Wagner Group head Prigozhin says mercenaries have ‘legally’ captured Bakhmut

Wagner mercenary group founder Evgeny Prigozhin said in a video posted Sunday night that his fighters have captured the administration building in Bakhmut, the city in Ukraine’s Donetsk region where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked in combat for months.

According to Prigozhin, his forces raised the Russian flag over the building in honor of Vladlen Tatarsky, the pro-war blogger and self-styled “war correspondent” who died in an explosion in a St. Petersburg cafe earlier on Sunday:

April 2, 2023, 11:00 p.m. We hoisted the Russian flag with the words ‘In Memory of Vladlen Tatarsky’ and a Wagner Group flag on the Bakhmut city administration building. Legally, it’s ours. The enemy is concentrated in the western areas.

Meduza cannot immediately verify these claims.