Russia’s Wagner Group paramilitary organization yesterday said it had captured the city hall in Ukraine’s eastern town of Bakhmut, giving it “legal” control, but Kyiv said its forces still held the town.
The battle for Bakhmut has raged for months with Wagner supporting Russian troops and Ukraine warning that the fall of the town would lead to the loss of huge swathes of its territory.
Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin posted a video on his Telegram channel showing him holding a Russian flag, which he said his forces would plant on Bakhmut’s city hall.
Photo: AFP
“This is the Wagner private military company. These are the guys who took Bakhmut. In a legal sense, it’s ours,” Prigozhin said.
Ukrainian military leaders yesterday said that after Prigozhin’s video was released enemy troops tried to take control of the town, but their forces had “repelled more than 20 enemy attacks.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy earlier on Sunday praised Ukrainian troops’ defense of the city, much of which lies in ruins.
Photo: AFP
“I am grateful to our warriors who are fighting near Avdiivka, Maryinka, near Bakhmut... Especially Bakhmut! It’s especially hot there today,” Zelenskiy said on Telegram.
In Kostyantynivka, about 27km from Bakhmut, a “massive attack” of Russian missiles left three men and three women dead and 11 wounded on Sunday, Ukrainian authorities said.
The attack targeted residential areas where “ordinary civilians” were living, Zelenskiy said.
There was a large crater in a yard and windows were shattered from ground to top floors in two 14-story tower blocks, while private homes nearby had smashed roofs, Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists saw.
Liliya, a 19-year-old psychology student, stood outside her severely damaged high-rise block.
“Everything is bombed out — and I think it’s like that in every flat, in fact. Because it was such an impact that it was very hard for anything to stay unbroken,” she said.
Earlier on Sunday, a leading Russian military blogger and fervent defender of the military offensive in Ukraine was killed by a bomb attack at a cafe in St Petersburg, investigators said.
Vladlen Tatarsky was reportedly killed after receiving a gift rigged with an explosive device at an event organized by Cyber Front Z, which refers to itself on social media as “Russia’s information troops.”
The explosion occurred at “Street Food Bar No. 1,” along the Neva River near the historic city center, with the Russian Ministry of Interior Affairs saying that police had been called to the scene at 6:13pm.
Officers cordoned off the street outside the building with about 20 police vehicles, alongside six ambulances as well as fire trucks, an AFP journalist at the scene saw.
About two dozen other people were injured.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs paid tribute to Tatarsky on Sunday, saying that he was among “defenders of the truth” and lashing out at Western governments for failing to react to the attack.
“Russian journalists constantly feel the threat of reprisals from the Kyiv regime,” spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Telegram.
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