The Ukrainian command did not decide to leave Bakhmut, and recently the speaker of the General Staff, Andriy Kovalev, said that the Armed Forces of Ukraine were not going to do this at all.. However, the Russian command still believes in success in this area and therefore takes away the Wagnerites from under Bakhmut, replacing them with the personnel troops of the Russian Federation. This is part of the internal competition in Russia for at least some, albeit insignificant, successes at the front.. This is stated in the report of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) for January 31..

" “The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) may be trying to completely push out Wagner’s troops near Bakhmut and establish a traditional Russian military command structure as the only winner around Bakhmut, assuming that Russian troops will eventually take over the city.”.

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It is precisely because of such internal competition that the head of the Wagner PPK, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the Russian Ministry of Defense argued about the village of Blagodatnoye near Soledar, making radically different statements.. The Russian Defense Ministry said that Russian troops captured Blagodatnoye on January 31 after, and Prigozhin said that the Wagnerites captured it on January 28.

The Ukrainian commanders of the units operating in Bakhmut, in particular, Denis Yaralovsky and Vladimir Nazarenko, confirmed the information about the reinforcement of the invaders by personnel units of the RF Armed Forces in this direction.

“ISW does not predict the imminent capture of Bakhmut by Russian troops, although the Ukrainian command may choose to retreat rather than risk unacceptable losses.. It is extremely unlikely that Russian troops will be able to carry out a sudden cordon of Ukrainian troops in Bakhmut,” the report says..

However, according to experts, on January 31, a representative of the Eastern Group of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Serhiy Cherevaty, said that the Ukrainian forces were still able to effectively provide units in Bakhmut, and noted that the Ukrainian military command had developed several plans for the defense of Bakhmut.

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Recall that Volodymyr Zelensky, commenting on the situation regarding the fighting in Donbass, said in his evening address that the situation near Bakhmut is very difficult, but the Russian army suffered heavy losses there.. “In some of its wars, Russia lost fewer people overall than it loses there, in particular, near Bakhmut,” Zelensky said..