Saturday April 15, 2023 | 8:30 a.m.
The head of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, asked Vladimir Putin to declare the end of the attacks on Ukrainian territory and “tightly entrench” in the occupied areas, he announced in a statement published on his Telegram account.
“The ideal option would be to announce the end of the conflict, inform everyone that Russia has achieved the expected results and, in a certain sense, we have really achieved them,” Prigozhin said in the text collected by The Kyiv Independent.
“We have grounded a large number of soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and we can inform ourselves that our task has been completed,” the head of the Russian paramilitary group said.
“Russia cut off the Sea of Azov and a large part of the Black Sea, seized a large part of Ukrainian territory and created a land corridor to Crimea. Now there is only one thing left: to gain a firm footing and scratch those territories that already exist, ”he added.
Prigozhin acknowledged in his statement that Ukraine is a “completely nationalist state and Russia’s main task in the future should be to establish itself and firmly entrench itself in the occupied territories.”
The Wagner group, controlled by Vladimir Putin, has been helping the Russian army try to capture the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut for the past nine months as Moscow tries to consolidate its control over the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, according to information from the aforementioned Ukrainian media.
In the midst of a new display of the divisions between the Russian military high command, the Wagner Group once again denied Vladimir Putin’s army which affirmed this Thursday that it has blocked the Ukrainian troops entrenched in Bakhmut, and assured that the Kiev forces continue resisting in the epicenter city for months of fierce fighting.
Yevgeny Prigozhin indicated that it was “premature” to talk about a complete encirclement of the town.
Bakhmut, which had 70,000 inhabitants before the war, has been the scene of fierce fighting for months and has become a symbol of the struggle between Russians and Ukrainians to control the industrial region of Donbas in the east.
“Russian airborne troops support Wagner’s assault troops on the flanks, blocking the delivery of Ukrainian army reserves to the city and the possibility of withdrawal of enemy units” from Bakhmut, the Russian Defense Ministry said in its statement. daily report.
Meanwhile, former Wagner fighter Andrei Medvedev, who fled to Norway, confirmed that the Russian paramilitary group was in charge of beheading the Ukrainian soldier after identifying the voices in the video showing the execution and whose authenticity is being investigated.
“He recognized the voices of his colleagues on a video recording,” said the founder of the Gulagu.net organization, Vladimir Osechkin, on his Telegram channel, where he posted a fragment of his intervention on the Khodorkovsky Live program.
According to this human rights activist, who lives in exile, the former mercenary “unequivocally identifies his colleagues there, Wagner’s fighters by their characteristic nicknames, by the way they speak, by what they express on the radio” during the Beheading of the Ukrainian soldier.
Osechkin announced a reward of 3,000 euros for information about the people who appear in the video.
