Russia-Ukraine WarWagner Group Says It Took Control of Bakhmut

Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state of Georgia who rebuffed Mr. Trump’s pressure to “find” enough votes to reverse the outcome of the election, also made the list. So did Lt. Michael Byrd, the Capitol Police officer who shot the pro-Trump rioter Ashli Babbitt on Jan. 6, 2021.

None of them has anything to do with Russia policy, and the only evident reason they would have come to Moscow’s attention is because Mr. Trump has publicly assailed them. The Russian Foreign Ministry offered no specific explanation for why they would be included on the list but did say that among its targets were “those in government and law enforcement agencies who are directly involved in the persecution of dissidents in the wake of the so-called storming of the Capitol.”

As recently as this month, Mr. Trump has tried to rewrite the history of that day and has dangled pardons for convicted rioters if he is elected to a second term. He also refused to commit to supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia if he is elected president again, saying instead he would seek to mediate between Kyiv and Moscow.

Presumably, the Russian sanctions will have little actual effect on Ms. James, Mr. Smith, Mr. Raffensperger or Lieutenant Byrd, since none of them is known to have assets in Russia or plans to travel there. Mr. Raffensperger reposted a tweet from Gabriel Sterling, his chief operating officer, who wrote: “A great honor for @GaSecofState Raffensperger. He is one of the hundreds of Americans banned from Russia by Vladimir Putin. That means Brad is doing it right.”

Summer 2022

When two Ukrainian cities in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine fell to Russian forces in quick succession last summer, Bakhmut, a city about 30 miles to the southwest, became the next target of Russia’s campaign to secure the whole of the Donbas.

Bakhmut had been a supply hub for Ukrainian fighters in the two Luhansk cities — Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk — and had been shelled repeatedly by Russian forces, prompting much of Bakhmut’s population of about 70,000 to flee. At that time, however, few expected the city, which was also the site of fierce fighting in 2014, to become the longest-running sustained battle of the war.

Fall 2022

Russia’s assault on Bakhmut relied on tactics employed in previous battles: deploying artillery firepower and trying to take neighboring towns and villages before moving into the city itself.

At the same time, Moscow, which broadly held territory east of the city, cut off supply routes into Bakhmut that Ukrainian forces were using. Severing that access would force the Ukrainian forces to retreat to avoid being surrounded.

In the fall, the two sides fought nearby, and the shelling of the city intensified.

December 2022

In a national address, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine accused Russia of turning Bakhmut into “burned ruins.” Among Ukrainians, the phrase “hold Bakhmut” became a rallying cry, and the defense of the city increasingly became a national symbol of resistance.

January 2023

Russian forces captured the village of Klishchiivka, south of Bakhmut. Ukrainian forces had deemed it key to Bakhmut’s defense because the village lies on high ground east of roads into the city that were crucial for resupplying the forces defending the city.

Ukrainian forces retreated from the town of Soledar, northeast of Bakhmut, enabling Russian forces to tighten their grip near the city. Russia later claimed to have seized a handful of villages near Soledar, further imperiling resupply routes into Bakhmut.

February 2023

The situation grew dire for the Ukrainians, with their main remaining supply route — which one general called the “last breathing tube” — coming under increasing attack from Russian forces. A U.S. intelligence assessment from the time, leaked online in April, said that as of Feb. 25, Ukrainian forces in the city “were almost operationally encircled.”

Mr. Zelensky told Ukrainians that “the situation is getting more and more difficult,” and Ukraine’s military barred aid workers and other civilians from entering Bakhmut for safety reasons, a decision that was seen as a prelude to a possible withdrawal.

But Ukraine sent in reinforcements, including a variety of elite units, and managed to push Russian forces back far enough to allow resupply of soldiers in the city and evacuation of the wounded.

March 2023

The commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, twice visited soldiers in Bakhmut and said that Russia was putting its “most prepared units” into the fight.

The Wagner mercenary force, which helped lead Russia’s assault on the city, took control of most of eastern Bakhmut, leaving the Bakhmutka River, which runs north to south through the city’s center, as the new front line. Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the Wagner group’s founder, said: “The pincers are closing.”

April 2023

In fierce urban combat, Ukrainian forces defended a western pocket of the city that was just 20 blocks wide, steadily shrinking and relentlessly pounded by artillery.

Russia stepped up its attacks on Bakhmut with artillery and airstrikes, Ukraine said, even as Kyiv’s forces fought to keep a grip on vital roads leading west out of the city, their last major resupply and evacuation route.

