While Russia remains focused on trying to take Bakhmut, in Donetsk, one of the two regions that make up Donbass, Ukraine on Friday asked the civilians who still remain in the city to leave it.
Ukrainian officials feared a major Russian offensive as the first anniversary of the conflict approached, with both Kyiv and NATO saying in earlier days that it had already begun. But for now Ukraine resists the Russian push in this city.
Of the city’s population of 70,000 before the conflict broke out, some 6,000 civilians still live there. The Ukrainian government addressed them this Friday to ask them to leave Bakhmut in the face of continuous attacks by Russian forces.
“They must immediately evacuate” the city, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereschuk said on her Telegram channel. “Enemy artillery” is attacking residential areas, she warned.
And he assured that in the previous 24 hours five civilians had died, while another nine had been injured in those attacks.
Vereschuk, who is also Ukraine’s Minister for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories, was surprised that there are still civilians in Bakhmut and insisted that they leave as soon as possible.
If they stay, he said, “they put themselves and their loved ones in danger, especially the children who are forced to stay,” but they also make it difficult for those who are trying to help them, such as defense and security forces or The volunteers. The military cannot carry out their work, since they “have to constantly check” the safety of civilians.
The weight of the Russian onslaught against Bakhmut is borne by the group of Russian mercenaries known as Wagner, which has spent months surrounding and beating a population that they consider strategic to head towards Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the largest cities in the region controlled by the Kyiv forces. Those populations are the key to moving forward and achieving Moscow’s goal of controlling the entire territory of the Donetsk province.
However, Wagner’s boss, oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, said on Thursday it could take months to occupy this stronghold and criticized Moscow’s “monstrous bureaucracy” for holding back military advances.
According to him, the Russian forces will be able to take over Bakhmut “in March or April,” he said in one of his messages that he posted on social networks.
“To take Bakhmut you have to cut off all supply routes” of the Ukrainian army. “Progress is not going to be as fast as we would like. We would have taken it before the New Year if it weren’t for our monstrous military bureaucracy,” he added.
It is not the first time that the businessman, considered close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, has raised his voice against the Russian military command, joining Russian nationalist bloggers who in previous months have criticized the planning of operations in Ukraine.
He also went so far as to accuse the Defense Ministry of trying to “steal” Wagner’s victory after his mercenaries claimed last month to have taken the small town of Soledar, near Bakhmut.