Russian forces in Bakhmut pushed back by up to 2km in some areas, claims Ukraine military commander
A Ukrainian military commander has said that Russian forces in Bakhmut had been pushed back by up to 2km in some areas, after counter offensives.
Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, who heads Ukraine’s ground forces, made the comments in a post on Telegram.
It comes as Ukrainian forces claim to have routed a brigade of thousands of troops in Bakhmut.
He said: “In some areas of the front, the enemy could not resist the onslaught of the Ukrainian defenders and retreated to a distance of up to two kilometers.
”It was the competent conduct of the defensive operation that exhausted the trained forces of the ‘Wagner’ PvC and forced them to be replaced in certain directions by less well-prepared units of the Russian regular troops, which were defeated and left.”
Key events
The UN’s special rapporteur on torture has called on Russia to provide jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny with “urgent and comprehensive” medical care following reports that his health is deteriorating.
Navalny’s supporters have said he was suffering from significant stomach pain in jail, which they said could be a sign of some sort of slow-acting poison.
“I am distressed by the deteriorating state of Navalny’s health and the apparent lack of satisfactory diagnosis and medical treatment,” Alice Edwards said in a statement.
Russia’s penitentiary service has previously denied allegations that its employees have mistreated Navalny and has said he has always been granted medical treatment when needed.
Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia in 2021 from Germany, where he had been treated for what western laboratory tests showed was an attempt to poison him with a nerve agent in Siberia in 2020.
“He must immediately and continuously be provided with adequate care, including comprehensive medical check-ups, treatment and monitoring of his health situation in a civil hospital,” Edwards said.
Navalny, 46, is serving combined sentences of 11 and a half years for fraud and contempt of court on charges he says were trumped up to silence him.
Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is in trouble again for his links to Russia after attending a victory day party at the Russian embassy in Berlin.
Schroeder, who has previously been criticised for his links to Russia, was seen at the reception on Tuesday marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in the second world war, along with senior figures from the far-right Alternative for Germany party and the far-left Linke party.
The two parties have been critical of the sanctions imposed on Moscow in response to its invasion of Ukraine.
The former Social Democrat chancellor is seen at the event in a photo published by the German daily Bild. Schroeder has not yet commented on his presence at the reception.
Schroeder, who held a number of positions in Russian energy companies, has seen many of the privileges normally given to ex-chancellors taken away for his ties to the Kremlin.
Schroeder no longer has a publicly funded private office, but members of current chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats have so far failed to expel his predecessor from the party.
“I find it incomprehensible,” senior Social Democrat MP Katja Mast said in response to Schroeder’s attendance.
“Gerhard Schroeder’s behaviour can hardly be surpassed in its tastelessness,” said senior conservative (CDU) politician Thorsten Frei.
“On the day the former chancellor was entertained by Russian diplomats, innocent people in Ukraine died as a result of the Russian war of aggression,” Frei said.
Scholz’s spokesperson declined to comment on the reception at a regular press conference Wednesday.
Also seen at the embassy party was the former East German leader Egon Krenz.
Russian forces in Bakhmut pushed back by up to 2km in some areas, claims Ukraine military commander
A Ukrainian military commander has said that Russian forces in Bakhmut had been pushed back by up to 2km in some areas, after counter offensives.
Col Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, who heads Ukraine’s ground forces, made the comments in a post on Telegram.
It comes as Ukrainian forces claim to have routed a brigade of thousands of troops in Bakhmut.
He said: “In some areas of the front, the enemy could not resist the onslaught of the Ukrainian defenders and retreated to a distance of up to two kilometers.
”It was the competent conduct of the defensive operation that exhausted the trained forces of the ‘Wagner’ PvC and forced them to be replaced in certain directions by less well-prepared units of the Russian regular troops, which were defeated and left.”
Tributes have been paid to an Agence France-Presse journalist who has been killed in Ukraine.
Arman Soldin was killed when an AFP team came under fire by Grad rockets while they were with a group of Ukrainian soldiers near Bakhmut, the epicentre of the fighting for months.
His death brings to at least 11 the number of journalists, fixers or drivers for media teams killed since Russia invaded Ukraine more than a year ago, according to advocacy groups.
French foreign minister Catherine Colonna paid tribute to Soldin’s “courage” and described his work as “essential” to understanding the facts around the war in Ukraine.
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak said: “Arman was a talented and courageous journalist and his death is obviously devastating for those who knew him.”
“Journalism continues to shine a light in the darkness of this war, and Arman’s work was vital to that.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the head of the Donetsk region where Bakhmut lies and which has been partially controlled by Kremlin-backed forces for years, offered his condolences to Soldin’s friends and family.
“I thank everyone who – risking their own lives – continues to tell the truth about our war,” he said.
Some more on the claims earlier that the Ukrainian army has partially destroyed a Russian brigade that has been fighting in Bakhmut.
Moscow has not commented on the reports that its 72nd separate motor rifle brigade had abandoned its positions on the south-western outskirts of Bakhmut.
Russia’s ministry of defence did not immediately reply to a request for comment, and Reuters said it was unable to independently confirm the situation on the ground.
A Russian brigade is typically formed of several thousand troops. The eastern Ukrainian city has been the primary target of Moscow’s huge winter offensive and scene of the bloodiest ground combat in Europe since the second world war.
Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has repeatedly accused Moscow’s regular armed forces of failing to adequately support his private army leading the fight in Bakhmut, said on Tuesday that the Russian brigade had abandoned its positions.
“Our army is fleeing. The 72nd Brigade pissed away three square km this morning, where I had lost around 500 men,” Prigozhin said.
