0:27: Wagner claims the capture of the town hall of Bakhmut
"In the legal sense, Bakhmut was captured. The enemy is concentrated in the western areas," the head of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner Yevgeny Prigozhin said on his Telegram channel on Monday (April 3rd).
A video accompanying his message shows Yevgeny Prigozhin waving a Russian flag with an inscription in honor of Vladlen Tatarskii, the Russian military blogger and staunch defender of the offensive in Ukraine killed Sunday by a bomb explosion in St. Petersburg. "The commanders of the units that took over the town hall and the whole center will go and raise this flag," he said. "This is the private military company Wagner, here are the guys who took Bakhmut. From a legal point of view, it is ours," he said.
A city of some 70,000 inhabitants before the war, Bakhmut has been the scene of particularly violent fighting for months.
The essentials of the day of April 2
A "massive attack" by Russian missiles on Sunday killed six people in residential areas of Kostiantynivka, near Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, whose President Volodymyr Zelensky praised for resistance in the face of "the greatest force against humanity of our time".
A well-known Russian military blogger, a staunch supporter of the military offensive in Ukraine, was killed and 25 others injured by "an explosive device" at a café in St. Petersburg, northwestern Russia, according to authorities.
With AFP and Reuters
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