The head of Russia’s private military company Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, made another visit to the inner front lines the eastern city of Bakhmutaccording to CNN video geolocation.
The video was uploaded on Monday and was filmed by Russian journalist Alexander Simonov. It is unclear exactly when it was fired.
“The Wagner group did not always let war journalists join them on the front lines. I asked the owner of the company Yevgeny Prigozhin and he allowed me to go to the location of the fighters in the Bakhmutka River, where there is currently heavy fighting in the central areas of Bakhmut,” said Simonov.
The river runs north and south through the eastern suburbs of the city.
In the video, a boxer wearing a tank top says “the enemy is 150-180 meters northwest of us….each private house is a fortification, each five-nine-story building is a fortress.”
The fighter said that the day before, Wagner had raided north of Bakhmut and claimed that they had killed more than 30 Ukrainian soldiers. CNN was unable to verify the claim.
“We are moving forward, Bakhmut will fall and we will win,” he said.
Prigozhin said, “We are going through the front lines. We’re looking at what we can do better, do it faster.”
One of the fighters said that they were attending school number five in Bakhmut. CNN geolocated the video to that location, south of central Bakhmut.
Later, Prigozhin said from another location that he was at a cemetery in the nearby town of Soledar, adding, “We bury the bodies of Ukrainians that we cannot hand over. We take pictures, number them to hand over later.”
Prigozhin has made several visits to Bakhmut and the surrounding area in recent weeks.
What both sides are saying: Both Ukrainian officials and Wagner acknowledged street fighting in the city, with Ukrainians claiming they had stabilized the situation in Bakhmut.
Wagner said that now control all metallurgical plants called AZOM on the northern edge of the city.
