Kiev/Moscow, (EFE).- Ukraine intends to wear down the Russian forces in Bakhmut to prevent them from continuing their offensive towards other Ukrainian strongholds in Donbas, explained President Volodímir Zelenski, while Moscow continues its slow advance in the city, where it controls each day more territory.
“We understand that after Bakhmut (the Russians) could go further. They could go to Kramatorsk, they could go to Sloviansk, it would be an open road for the Russians after Bakhmut to reach other cities in Ukraine, in the direction of Donetsk,” Zelensky explained in an interview with CNN.
Fight until the end
The Ukrainian president thus defended his decision to keep his country’s troops in the besieged city where an unknown number of soldiers from both sides have died and whose population has fallen from 70,000 to less than 5,000 inhabitants.
“It’s a tactical issue for us,” Zelensky said, before insisting that his top military commanders unanimously support prolonging their defense of the city after weeks of continuous Russian attacks.
Zelensky said his motivations for keeping the city are “very different” from Russia’s goals.
“We understand what Russia wants to achieve there. Russia needs at least some victory, a small victory, including ruining everything in Bakhmut, simply killing all the civilians there, ”he denounced.
To show the commitment of the authorities to the defense of the city, this Wednesday a new visit to Bakhmut by Oleksandr Syrskyi, commander of the Land Forces of the Ukrainian Army, was reported, the fourth in total in the last two weeks.
At the same time, the Ukrainian government decreed on Wednesday the mandatory evacuation of the children who still remain in the besieged city.
kyiv decided this week to maintain the defense of the city of Bakhmut and send additional reinforcements, despite the risk that Wagner’s mercenaries manage to close the siege around the city.
The Ukrainian outlet The Kyiv Independent in turn collected testimonies from more than a dozen Ukrainian soldiers who describe the battle for Bakhmut as “a carnage.”
Wagner group breakthrough
Also the Wagner group, the main assault force of the Kremlin, uses the word “carnage” to refer to the fighting for Bakhmut or Artiomovsk, as the Russians call it.
However, the head of that paramilitary group, Yevgueni Prigozhin, has assured that Wagner’s combatants will do their job in the city “until the end”, going so far as to compare them with the “300 Spartans”, in an apparent allusion to the lack of help from the regular Army, despite all of Wagner’s requests to the Defense Ministry.
Prigozhin assured this Wednesday that his units have taken control of the eastern part of Bakhmut.
This information was also confirmed by the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which monitors the fighting in Ukraine on a daily basis.
“Russian forces have likely captured the eastern part of Bakhmut, east of the Bakhmutka River, following a controlled Ukrainian withdrawal from eastern Bakhmut,” the ISW notes in its latest report.
“Wagner units have taken over the entire eastern part of Bakhmut, everything east of the Bakhmutka River is under the control of the Wagner private military company,” Prigozhin said in a message released by his press service.
The day before Prigozhin affirmed that in Bakhmut between 12,000 and 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers still remain, offering iron resistance to the Russian forces.
The head of the mercenary group praised the enemy, saying that “day and night” there is fierce fighting and “the Ukrainians do not run away.”
“They die en masse for Bakhmut and surrender only in extreme cases,” he said.
NATO does not rule out the early fall of Bakhmut
Meanwhile, the NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, did not rule out the early fall of Bakhmut this Wednesday, although he stressed that his conquest by the Russians will not necessarily mean a “turning point in the war.”
“We cannot rule out that Bakhmut may ultimately fall in the coming days. It is therefore also important to stress that this does not necessarily reflect a turning point in the war and only highlights that we should not underestimate Russia,” he declared upon arrival at the EU defense ministers meeting in Stockholm.
He stressed that recent months and weeks have seen “bitter fighting in and around Bakhmut.”
He also added that Russia is deploying more soldiers and that what Moscow “lacks in quality, it tries to make up for in quantity.”
For his part, Igor Strelkov, leader of the pro-Russian uprising in Donbas in 2014, opined that after the definitive capture of Bakhmut, the Russian offensive will lose strength.