In a statement overnight, Ukraine’s Third Separate Assault Brigade said: “It’s official. Prigozhin’s report about the flight of Russia’s 72nd Independent Motorized Rifle Brigade from near Bakhmut and the ‘500 corpses’ of Russians left behind is true.”
“The Third Assault Brigade is grateful for the publicity about our success at the front.”
Early on Wednesday the Ukrainian unit, which was formed last year from the nationalist Azov battalion, reposted a video of one of Azov’s founders, Andriy Biletsky, who said his forces had “defeated” the Russian brigade.
“In fact, the 6th and 7th squadrons of this brigade were almost entirely destroyed, brigade intelligence was destroyed, a large number of fighting vehicles were destroyed a considerable number of prisoners were taken,” he said.
Canada and Latvia will become the latest countries to help train Ukrainian troops.
They will jointly lead Ukrainian soldiers on Latvian soil from 15 May, the Canadian defence minister, Anita Anand, said on Wednesday.
The training programme will complement other Canadian efforts to train Ukrainian soldiers in the UK and in Poland, said Anand, speaking to reporters alongside her Latvian counterpart, Ināra Mūrniece, in Ottawa.
Vladimir Putin has signed a decree calling up military reservists for training in 2023, according to a document published on Wednesday on a government website.
The training of these Russian citizens, who are in the armed forces reserve, is a planned annual event.
Reservists were partially mobilised in September last year, as the Kremlin looked to bolster its forces in the midst of a swift counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops.
Wagner’s Prigozhin again complains his mercenaries are not receiving enough ammunition in Bakhmut
Russian Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin complained on Wednesday that his fighters were still not getting enough shells from the official defence ministry to underpin what he claimed was their advance in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.
In an audio statement, he said the defence ministry – which has promised to ensure that all combat units have the resources they need – had been holding long meetings on the shell issue but that there had been no breakthrough.
“We’re not receiving enough shells, we’re only getting 10%,” Prigozhin said, reported Reuters.
“We’re scraping by with a minimal quantity of shells,” he said, adding his mercenaries were nonetheless continuing to advance in Bakhmut.
Prigozhin said the Russian leadership had asked the defence ministry to check the status of Wagner’s shell request, but that bureaucracy meant the process was a slow one.
Late last week Prigozhin posted a video of an expletive-laden tirade addressed at senior Russian army officials while standing in what appeared to be a field of Russian corpses. He accused officials of “getting fat” in their offices while his troops died. He subsequently threatened in public to withdraw Wagner forces from Bakhmut, a Ukrainian city Russia has spent ten months trying to take.
Germany will buy an additional 50 Puma fighting vehicles worth €1.5bn (£1.3bn/$1.65bn) for its armed forces, two participants in the parliamentary budget committee which approved the purchase on Wednesday have told Reuters.
Berlin has ramped up defence spending after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, both sending weapons to Kyiv and replenishing its own military stocks.
Ukraine claims it has partially destroyed brigade attacking Bakhmut
Ukraine’s military has said its forces have seriously damaged Russia’s 72nd independent motorised rifle brigade near Bakhmut, and that the eastern city remained Moscow’s main target.
Serhiy Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for Ukrainian troops in the east, said the situation remained “difficult” in Bakhmut but that Moscow was increasingly forced to use regular army units because of heavy losses among the Wagner private army group.
The Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose private Wagner group is fighting in Bakhmut, said on Tuesday that the brigade had abandoned its positions.
“Unfortunately they have not destroyed the whole [Russian] brigade yet, two companies have been seriously damaged there,” Cherevatyi said in televised comments.
“The situation [in Bakhmut] remains difficult because for the enemy, despite all the white noise Prigozhin is trying to create, it [Bakhmut] is the main direction of attack, the main coveted target.”
France has asked China to make clear to Russia that Moscow is in an “impasse” in its war with Ukraine, as Beijing seeks to mediate in the conflict.
The French foreign minister, Catherine Colonna, told a cabinet meeting that Beijing should urge Russia to “return to peace”, according to a post-cabinet press briefing Reuters has reported.
“It is necessary for China to use its relations with Russia to make Russia understand better that it is at an impasse, and to tell Russia to come back to its senses,” she said.
The request comes after French president, Emmanuel Macron, visited China last month and sparked controversy by saying that Europe should not be a “follower” of either Washington or Beijing or get caught up in any escalation over the future of Taiwan.
The remarks sparked much comment, including from the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, who called them “unfortunate”, adding: “We have never been in danger of becoming or being a vassal of the United States.”
Ukraine claims Russia is blocking Zaporizhzhia evacuation
The Ukrainian army has claimed that Russia is stopping workers and their relatives from leaving Zaporizhzhia, despite organising their evacuation from the area near the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant.
On Wednesday Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, Energoatom, said it had been told that about 3,100 people were to be withdrawn from the southern city from Enerhodar, including 2,700 who had signed contracts with the Russian-installed company.
Warnings have frequently been issued over how dangerous the situation at the power plant has been since the invasion last year.
However the situation looks murkier than first thought. In its daily update on Wednesday morning, the general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces said:
In Enerhodar, the Russian occupiers organised a so-called “evacuation” for family members of Zaporizhzhia NPP [nuclear power plant] employees. Yet the employees of the power plant are not allowed to leave the city.
The so-called “authorities” put in office by the occupation forces announced the evacuation to recreation centres and hotels of Berdiansk and Kyrylivka. However, those who agreed were taken to Rostov oblast [in Russia] and placed in tent camps.