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Russia TV celebrates as it reports the capture of Bakhmut

FILE - In this grab taken from video and released by Prigozhin Press Service Saturday, May 20, 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group military company speaks holding a Russian national flag in front of his soldiers in Bakhmut, Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday, May 21, 2023 that Russian forces weren't occupying Bakhmut, casting doubt on Moscow's insistence that the eastern Ukrainian city had fallen. (Prigozhin Press Service via AP, File)

TALLINN, Estonia — Russian TV went into a full frenzy of celebration as it reported Moscow’s capture of the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. There were comparisons to the Red Army liberating Berlin in 1945, congratulations relayed from President Vladimir Putin and announcers emphasizing the victory by using the city’s nearly century-old Soviet name of Artyomovsk.

“The myth that Artyomovsk is an unassailable fortress has been crushed,” an anchor said Sunday night on Channel One, Russia’s most popular state broadcaster. “Those are historic events.”

A report from the smoldering city in eastern Ukraine followed, showing Russian fighters yelling “Victory!” and placing two flags — the Russian tricolor and the black flag of the private military contractor Wagner — atop a tall, partly destroyed building.

The flags were mounted “so that everyone could see them,” the correspondent said, even though the bombed-out, deserted 400-year-old city looks like a ghost of itself after the longest and bloodiest battle of the war.

Despite the Russian claims, top Ukrainian military leaders say the fight there is not over, even though they still control only a small part of the city. Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Monday that Ukrainian troops hold parts of its southwestern outskirts, while fighting continues for the strategic heights in the northern and southern suburbs.

But Kyiv says its troops played a key role in the strategy of exhausting Russian forces. Tens of thousands of fighters on both sides have died in the grinding nine-month battle for Bakhmut.

Satellite imagery shows infrastructure, apartment blocks and buildings reduced to rubble from relentless artillery attacks.

Putin badly needed a victory in Bakhmut, analysts say, especially after a winter offensive by his forces failed to take other front-line cities and towns. And Russia still wants to capture the entire Donetsk region — a goal that was emphasized several months after the assault on Kyiv failed.

On Channel One, a Russian fighter told the correspondent he felt “probably the same emotions our grandfathers had in Berlin,” referring to the Red Army’s victorious sweep of the German capital at the end of World War II.

The celebratory tone continued Monday even as Russia reported an incursion into its territory in the border region of Belgorod by Ukrainian saboteurs, triggering a “counterterrorism operation.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the attack was meant “to draw attention away from the Bakhmut axis, to minimize the political effect of Ukrainian side losing Artyomovsk.”

The fog of war made it impossible to confirm the situation inside Bakhmut, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying the city was not fully occupied.

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