May 2023

Mr. Prigozhin threatened to withdraw his fighters from Bakhmut on May 10 due to a lack of support from Russia’s Ministry of Defense, but appeared to backtrack two days later in saying he had been promised as much ammunition and weaponry as needed to continue the fight.

In mid-May, Ukrainian forces managed to take back some territory to the north and south of Bakhmut even as Russian forces continued their assault within the city limits.

On Saturday, Mr. Prigozhin claimed the city was fully under Wagner control — an assertion Ukrainian officials swiftly rejected. Hours later, Russia’s Defense Ministry said the capture of the city “has been completed.”

For Mr. Prigozhin, capturing the city appears to have become a personal obsession — so much so that one facet of the battle’s legacy will be the bizarre, public feud it set off between him, the man once known as “Putin’s chef,” and the Russian Defense Ministry.

Mr. Prigozhin is an oligarch who amassed his wealth partly through securing catering contracts from the Kremlin — hence the “chef” moniker. His notorious Wagner mercenary force has exerted influence on behalf of Moscow in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Mali and Mozambique, and it is now a crucial force fighting on Russia’s behalf in Ukraine — though Mr. Prigozhin publicly acknowledged his connection to Wagner only in September.

Since then, he has built an aggressive social media presence, portraying himself and his forces as more ruthless and effective fighters than the Russian military, and denouncing Moscow’s defense bureaucracy — all despite his close alliance with President Vladimir V. Putin.

Mr. Prigozhin’s pointed accusations about the competency of the Russian defense ministry, paired with his fighters’ advances in the grinding battle for Bakhmut, transformed him from a once-secretive figure into a political power player on the public stage.

The discord between Mr. Prigozhin and Russian defense officials was increasingly exposed as the anniversary of the war approached in February.

Back then, Mr. Prigozhin’s mercenary group was losing its ability to replenish its ranks. Sheer numbers of troops, some of whom Mr. Prigozhin recruited from prisons, had fueled Wagner’s repeated offensives in Bakhmut. But news of Wagner’s astronomical casualty rate was spreading to Russian penal colonies, and Mr. Prigozhin announced in early February that he would stop recruiting inmates, without giving a reason.

Not long afterward, he took aim at figures near the very top of Russia’s command structure, accusing the defense minister and the country’s most senior general of treason in vitriolic, profanity-laden audio messages on social media.

Mr. Prigozhin claimed that military officials were deliberately withholding ammunition and supplies from Wagner fighters in Bakhmut to undermine him, while, he said, Russian forces elsewhere faced failure after failure.

According to a classified U.S. intelligence document that was leaked online in April, the dispute grew so bad that Mr. Putin became personally involved, calling Mr. Prigozhin and Russia’s defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, into a meeting believed to have taken place on Feb. 22. “The meeting almost certainly concerned, at least in part, Prigozhin’s public accusations and resulting tension with Shoygu,” the document says, using an alternative transliteration of the minister’s name.

The public intensity of the dispute has since fluctuated. Mr. Prigozhin eventually said his fighters in Bakhmut received the ammunition they needed, and in April, Russia’s defense ministry made a rare acknowledgment of their cooperation, saying that Russian paratrooper units were covering Wagner’s flanks in the western part of the city.

But over the course of just three weeks in May, Mr. Prigozhin again accused Russia’s military bureaucracy of starving Wagner forces of the ammunition they needed to fully capture Bakhmut, this time threatening to withdraw them from the city on May 10; appeared to backtrack two days later, as he has done before, this time saying he had received satisfactory promises of more arms; undermined the Russian Army’s claims of a partial “regrouping” of its forces in the city by declaring it a “rout”; denied a report that he had offered to betray the Russian Army’s locations around Bakhmut if Kyiv agreed to withdraw from the area; and on Saturday, declared that Bakhmut was fully under Wagner control.

Kyiv swiftly denied the latest claim. Several hours later, Russia’s Defense Ministry released a statement saying that the city’s capture “has been completed” as a result of Wagner’s actions with the support of traditional Russian forces.

The ministry issued its statement at about the same time on Saturday that President Biden and other G7 leaders in Hiroshima issued a communiqué calling for “constructive and stable relations” with China, but also for “peace and stability” in the strait between China and Taiwan, the island democracy that Beijing has said must accept unification. The communiqué also urged China to use its influence over Russia to get Moscow to withdraw its troops from Ukraine.

But the Chinese foreign ministry said that even the G7 leaders’ relatively mild comments about Taiwan were unacceptable interference.

