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| ©The Ruined City of Bakhmut. Tyler Hicks/ |
The Wagner mercenary force has declared victory in Bakhmut, Ukraine, and is turning it over to the Russian Army to defend. The group leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, suggested that Russia’s regular soldiers can expect no more help from the group. A Wagner withdrawal could open a new phase of the struggle for Bakhmut, testing whether the Russian Army can hold the hard-won ground against Ukrainian forces that have advanced on the city’s outskirts and are preparing to launch a broader counteroffensive. Ukraine has conceded that despite its firepower to hold Bakhmut, Russia now controls nearly the entire town. Regular Russian Army units have replaced Wagner fighters in Bakhmut’s suburbs, while Wagner forces remained inside the city.
The repositioning around the city came as Russia and Ukraine engaged in drone battles. Ukraine's military said it shot down dozens of Russian drones aimed at targets nationwide before dawn. In contrast, Russian officials said they had thwarted an attack by Ukrainian aerial and maritime drones seeking the home of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea. Ukraine has spent weeks targeting key Russian command and control centres, rail lines, airfields and other military installations across occupied territories to limit Moscow's ability to move troops and equipment quickly and effectively. Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that recent military actions were all part of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which would not be marked by a "single event". Vadym Skibitsky, Ukraine's deputy intelligence chief, said that disrupting Russian military movement in Crimea was essential to the Ukrainian campaign.
Crimea holds enormous symbolic and military value for the government of President Vladimir V. Putin, who seized the peninsula in 2014 and has described it as a centrepiece of what he sees as Russia’s national restoration. On Thursday, the Kremlin-installed governor of Crimea said that multiple Ukrainian drone attacks had been thwarted across the territory and that two aerial drones had been shot down with small arms and that several maritime drones had been disabled using electronic warfare tools that jammed their signals. The capture of Bakhmut has given Moscow a rare and costly victory and made clear how reliant it has become on the Wagner forces and their outspoken leader, who has been scathingly critical of the Russian military. For many supporters of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Wagner group, with its harsh discipline and agile decision-making, has become a model for what the Russian Army should look like. In recent days, buoyed by victory in Bakhmut, Mr Prigozhin has become still more outspoken, warning Russian elites that they face the prospect of a popular uprising if they do not
