Zelensky Insists Ukraine Fighting on For Bakhmut, Despite Russia Claims

Russia has claimed victory in Bakhmut, long a focus of heavy fighting in the war, but Ukraine’s President Zelensky has denied the claims, saying the city is not occupied.

“Bakhmut is not occupied by Russia today”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in Hiroshima, Japan, during his visit to the G7 group of nations conference, insisting “there are no two or three interpretations of those words” to dispel any doubt over his assertion.

Zelensky said of the battle in Bakhmut, Zelensky said per CNN: “We are keeping on, we are fighting. I clearly understand what is happening in Bakhmut. I can’t share the tactics of the military, but a country even bigger than ours cannot defeat us. A little time will pass and we will be winning. Today our soldiers are in Bakhmut.”

The remarks come after claims by Russia’s state media and Wagner mercenary group that they had captured the Donbas city of Bakhmut at the weekend.

These Russian allegations of victory is factually incorrect says Kyiv because Ukraine still holds some territory in the city, described variously as “a small part“, “a handful of its westernmost streets“, or “a handful of buildings on the outskirts” in reports. Ukraine army chief Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi says this toehold in Bakhmut remains possible as it will allow his forces to react quickly, to “enter the city in case of a change in the situation. And it will definitely happen.”

The General said Ukraine continues to advance on the suburbs of Bakhmut.

Even these claims are challenged by Russia, with Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin asserting that: “We’ve taken the whole city – every building – so that nobody could say that we didn’t capture some small part of it.”

While Russia and Ukraine dispute each other’s accounts of the state of Bakhmut, media reports about the city itself seem in agreement in emphasising the strategic unimportance of Bakhmut itself. CNN  says “the city’s symbolism always outweighed its strategic importance”, the BBC that “the city is of little strategic value”, and The Times reports:

The US estimates that Russia has lost the best part of 20,000 troops over the past five months trying to take the small town, which had a prewar population of 70,000, and was of little strategic significance even before being reduced to rubble.

Another settled matter is the degree to which Bakhmut has been destroyed by nine months of bitter fighting. Speaking of the city at Hiroshima — which was levelled by a nuclear bomb in 1945 — Zelensky the two cities had something in common, remarking in Bakhmut it was “Just the same, nothing alive left, all of the buildings have been ruined”. President Zelensky promised Bakhmut would be rebuilt as Hiroshima had been.