“Taiwan is China’s Taiwan. Resolving the Taiwan issue is a matter for the Chinese people themselves,” the Chinese foreign ministry said. The G7 statement, it added, amounted to support for Taiwanese independence, “and the outcome will only create serious shocks for peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”

The Chinese statement did not comment directly on the G7 leaders’ call for Beijing to press Russia to abandon its invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian Defense Ministry did not immediately comment on the declaration by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the Wagner chief, whose forces have been spearheading Russia’s monthslong campaign to take Bakhmut, a battle that has cost thousands of lives on both sides and reduced much of the city to rubble.

“Today, at 12 noon, Bakhmut was completely taken,” Mr. Prigozhin said in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app on Saturday, standing in front of ruins and holding a flag. “We completely took the whole city, from house to house.”

Hanna Maliar, a deputy defense minister in Ukraine, said in a statement that Ukrainian soldiers were still holding their ground in “certain industrial and infrastructure facilities” in the southwest corner of Bakhmut, but said there was “heavy fighting” and the situation was “critical.”

The Ukrainians have been pulling back, step-by-step, in some of the most intense urban combat in a generation, even as Kyiv’s forces have pushed the Russians out of key positions to the north and south of the city in recent days.

Mr. Prigozhin said last week he would pull his troops out and leave the problem of holding the territory to the Russian Ministry of Defense. He said the same again on Saturday, claiming his troops would pull out by May 25.

The Wagner leader has publicly clashed with Russia’s military leaders over the fight for Bakhmut, accusing them of starving his forces of ammunition.

“We weren’t only fighting the Ukrainian army in Bakhmut, we were also fighting the Russian bureaucracy that was disturbing our efforts,” Mr. Prigozhin said on Saturday. “Because of their whims, five times more guys died than had to die.”

Ukraine’s military, without directly mentioning Mr. Prigozhin, rejected claims of Bakhmut’s capture. Serhiy Cherevaty, the spokesman for Ukraine’s eastern military command, said on national television that Ukrainian units are stationed in the southwestern part of Bakhmut, defending the area.

Earlier on Saturday, the command for Ukraine’s Special Operations Forces released a video that it said showed its soldiers still operating in the city, although the timing and location of the footage could not be immediately independently verified.

On Saturday, Mr. Zelensky met Mr. Modi on the sidelines of the Group of 7 summit in Hiroshima. In place of the warm hug he shared with leaders like Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, Mr. Zelensky extended the Indian leader a handshake before they were seated for what he later described as a “serious talk.”

In a brief separate statement, Mr. Zelensky said he had discussed Ukraine’s humanitarian needs and invited Mr. Modi to join Ukraine’s peace initiative. The initiative lays out as a precondition for any negotiations to end the war that Russia withdraw from all of Ukraine’s territory.

“I thank India for supporting our country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, in particular, at the platforms of international organizations, and for providing humanitarian aid to Ukraine,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on Twitter. His language echoes India’s own statements about the war — which it refrains from calling a war — and about the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Mr. Modi said he had “conveyed our clear support for dialogue and diplomacy to find a way forward” to the Ukrainian leader.

“We will continue extending humanitarian assistance to the people of Ukraine,” he wrote on Twitter.

India has long tried to balance its ties to Russia and the West. During the Cold War it was a reluctant partner to the Soviet Union. While it has cultivated closer relations with the United States, Moscow remains a trusted partner, a key energy supplier and the source of much of the Indian military’s weaponry.

The Ukraine crisis and the escalating tensions between Russia and the West have tested India’s tightrope act. It has increased its purchases of Russian oil, which has angered Ukraine and the United States. And it has refused to support resolutions at the United Nations that have condemned Russia’s aggression.

But on social media, critics worried that the visit might put pressure on Japan to join the United States and other allies in sending lethal weapons to Ukraine to fight the Russian invasion. Japan has so far resisted doing so because of the pacifist clause in its Constitution, which was put in place by American occupiers in 1947 and limits military action to instances of self-defense.

Since the end of World War II, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, as its military is known, have participated only in humanitarian, disaster relief or logistics operations.

And last year, when Japan sent bulletproof vests and helmets to Ukraine shortly after the invasion, it was the first time it had sent military matériel to a country fighting a war in more than 75 years.

As President Biden said he would allow Ukrainian pilots to be trained on American-made F-16 fighter jets, some in Japan expressed concern that their government would be pushed to join in the effort.

