After a bloody 224-day battle for the crucial Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, private military group Wagner claimed victory on Sunday. While Kyiv maintains that the fight for the key city is ongoing, videos shared widely on social media show Wagner declare their claim over the territory.
Dramatic visuals show Wagner soldiers walk over buildings reduced to rubble with the Russian and Wagner flags. The soldiers, against the backdrop of the setting sun and ravaged cityscape, victoriously wave their flags while one of them triumphantly shoots his assault rifle in the air.
Another video shows the mercenary group's boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is the face of mission 'Bakhmut Meat Grinder', speak directly to the camera and declare that "every building in the city is occupied by PMC Wagner".
"By May 25 we will completely examine (Bakhmut), create the necessary lines of defence and hand it to the military ... We ourselves will go into field camps," Prigozhin was quoted by news agency AFP as saying.
While Prigozhin held up the Russian flag, he has been embroiled in an increasingly public fight with the official Russian army, whose "incompetent generals" he blames for Moscow's losses. "There was only Wagner here (in Bakhmut)," he said in the video, according to AFP. "We fought not only the Ukrainian army here, we fought Russian bureaucracy."
Bakhmut, a salt mining town that once had a population of 70,000 people, has been the scene of the longest and bloodiest battle in Moscow's more than year-long Ukraine offensive. Its fall to Russia, if true as claimed by Wagner, would have high symbolic value after a series of humiliating defeats for President Putin.
Wagner is a private mercenary group aimed at furthering Russia's military objectives and endeavours. It provides military services, including armed combat and has marked its presence in several conflict zones. Wagner ranks include an unknown number, believed to be high, of ex-convicts after Prigozhin toured Russian prisons last year to attract prisoners, promising them an amnesty upon their return should they survive.
Despite their victorious claims, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky insists that the east Ukrainian city was "not occupied". "Bakhmut is not occupied by Russia today," Zelensky said today.
