The Ukrainian president’s spokesman denied on Sunday that Volodymyr Zelensky had confirmed the seizure of the city of Bakhmut by Russian forces, after ambiguous statements on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Japan.
“The president denied the capture of Bakhmut,” Serguei Nykyforov said on the Facebook social network, quoted by the French agency AFP.
The dialogue with journalists occurred at the end of a meeting between Zelensky and his American counterpart, Joe Biden, held on the sidelines of the Hiroshima summit.
According to AFP, the question was as follows: “President Zelensky, is Bakhmut still in the hands of Ukraine? The Russians say they have taken Bakhmut.”
“I don’t think so,” Zelensky replied, although it was not clear if he was answering the first or second part of the question, according to the French news agency.
The presidential spokesman said Zelensky’s response was in reference to Russia’s claim to take Bakhmut, not whether Ukrainian troops still controlled the city, according to the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform.
Then, addressing the journalist who had asked the question, he told him: “what you have to understand is that there is nothing there, all the buildings were destroyed.”
“For now, Bakhmut exists only in our hearts. There is nothing,” he added, quoted by the Spanish news agency EFE.
The US news agency AP also reported that Zelensky said he believed the city had fallen, that it had been completely destroyed by the Russians and that it was only now in the hearts of Ukrainians.
Zelensky also thanked the soldiers who fought against the Russian troops for eight months in Bakhmut.
“Our defenders in Bakhmut did a good job and naturally we appreciate the excellent job they did,” he said.
The seizure of Bakhmut was announced on Saturday by the head of the Russian Wagner paramilitary group, Yevgeny Prigojin.
The information was later confirmed by the Russian Defense Ministry and welcomed by President Vladimir Putin.
Already today, the Russian Ministry of Defense reaffirmed, in a statement quoted by the official TASS agency, “the liberation of the city of Artemovsk”, using the Russian name of Bakhmut.
Located 55 kilometers from the capital of the Donetsk region, Bakhmut had about 80,000 inhabitants before the war started by Russia on February 24, 2022.
Despite not being considered a strategic city, the battle for Bakhmut acquired symbolic importance for both sides, who lost a large number of soldiers in eight months of fighting.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) deemed the Russian capture of the last remaining ground in Bakhmut “not significant from a tactical or operational point of view.”
Control of the area “does not give Russian forces operationally significant ground to continue conducting offensive operations” or to “defend against potential Ukrainian counterattacks,” added ISW, which produces daily analysis of the war in Ukraine.
Source: TSF
