After nearly a year of fighting over the remnants of the town, Russia has claimed victory in Bakhmut. Ukraine has conceded that there are only a handful of soldiers left in the city.

Russian forces are engaged in “mopping up” operations to clear the remaining Ukrainian soldiers from the ruins of Bakhmut, a senior Ukrainian official said on Monday, as Kyiv’s military commanders seek to shift the focus from their apparent loss of the city to the battle for its outskirts.

The commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, conceded over the weekend that only a small contingent of Ukrainian soldiers is now inside Bakhmut, a tacit acknowledgment that Russia had prevailed in its nearly yearlong campaign to seize the city.

The head of the Wagner group claimed victory over the weekend and made a point of saying he would soon hand it over to the regular Russian army.

Prigozhin announced that Wagner took Bakhmut, but his fighters will hand over the city to the regular army on May 25th. #Bakhmut #Ukraine #Russia #RussiaUkraineWar #Wagner #Prigozhin pic.twitter.com/2dEJucyOhW

— Natalka (@NatalkaKyiv) May 20, 2023

Here’s more of his speech in which he renews his complaints about the Russian Army and takes sole credit for the win.

Prigozhin thanks Putin and the Russian people while blaming Shoigu and Gerasimov for the unnecessary deaths of his fighters in Bakhmut. #Bakhmut #Russia #Wagner #Prigozhin #RussiaUkraineWar #Ukraine #Shoigu #Gerasimov #Putin pic.twitter.com/NMuoBmss77

— Natalka (@NatalkaKyiv) May 20, 2023

He was congratulated by Putin.

On Saturday the chief of the mercenary Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claimed to have captured Bakhmut after months of brutal fighting, saying he would hand it over to Russia later in May.

Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his congratulations for “the completion of the operation to liberate Artemovsk,” Russian state news agency TASS reported the Kremlin as saying, using the Soviet-Russian name for Bakhmut.

Wagner’s plans to withdraw and hand the territory over could prove to be difficult.

“From June 1, not a single Wagner PMC fighter will be at the forefront until we undergo re-formation, re-equipment and additional training,” he said.

Withdrawing forces from an active front is no simple task, and could leave Russia vulnerable to attacks from Ukrainian troops on high ground on the city’s outskirts. Given the widely reported tensions between Wagner and Russia’s military leadership, and communication problems within the Russian ranks, analysts say Ukraine will be watching for fissures to exploit.

Even if Mr. Prigozhin does not pull his fighters out now, military analysts noted that Russia will face challenges controlling Bakhmut, especially with Ukrainian forces preparing a counteroffensive that could escalate fighting along other parts of the 600-mile-long front line.

“Russian forces will likely need additional reinforcements to hold Bakhmut city and its flanks at the expense of operations in other directions,” the Institute for the Study of War wrote in its latest analysis on Sunday.

So Prigozhin got his photo op but we’ll have to wait and see how long Russia can hold it. It was just last week that Prigozhin was blaming the Russian army for the loss of several square kilometers of territory around the city. From his perspective, the only thing that could make this moment of victory would be if his army replacements failed to hold on to it once he left.

This is the only significant success Russia can point to in the past year and it’s of more public relations value than strategic value. There is nothing left of the town and there are no major crossroads that will make a significant strategic difference in the battles to come. Bakhmut matters mostly because it has been fought over for so long.

Update: There’s something interesting happening in Belgorod, a Russian city just north of the border with Ukraine.

In a Telegram post, groups calling themselves the “Freedom of Russia Legion” and “Russian Volunteer Corps” said they had “liberated” a settlement in the Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine.

A Ukrainian official acknowledged that the units had carried out an operation in the area but insisted they were acting independently.

“We can confirm that this operation was carried out by Russian citizens,” Andriy Yusov, a representative of Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency, told CNN…

The situation in Belgorod marks “the first time” that Ukrainian-aligned forces have launched “a cross-border land operation against Russian targets,” according to CNN’s Sam Kiley.

“This is on a significant scale, and clearly intended to cause considerable consternation among the local authorities at the very least, if not at the level of the Kremlin,” Kiley told CNN’s Lynda Kinkade on Connect the World.