Moscow, February 12. Mercenaries from the Russian Wagner Group today claimed to have taken a new town near the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut in the eastern region of Donetsk.
“Today Wagner’s assault units took the city of Krásnaya Gorá,” the private military company reported on its Telegram channel, where you can see a video of several mercenaries posing next to a sign with the name of this city.
Krásnaya Gorá, located about ten kilometers from Bakhmut, is located between Soledar, taken last month by the Wagners, and this Ukrainian stronghold.
Wagner, who has been trying to assault Bakhmut since mid-2022, also today denied that Russia has deployed regular forces in the region and that its men have been transferred to the southern front.
“There is no special unit… Within a radius of more or less 50 kilometers there are only Wagner’s soldiers, who will eventually conquer Bakhmut,” said Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the group. .
Moreover, he denied ever storming Vuhledar, another major Ukrainian town further south of Donetsk, in an attempt to surround Ukrainian troops.
“Where they are not, well they are not. We are neither north nor south,” he added.
Russian troops have intensified in recent days both their ground offensive and their aerial bombardments and artillery attacks against Ukrainian positions in Donbass and the neighboring region of Kharkiv.
According to various Ukrainian and Western sources, these would be the first steps of the major offensive ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin to take control of the four regions annexed in September, in particular Donetsk.
In this regard, the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksy Danilov, said last night that Moscow has already launched the “big offensive”, but will encounter “big problems” at the beginning.
“The offensive they were planning is already advancing gradually. But it is not the offensive they were expecting,” he said, in statements on Ukrainian public television.