The mercenaries of the Wagner Group continued their meter-by-meter advance today in the city of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, while their boss, the businessman Yevgueni Prigozhin, called to declare the objectives of the military campaign fulfilled and limit themselves to defending the conquered territories .
“The Wagner assault detachments managed to advance and took control of two blocks, in the northern and southern suburbs of the city,” Russian Defense Ministry spokesman General Igor Konashenkov said in his daily report on the situation. on the battlefields. He stressed that the fiercest fighting in eastern Ukraine is taking place precisely in Artiomovsk, the Russian name for Bakhmut.
“The airborne units contain the enemy on the flanks and support the actions of the assault detachments to capture the cities,” added the Russian military.
While his mercenaries were fighting Bakhmut, the Wagner boss spoke in favor of ending the Russian military campaign in Ukraine in an article published on Telegram. “For the (Russian) authorities and society in general it is necessary to put an end to the special military operation,” Prigozhin wrote,
The ideal, he added, would be “to announce that Russia has achieved the results it was seeking, and in a certain way we have.”
“In theory, Russia has already put an end to it by annihilating a large part of Ukraine’s active male population and intimidating another party, who fled to Europe,” the Wagnerite chief explained.
He also stressed that Russia managed to seize the Azov Sea and a large part of the Black Sea, seized a “juicy piece of Ukrainian territory” and created a land corridor to the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014.
Now, according to the businessman, Russia must “fortify itself and cling tooth and nail to the territories it already has” and not reach any kind of agreement with Ukraine, with which it can only fight. Summing up the situation, the head of the mercenaries noted that the Ukrainians are ready for an offensive, and the Russians are ready to repulse it.
“The best scenario for the healing of Russia, for it to cohere and become a more powerful state is an offensive by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which would make any concessions and negotiations impossible,” he said.
So, Prigozhin wrote, “either the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be crushed in a frank fight, or Russia will heal its wounds, accumulate its strength and again defeat its adversaries.”
In his usual nightly television message, the President of Ukraine, VolodÃmir Zelenski, stressed that the “permanent annihilation of the occupiers” is key to the preparations for the actions of the country’s Armed Forces.
“For every killing of Ukrainians, the occupier must suffer the maximum number of casualties. Every meter of Ukrainian soil must show the occupier the inevitability of Russia’s defeat in the war,” the president stressed.
Zelensky admitted that the most difficult thing at the moment is to maintain the defense in Donbas, but stressed that this defense “is what gives life to the whole of Ukraine.”
“Not a single hour of this Holy Week has passed without Russian terror and their murders,” said the president, offering his condolences to the relatives of the victims of the missile attack on the city of Sloviansk on Friday.
As reported today by the Ukrainian authorities, two other deceased were found under the rubble of a residential building, bringing the number of victims to 11 dead and 21 injured.
The Kiev government denounced that Russia launched at least seven missiles against Sloviansk, one of the Ukrainian strongholds in the eastern Donetsk region, which caused considerable damage to several residential buildings and a school.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project