Dispute between presidents
On 20 May, head of PMC Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin posted a video on social media in which he claimed that his mercenaries had captured all of Bakhmut. Prigozhin, of course, did not forget to mention the “betrayal” of military-adjacent bureaucrats, naming, among others, Russia’s Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, who previously “prevented” the Wagner fighters from capturing the Ukrainian city. According to the head of PMC Wagner, the operation to capture Bakhmut lasted 224 days; he plans to withdraw his fighters for rest and retraining by 25 May. The video also showed Wagner’s mercenaries install flags of their PMC and Russian banners on the roofs of several buildings greatly damaged by shelling.
Russian pro-war Telegram channels promptly went into celebration mode. Many authors of Telegram channels compared Bakhmut to Stalingrad and presented Prigozhin’s announcement as one of the most important events of the war. Meanwhile, Russia’s state-controlled Channel One even claimed that the Wagner fighters in Bakhmut should be experiencing the same feelings as “their grandfathers in Berlin”.
Several hours later, Russia’s Defence Ministry also reported that Bakhmut, which is often referred to as Artemovsk in Russia today, had been taken. The next day, Vladimir Putin congratulated Russian servicemen and Wagner’s assault troops on their success and promised to award the most distinguished participants of the operation. This was the first time the Russian president has ever mentioned PMC Wagner in an official statement.
At the same time, Volodymyr Zelensky, who was in Japan for the G7 Summit, also commented on the situation. His first statement was found to be ambiguous by many. When asked by a journalist: “Is Bakhmut still in Ukraine’s hands? The Russians say they’ve taken Bakhmut,” he responded: