(EFE).- The Ukrainian forces have endangered the flanks of the Russian troops around Bakhmut with a series of counterattacks, where they have managed to approach the city from the northwest and recover territory to the southwest.
“The flanks are crumbling, the front is collapsing and the attempts of the Ministry of Defense to somehow smooth the situation are leading and will lead to a global tragedy for Russia,” the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, warned on Friday visibly upset.
The businessman recommended in a video that the military leadership “immediately stop lying” about the real situation in that bastion, from whose flanks “units of the Ministry of Defense fled.”
The spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov, stated in his war part that “the airborne units stop the attempts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to counterattack on the flanks” of Bakhmut.
He also assured that the Ukrainian counterattacks along 95 kilometers in the direction of the city of Soledar, some 15 kilometers northeast of Bakhmut and under Russian control since last January, “were repelled and “incursions into the Russian defense were not allowed.”
Prigozhin said that on Friday only the Russians had lost a territory of five square kilometers in the northwest of Bakhmut, which includes the road between the city and the town of Chasiv Yar.
Prigozhin maintained that on Friday only the Russians had lost a territory of five square kilometers in the northwest of Bakhmut, which includes the road between the city and the town of Chasiv Yar – the main supply route for Ukrainian troops and which Russia had secured. have under fire control – and all tactical heights.
Konashenkov noted in this regard that his forces had taken up “more favorable positions” near the Berkhovskaya dam in the northwest, a euphemism for a withdrawal.
In addition to the northwest, where Ukrainian troops would also have been successful is near Ivanivske, 8 kilometers southwest of the Bakhmut center.
The anger of the head of the Wagner Group is monumental, not only because he had warned on numerous occasions of a possible collapse of this front, but also because to reach this point in the battle, which has lasted for more than nine months, they have had to die a hundred of his men on average a day, as he recalls on each occasion.
Wagner’s chief, in his confrontation with the Russian military leadership, invited the Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Shoigu, to visit Bakhmut to assess the “difficult operational situation.”
On the eve Defense had still affirmed that “the general situation in the zone of the special military operation is under control”, in the face of increasing reports from Russian military bloggers that the Ukrainian forces had managed to break through some flanks.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar confirmed on Friday that this week the Ukrainian defenders “advanced 2 kilometers in the direction of Bakhmut.”
The commander of the Ukrainian Land Forces, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrsky, already announced today at a meeting of the General Staff of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Volodimir Zelensky, that his units “stopped the enemy by force and even pushed him back in some addresses”.
The Ukrainian advances have occurred after Prigozhin denounced last Tuesday that one of the Russian Army units fled from one of Bakhmut’s flanks, leaving an area almost 2 kilometers wide and 500 meters deep without protection.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar confirmed this Friday that this week the Ukrainian defenders “advanced 2 kilometers in the direction of Bakhmut”, something that Syrsky already advanced on Wednesday.
On the diplomatic front, efforts to achieve a ceasefire continue.
After receiving on Thursday Zelensky the former Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin, adviser to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who is trying to form a group of countries that can mediate between Russia and Ukraine – tomorrow the president will travel to Rome to meet with the authorities Italians and Pope Francis, who revealed that a Vatican mission is underway to stop the war in Ukraine.
In turn, the special representative of the Chinese government for Eurasian Affairs, Li Hui, will visit Ukraine and Russia next week, among other countries, in order to promote a political solution to the ‘crisis’.
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