KYIV: Ukrainian soldiers were still engaging Russian forces in fierce battles in and around Bakhmut on Sunday, military officials said, hours after Moscow and the private army Wagner announced that their troops had taken full control of the eastern city.
The fog of war made it impossible to confirm the situation on the ground in the invasion’s longest battle, and a series of comments from Ukrainian and Russian officials added confusion to the matter.
Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minsiter Hanna Malyar even went so far as to say that Ukrainian troops “took the city in a semi-encirclement.”
“The enemy failed to surround Bakhmut, and they lost part of the dominant heights around the city,” Malyar said. “That is, the advance of our troops in the suburbs along the flanks, which is still ongoing, greatly complicates the enemy’s presence in Bakhmut.”
Her comments came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, at the Group of Seven summit in Japan, appeared to suggest that Bakhmut had fallen.
When asked if the city was in Ukraine’s hands, Zelensky said: “I think no, but you have to — to understand that there is nothing, They’ve destroyed everything. There are no buildings. It’s a pity. It’s tragedy.”
Zelensky’s press secretary later walked back those comments.
And the spokesman for Ukraine’s Eastern Group of Forces, Serhii Cherevaty, said that the Ukrainian military is managing to hold positions in the vicinity of Bakhmut.
“The president correctly said that the city has, in fact, been razed to the ground. The enemy is being destroyed every day by massive artillery and aviation strikes, and our units report that the situation is extremely difficult.
“Our military keep fortifications and several premises in the southwestern part of the city. Heavy fighting is underway,” he said.
It was only the latest flip-flopping of the situation in Bakhmut after eight months of intense fighting.
Only hours earlier, Russian state new agencies reported that President Vladimir Putin congratulated “Wagner assault detachments, as well as all servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces units, who provided them with the necessary support and flank protection, on the completion of the operation to liberate Artyomovsk,” which is Bakhmut’s Soviet-era name.
Russia’s Defense Ministry also said that Wagner and military units “completed the liberation” of Bakhmut.
At the G-7 in Japan, Zelensky stood side by side with US President Joe Biden during a news conference. Biden announced $375 million more in aid for Ukraine, which included more ammunition, artillery and vehicles.
“I thanked him for the significant financial assistance to (Ukraine) from (the US),” Zelensky tweeted later.
The new pledge came after the US agreed to allow training on American-made F-16 fighter jets, laying the groundwork for their eventual transfer to Ukraine. Biden said Sunday that Zelensky had given the US a “flat assurance” that Ukraine wouldn’t use the F-16s jets to attack Russian territory.
Many analysts say that even if Russia was victorious in Bakhmut, it was unlikely to turn the tide in the war.
The Russian capture of the last remaining ground in Bakhmut is “not tactically or operationally significant,” a Washington-based think tank said late Saturday. The Institute for the Study of War said that taking control of these areas “does not grant Russian forces operationally significant terrain to continue conducting offensive operations,” nor to “to defend against possible Ukrainian counterattacks.”
In a video posted on Telegram, Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin said the city came under complete Russian control at about midday Saturday. He spoke surrounded by about a half-dozen fighters, with ruined buildings in the background and explosions heard in the distance.
Russian forces still seek to seize the remaining part of the Donetsk region still under Ukrainian control, including several heavily fortified areas.
It isn’t clear which side has paid a higher price in the battle for Bakhmut. Both Russia and Ukraine have endured losses believed to be in the thousands, though neither has disclosed casualty numbers.
Zelensky underlined the importance of defending Bakhmut in an interview with The Associated Press in March, saying its fall could allow Russia to rally international support for a deal that might require Kyiv to make unacceptable compromises.
Analysts have said Bakhmut’s fall would be a blow to Ukraine and give some tactical advantages to Russia but wouldn’t prove decisive to the outcome of the war.
Bakhmut, located about 55 kilometers (34 miles) north of the Russian-held regional capital of Donetsk, had a prewar population of 80,000 and was an important industrial center, surrounded by salt and gypsum mines.
The city, which was named Artyomovsk after a Bolshevik revolutionary when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, also was known for its sparkling wine production in underground caves. Its broad tree-lined avenues, lush parks and stately downtown with imposing late 19th-century mansions — all now reduced to a smoldering wasteland — made it a popular tourist destination.
When a separatist rebellion engulfed eastern Ukraine in 2014 weeks after Moscow’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, the rebels quickly won control of the city, only to lose it a few months later.
After Russia switched its focus to the Donbas following a botched attempt to seize Kyiv early in the February 2022 invasion, Moscow’s troops tried to take Bakhmut in August but were pushed back.
The fighting there abated in autumn as Russia was confronted with Ukrainian counteroffensives in the east and the south, but it resumed at full pace late last year. In January, Russia captured the salt-mining town of Soledar, just north of Bakhmut, and closed in on the city’s suburbs.
Intense Russian shelling targeted the city and nearby villages as Moscow waged a three-sided assault to try to finish off the resistance in what Ukrainians called “fortress Bakhmut.”
Mercenaries from Wagner spearheaded the Russian offensive. Prigozhin tried to use the battle for the city to expand his clout amid the tensions with the top Russian military leaders whom he harshly criticized.
“We fought not only with the Ukrainian armed forces in Bakhmut. We fought the Russian bureaucracy, which threw sand in the wheels,” Prigozhin said in the video on Saturday.
The relentless Russian artillery bombardment left few buildings intact amid ferocious house-to-house battles. Wagner fighters “marched on the bodies of their own soldiers” according to Ukrainian officials. Both sides have spent ammunition at a rate unseen in any armed conflict for decades, firing thousands of rounds a day.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu has said that seizing the city would allow Russia to press its offensive farther into the Donetsk region, one of the four Ukrainian provinces that Moscow illegally annexed in September.
Ukraine says troops still engaging Russian forces in Bakhmut after Moscow announces victory in city
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Ukraine says troops still engaging Russian forces in Bakhmut after Moscow announces victory in city
- Russia claimed on Saturday to have fully captured the smashed eastern Ukrainian city, which if true would mark an end to the longest and bloodiest battle of the 15-month war
Myanmar, Afghan hopeful scholars mourn UK study visa ban
- Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sudan and Cameroon citizens will be barred from obtaining university visas
- Britain’s travel block is “really painful” for Afghan women hoping to escape to an education abroad, said one female
YANGON, Myanmar: Aspiring students are lamenting Britain’s ban on education visas for their war-weary countries — dashing dreams of bettering themselves and their home nations.
Myanmar, Afghanistan, Sudan and Cameroon citizens will be barred from obtaining university visas, London announced this week, saying asylum applications by visiting students had “rocketed” nearly 500 percent from 2021 to 2025.
“It’s like the country is punishing the weak, the most vulnerable people,” said one woman from Myanmar.
She was preparing for a scholarship interview for a master’s in climate change finance when her plans were upended by Downing Street’s decree on Wednesday.
“I could not focus the whole morning,” the 28-year-old told AFP from Yangon, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons in a country riven by civil war since a 2021 military coup.
“I can’t picture my future.”
Like in much of the developed world, immigration has become a divisive issue in Britain.
Efforts to beat back arrivals mirror the sweeping travel bans issued by US President Donald Trump which have shut out citizens of Myanmar, Sudan and Afghanistan.
Since the chaotic military withdrawal of Britain, the United States and other NATO nations in 2021, Afghanistan has been ruled by a resurgent Taliban government which has banned women over age 12 from attending school.
Britain’s travel block is “really painful” for Afghan women hoping to escape to an education abroad, said one female child social worker in Ghazni province, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons.
She has now canceled her plans to study for a master’s in both the US and the UK.
“Now I am trying to be hopeful, but I think it would also be a mistake,” said the 27-year-old.
In the summer of 2024, Arefa Mohammadi fled to neighboring Pakistan, living in limbo as she applied to universities.
She got an offer to study public health in England but now cannot accept it.
“It was truly shocking for me,” said the 24-year-old.
“This situation put me in a place where I haven’t any goals, because all my goals and all my futures are unpredictable.”
- ‘Cruel and short-sighted’ -
In Kabul, a 39-year-old man faces similar heartbreak.
He was accepted to study specialist subjects related to water management at three universities in England and Scotland.
“When I was a child I witnessed several challenges like flash floods, water scarcity, environmental neglect, inefficient irrigation systems,” he said, asking to remain anonymous for security reasons. “To address these challenges I made my application.”
“I hoped to acquire modern knowledge. It’s impossible to acquire in Afghanistan,” he added.
Some 33 million people in the country face severe water shortages, aid agencies say, a result of compounding multi-year droughts, climate change and infrastructure battered by decades of war.
Britain’s Labour government made the decision to curb visas as the right-wing Reform UK party surges in opinion polls with its hard-line stance against immigration.
The UK Home Office said almost 135,000 asylum seekers had entered the country through legal routes since 2021.
Activist organization Burma Campaign UK called the visa ban “exceptionally cruel and shortsighted.”
“The opportunity to come to the UK to study is life-changing for the individual student but also an investment in the future of Myanmar,” said program director Zoya Phan in a statement.
One exiled Myanmar journalist has been living over the border in Thailand after escaping the military rule which has clamped down on press freedoms.
“When the military coup happened I was just 22, so I had a lot of dreams,” she said. “But over the past five years there have been a lot of struggles — I couldn’t complete my dreams.”
Every year since the junta takeover she applied for further education to buoy her spirits.
But she received an email Thursday morning canceling her place to study for a master’s at a London university.
“Everything is gone,” she said. “My UK dream is all disappeared.”
