Bakhmut Not Lost, Ukrainian Defense Minister Insists In Late Rallying Cry

Russian forces do not entirely control the decimated Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, Ukraine's defense minister said on Friday, denying Moscow's repeated claims of having captured the eastern battleground settlement.

"We use Bakhmut as a stronghold to reduce their [Russia's] offensive capability," Oleksii Reznikov told Channel News Asia on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue security conference in Singapore.

The contested city of Bakhmut has seen months of some of the fiercest fighting of the ongoing war in Ukraine so far. A settlement with little strategic value, both sides have battled for control of it for its symbolic importance. But the constant clashes have come at a high cost for Moscow and Kyiv, with both sides believing to have racked up high casualty counts in Bakhmut. In late March, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley said the city had become a "slaughter-fest" for Russian forces.

Russia's defense ministry and the Wagner Group, a paramilitary unit fighting in Ukraine, have insisted for weeks that Russian forces have captured Bakhmut, which has been repeatedly denied by Kyiv.

On Sunday, Ukraine's General Staff of the Armed Forces wrote in a Facebook post that Russian fighters continued "offensive operations" in the area. On Saturday, Hanna Maliar, Ukraine's deputy defense minister, wrote on Telegram that "the situation is conditionally stable" in Bakhmut, adding that Ukraine controlled territory on the southwestern outskirts of the city.

"The enemy continues to suffer significant losses in the direction of Bakhmut," Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukraine's ground forces, wrote in a statement on Telegram on Saturday, furthering bolstering the sentiment that the fight for Bakhmut is not over.

Kyiv's forces still control Bakhmut, Reznikov said on Friday, but described it as "no longer a city," adding that Russian forces "have wiped out everything."

"There is nothing, they destroyed everything," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters shortly after Russia claimed to have captured Bakhmut in mid-May. "Bakhmut is only in our hearts."

Fighting in Bakhmut had been largely carried out by Wagner mercenaries led by Russian oligarch and founder Yevgeny Prigozhin. However, Russia's military has "likely largely relieved Wagner Group forces in Bakhmut," the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote in its Saturday assessment.

On Friday, Prigozhin said in a statement on Telegram that 99 percent of Wagner fighters had left Bakhmut and had been replaced by conventional Russian troops.

The British Defense Ministry said in an intelligence update on Twitter on Saturday that Russia had sent regular military units to Bakhmut while Wagner troops withdrew to rear areas. Russia's defense ministry has previously said its airborne units, also known as the VDV, were deployed to Bakhmut in support of Wagner operations.

"Elements of the 76th and 106th divisions and two additional separate VDV brigades are now deployed to the sector," the defense ministry added.

Newsweek has reached out to the Russian defense ministry for comment via email.