Russian troops are in Pakmut, but the city is “not occupied”, according to Zelensky

“I can honestly say that the photographs of destroyed Hiroshima remind me of Bagmouth. There is absolutely nothing alive, all the buildings have been destroyed (…) complete and total destruction,” he said at a press conference on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Japan.

However, while Russian troops were in Bagmouth, the city was “not occupied,” he said. “Today they are in Bagmouth. Baghmoud is not occupied by Russia today,” he told a news conference, without elaborating on his words, after initial vague reports on Baghmoud earlier on Sunday.

“President Denies Pact Capture”

The press actually asked him: “President Zelensky, is Bagmouth still in the hands of Ukraine? The Russians claim to have captured Bagmouth. Unsure whether he was answering the first or second part of the question, he replied, “I don’t think so.”

“You must understand that there is nothing”. “Today Bagmouth remains only in our hearts,” he added. “The president has denied the capture of Bakhmoud”, later his spokesman Serguii Naikiforov noted on Facebook, taking a simplified version of Volodymyr Zelensky’s words.

sitting on the side US President Joe Biden During the G7 meeting in Hiroshima, the Ukrainian president struggled to express himself on the matter, with a long, emotional and sometimes confusing response in English.

He suggested that Bagmuth was a pyrrhic victory for the Russians and that the Ukrainians had nothing to lose there. “There is nothing in this place […] A lot of rubble and dead Russians,” he said. He stressed that the Ukrainian soldiers had done a “good job”.

Ukraine says it has ‘partially surrounded’ Bakumout

This Sunday morning, Ukraine assured that it had “partially encircled” the town of Baghmoud, which Russia claimed it had captured, thanks to recent advances by Kiev forces on the city’s northern and southern flanks.