In a video sent Friday March 3 on Telegram messaging, Evgueni Prigojine calls on the troops of kyiv to surrender.
Evgueni Prigojine is facing the camera, day is breaking and the sound of shell explosions is in the background. In a video sent to Telegram messaging shortly before 10 a.m. on Friday March 3, the leader of the paramilitary group Wagner, helmet on his head, hands tucked into his bulletproof vest, speaks directly to the Ukrainian president: “Volodymyr Alexandrovich Zelensky, I am speaking to the President of Ukraine. Wagner’s units have almost finished encircling Bakhmout. You have only one access route left, which is surrounded.”
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A digital western atmosphere therefore: surrender or death. The Battle of Bakhmout is the longest of the war in Ukraine, with eight months of fierce fighting. Next to Evgueni Prigojine, three Ukrainian prisoners, two very young, and a third older. “Today we see on the battlefield more and more old people and childrencontinues the head of Wagner. They fight but their life expectancy is not very long in Bakhmout. One or two days only. Give them the chance to escape.”
Time is playing for Kyiv
On the ground, the Ukrainians have recognized for several days that the situation is complicated with simultaneous offensives to the east, north and south of the city. The situation of Bakhmout recalls that of Severodonietsk, 60 km further north. The Russians massively committed their forces to this battle in 2022. They conquered the city but paid a heavy price, in weapons, ammunition and men. A Pyrrhic victory in a way, since since then the Kremlin troops have hardly advanced in this region. In Bakhmout, we are witnessing the same burst of energy, we do not count the sacrifices, and it is likely that the increasingly certain victory of the Russians will lead to an operational pause to allow the troops to be reconstituted.
On the Ukrainian side, we play for time, we resist as long as possible, again paying a high price. But time is running out for Kiev, as Western weapons arrive, soldiers are trained in the West, and the crystallization of the front in Bakhmout prevents the Russians from launching a wider offensive elsewhere. As a reminder, after Severodonietsk more than nine months ago, the Ukrainians carried out surprise attacks in the Karkhiv region, which resulted in the recapture of hundreds of square kilometers of territory.