KYIV, May 24 ------ Ukraine on Monday said it continued to fight for Bakhmut and still controlled a corner of the eastern city, as the Russian mercenary group Wagner said it would transfer control of the ruined hotspot to Moscow's armed forces by next month. Ukraine has denied that Bakhmut has fallen to Russian forces, saying it is hanging on to one area of the city and that battles are ongoing. Both Wagner and the Russian military claimed over the weekend that Bakhmut has fallen to them. "The fighting continues," Ukraine's Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar said, a day after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Bakhmut was "not occupied" by Russia. Kyiv's troops retained control of the city's "Airplane" district, she said, adding that "the battle for the dominant heights on the flanks north and south of the suburbs — continues." Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner, whose fighters have led Moscow's storming of Bakhmut, said on Monday his group would depart the city by June 1 and hand over control to regular Russian troops. "Wagner will leave Artemovsk from May 25 to June 1," Prigozhin said in an audio recording on Telegram. Bakhmut was previously known as Artemovsk, after a Soviet revolutionary, before Ukraine renamed it.
Prigozhin said the mercenaries had set up "defense lines" on the western outskirts of the city before the planned transfer of control. "If the Ministry of Defense does not have enough personnel, we have thousands of generals," said the Wagner chief, who has been embroiled in an increasingly public spat with the Russian military leadership. Prigozhin has poured scathing criticism on Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov, accusing them of being incompetent and causing Moscow's large-scale losses in the conflict in Ukraine. Prigozhin's influence has risen hugely during the invasion. He previously said Wagner fighters would pull out by May 25.
Russian President Vladimir Putin congratulated Wagner and the Russian army on the alleged conquest. But Zelenskyy said at the Group of Seven summit in the southwestern Japanese city of Hiroshima on Sunday that Bakhmut was "not occupied" by Russia. Both sides are believed to have suffered huge losses in the battle for Bakhmut, the longest and bloodiest in the war on Ukraine. A salt-mining city in the Donetsk region, Bakhmut had a prewar population of about 70,000.
Source: manilatimes.net