“Don’t tell me that the U.S. is going to make Japan release its F-16 fighter jets?” wrote Isoko Mochizuki, an investigative journalist at the Tokyo Shimbun newspaper. Japan, she wrote, “should never provide lethal weapons.”

In Hiroshima, some survivors of the Aug. 6, 1945, atomic bombing that killed about 150,000 people said they hoped that Mr. Zelensky’s visit was intended to rally leaders around peace, not escalation.

“There is so much meaning to Zelensky coming here,” said Atsuko Kobayashi, 79, who was less than 2 years old when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. “I want him to see what nuclear war has done to our country, to people like me, and go back to his country and care about his citizens, not fight power with power and weapons with weapons, and seek to have the war end.”

If Mr. Zelensky visits Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial dedicated to those who died in the bombing, he would remind the world what is at stake in the Russian war against Ukraine, some said.

“By Zelensky standing in front of the Hiroshima dome with the backing of G7 leaders and that photo being broadcast all around the world, that will be such a symbolic moment, capturing the atrocities of war,” said Takefumi Kato, 62, an artist who has lived in Hiroshima for 30 years and visited Ukraine in 2019 to paint murals with children.

“I think he wants to appeal to the world and Russia that nukes are not OK,” Mr. Kato said. Mr. Zelensky’s presence in Hiroshima sends “a warning” of the fate that could befall Ukraine, Mr. Kato added. “If we don’t stop now, what happened in Hiroshima may happen to us, too.”

Hisako Ueno contributed reporting from Tokyo.

Details of Mr. Zelensky’s travel are kept closely guarded for security reasons. His trips are rarely if ever broadcast in advance. In recent weeks, Mr. Zelensky has made surprise visits to several European capitals on a quest to shore up military support for a looming Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Initially, Mr. Zelensky was only expected to address the G7 summit of the world’s wealthiest democracies virtually, which was the line that Japanese officials took. Then news reports by The Financial Times and other news outlets emerged saying that he would travel to Japan in person. Several officials told The New York Times on Friday that Mr. Zelensky would be making the trip.

Later on Friday, Oleksii Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national defense council, went on national television to confirm Mr. Zelensky would be there for face-to-face meetings.

“Very important things will be done there; therefore, the physical presence of our president is important in order to defend our interests,” Mr. Danilov said. “To provide clear proposals and clear arguments regarding the events taking place on the territory of our country.”

But very soon afterward, the council’s website posted a brief statement saying only that Mr. Zelensky’s participation would be online. The Ukrainian president’s office did not respond to questions about the conflicting information.

On Friday night, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan told reporters it was also his “understanding” that the Ukrainian president’s participation in the summit would be virtual. When pressed by reporters who had seen numerous leaks about an in-person appearance, Mr. Kishida said, “I have nothing to add.”

But at 9:20 a.m. local time on Saturday morning, Japan’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement. It said that Mr. Kishida, while on a visit to Kyiv in March, had suggested that Mr. Zelensky attend the G7 virtually but that the Ukrainian leader “then expressed his strong desire for face-to-face participation.”

“The Japanese government carefully considered the overall summit agenda and schedule, and have decided to hold a session on Ukraine with the G7 leaders tomorrow on the 21st, the last day of the summit, with President Zelensky participating face to face,” the statement said.

Hours later, Mr. Zelensky, in his trademark military olive green, stepped off a plane on the tarmac in Hiroshima.

But Mr. Biden concluded he had to return to Washington to broker an agreement to ensure the United States does not default on its debt.

Now the Quad meeting will happen in Hiroshima on Saturday night instead. Papua New Guinea will get a visit by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. Other island leaders will get an invitation to Washington. And Mr. Albanese will get a state dinner at the White House this fall, making him the fourth foreign leader to be honored with a state visit since Mr. Biden took office.

“I truly apologize to you for having to meet here instead of coming to Australia, but we have a little thing going on at home,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Albanese on Saturday at a hurriedly arranged meeting in Hiroshima after the Australian leader flew north rather than hosting the American president as originally planned.

Mr. Albanese was gracious.

“Certainly, I understand the circumstances,” he told Mr. Biden.

Ukraine’s air defenses have intercepted the vast majority of the missiles and drones that have been fired on the city this month. Mr. Popko described the concentrated spate of attacks as an attempt to psychologically drain the city’s populace. Ukrainian officials have said the series of attacks may be aimed at locating and exhausting air defenses around the capital.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who arrived in Japan on Saturday afternoon to meet with the leaders of the Group of 7 wealthy nations, has said procuring additional air defense systems is a priority for the coming weeks.