The Wagner PMC (private military company) has raised the Russian flag at the townhall in central Bakhmut, claims Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary group most heavily deployed on the Donbas front, suggesting that the bloodiest battle of the Ukrainian war has drawn to a close.
“From a legal point of view, Bakhmut has been taken,” Prigozhin said in a video posted by his press service on Telegram on Sunday, April 2nd. According to him, the Ukrainian troops are still in the town, but are now “concentrated in the western parts.”
However, Wagner’s claims remain unconfirmed by Ukrainian officials, who insisted in their Monday morning brief that the “defenders courageously hold the city” and that the Russians are “very far” from capturing it, despite what they say. Similarly, while Liveuamap did report fighting in the center of the town on Monday, it does not yet indicate that the Russians would be in control of the area. According to the tracker, Russian forces have launched attacks on Lyman, Maryinka, and Avdiivka as well, with the latter facing an encirclement similar to Bakhmut’s.
The battle for Bakhmut—a town of some 70,000 residents before the war, now empty and devastated by eight months of shelling—began in the early days of August. Russian forces had captured Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, allowing them to move further west toward Sloviansk and Kramatorsk—the two remaining major Ukrainian holdouts in the Donbas region—the road to which is blocked only by Bakhmut. All major roads and railroads in the area run through the town, therefore capturing it holds strategic significance for the Kremlin if it ever wishes to complete the invasion of Donbas, formally annexed by Russia last September.
For the same reasons, holding Bakhmut is crucial for the Ukrainians too, and not only for strategic reasons. For Kyiv, ‘fortress Bakhmut’ has a symbolic value, representing the struggle, perseverance, and sacrifices of the entire nation. That is why when the encirclement of the town became obvious, prompting the U.S. to recommend the retreat of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops feared to be trapped in Bakhmut, President Zelensky simply refused and instead committed more forces to the front.
So far, western intelligence estimates put the number of Russian casualties in the town between 20- and 30,000, with Russia losing up to 100 troops a day. The exact Ukrainian casualties in the town are unknown, but the situation is not much better, and the average life expectancy in Bakhmut has shrunk to four hours, according to soldiers on the front, earning the town the “meat grinder” epithet.
Over time, Russian forces were able to gradually tighten their grip from the outskirts, and just in the past weeks, they launched 25 separate attacks on the center of Bakhmut, each harder to repeal than the last. If Prigozhin’s claims are correct and not just disinformation, then it would appear they finally broke through. If that’s the case, Russian forces are likely to capture the entire town within the next few weeks while the Ukrainian forces regroup at the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk line, preparing for the spring counteroffensive.
