South Front
Today, May 20, 2023, at 12:00 local time, units of the Wagner PMC successfully completed their storming of Bakhmut, one of the key resistance sites of the Ukrainian army in Donbass.
By this time, the last section of the high-rise apartment complex, known as “Airplane,” had been taken.
The Zelensky regime referred to Bakhmut as the “Bakhmut Fortress”. Today this “fortress has fallen” despite all the efforts of more than 80,000 Ukrainian troops that were operating in this direction, not counting the reserves from Kharkiv, Svatovsk, Krasnoliman, and Zaporizhzhya.
The remnants of the AFU forces retreated behind Chasov Yar, shielded from Russian forces by undermined bridges. Slavyansk and Kramatorsk have been turned into new fortresses, where new Ukrainian reserves are concentrated.
For Russia, the Bakhmutsk battle was also one of the bloodiest and longest since the Great Patriotic War.
This battle has exhausted the forces of the AFU. For months, Kiev has been forced to pour more and more men and military equipment into “the Bakhmut meat grinder”. But almost no one came back. “Going to Bakhmut” for the forcibly mobilized Ukrainians was comparable to a death sentence.
The operation to capture Bakhmut lasted 224 days. The head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, stated that Bakhmut was liberated solely by the company’s fighters.
Prigozhin said that “they fought both the Ukrainian army and the Russian military bureaucrats who were putting sticks in their wheels”. He accused Russian Defense Minister Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Gerasimov that “five times as many soldiers died as they could have because of their whims”.
On May 25, the Wagner PMC would begin to withdraw its units for rest and retraining, Prigozhin said. Positions in Bakhmut will be transferred to units of the Russian Armed Forces.
Today, Wagner PMC has three high-profile victories – Popasna, Soledar and Bakhmut, not counting Svetlodarsk, Uglegorsk TPP and others.
