Shocking: Vladimir Putin's Russian Forces Have Reduced a Ukrainian City to A Dystopian Wasteland

A report in the New York Times citing unnamed US intelligence officials claims that a pro-Ukrainian group may have carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, an incident that we reported on at the time and which had been widely blamed on Russia. The German government says it has taken note of the New York Times report, but that its own investigation into the pipeline attack has not yet reached a definitive conclusion. Kyiv has strenuously denied the latest allegations. Mykhailo Padolyak, a senior presidential aide, said that Ukraine was absolutely not involved in the attacks and has no information about what happened. In the meantime, Denmark, Germany and Sweden are all continuing their investigation into what happened, with a spokesperson for the German government stating, The federal public prosecutor has been investigating the matter since the beginning of October 2022. It thus has sovereignty over the procedure. As fighting continues around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the leader of the Wagner Group private military company, Yevgeny Prigoshin, has claimed that between 12,000 and 20,000 Ukrainian troops remain in the city, together with around 4,000 civilians, according to separate reports. Prigoshin, it seems, is keen to lower expectations around potential Russian victory in the offensive after Russian Minister of Defence Sergei Shoigu said that capturing Bakhmut could serve as a launchpad for a broader offensive in the east. Shoigu has also said that taking Bakhmut would be fundamental for such an offensive, telling Russian television that capturing it will allow for further offensive operations deep into the defensive lines of the Ukrainian armed forces. Meanwhile, other observers, as we have previously reported, are less convinced of the strategic importance of the city. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin recently described Bakhmut as being mainly of symbolic importance and argued that a Russian victory there would not necessarily change the course of the war to any significant degree. Prigoshin is now urging against putting the cart before the horse, saying that we have taken Bakhmut and what will happen after. It is very complicated to kill between 12,000 and 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers by tomorrow morning, Prigoshin added. Such masters only exist in the depths of the General Staff or at Soyuzmultfilm, he said, with a reference to a Soviet-era cartoon studio. Meanwhile, Western estimates put the number of Russian casualties in the fighting for Bakhmut at between 20,000 and 30,000. Yesterday we reported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had said Kiev planned to continue its defence of the city amid reports that a Ukrainian tactical withdrawal may already have begun. Zelensky reiterated today that no part of Ukraine can be abandoned. In a statement today, Jan Gagin, an advisor to the Russian, installed leaders in the occupied portion of Donetsk, claimed that Russian forces now control about half of Bakhmut, including all major roads in and out of the city. Our artillery, our equipment and our troops are already in the city, Gagin told TASS. They control almost half of Bakhmut. I do not rule out attempts by Ukrainian forces to break through in order to try to keep it and break out from the city itself. There is a chaotic retreat of small groups. Ukraine Today identified the soldier who was shot dead by Russian forces after being captured as a prisoner of war as 40-year-old Timofei Mykolaevich Shadura. A graphic 12-second clip first appeared on Telegram yesterday before being widely shared on social media. In the video, the detained soldier in Ukrainian uniform was seen standing in a trench, unarmed, smoking a cigarette. After saying glory to Ukraine, he was then apparently killed in a hail of automatic gunfire. Assigned to the 30th Independent Mechanized Brigade, Shadura was posted missing in action during fighting around Bakhmut early last month. President Zelensky has bowed to find the murderers responsible for Shadura's killing. Other prisoners of war have been in the news today with the announcement that 130 captured Ukrainian soldiers have been returned home following an exchange with Russia. According to Andriy Yermak, the head of the Office of the Ukrainian Presidency, we managed to return home 130 of our people. I am proud of the entire team that worked long and hard on this exchange. The Russian Ministry of Defense confirmed that 90 Russian prisoners of war were returned by Ukraine. Some interesting information about Ukraine's little publicized cross-border raids into Russia became available today with the funeral for four individuals who were killed during an operation on Russian territory. The four, one of them a teenager, had been taking part in a sabotage mission in Russia's southern Bryansk region in December when they were killed in one of many missions that have been conducted by Ukraine in the border region. The individuals were apparently part of the Bratsvil, or Brotherhood, battalion, established after the party of the same name. At the funeral in Kiev, Brotherhood Party leader Dmitry Korchinsky provided the following details. They were in one of the reconnaissance sabotage groups of Bratsvil that take part in raids at the enemy's rear, both in the occupied territories and on Russian soil. They were killed during one of those raids. Russia's FSB security service said that it had killed the men after finding them armed with rifles and explosives, with the bodies reportedly being returned to Ukraine this month. A Ukrainian official today provided new details about the situation in the Luhansk region, Ukraine's easternmost province, which is mainly occupied by Russian forces. The governor of the region, Serhii Haide, described the situation in Luhansk as stable and controlled. He said that the Russians have pulled back to replenish their reserves, but that attacks in the direction of Byelorussia and Crimea have recently increased. He said freshly mobilized Russians are demotivated when their commanders abandon them when they see the real number of losses of the Russian army, as well as the conditions in which they found themselves at the front. He also said the Russians in the occupied territories treat the local population even more aggressively. They take out their anger on civilians due to the lack of success at the front. Ukraine appears set to receive more Western tanks this week after Poland said it would deliver another 10 Leopard, two main battle tanks. These are part of the 14 examples that Warsaw had already promised to send to Ukraine. The first four Polish-supplied Leopard 2s are already in the country, and Poland has also now offered to launch a repair and overhaul facility for the tanks in Ukraine. However, the Polish Ministry of Defense corrected previous unconfirmed reports that Patriot Air Defense Systems were already in Ukraine. There are unconfirmed reports that Russian-occupied Crimea has again come under Ukrainian attack, although the Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol today denied this. Reportedly, explosions were heard near Belbek Air Base, a key hub for Russian aerospace forces and an area that has come under attack previously. The public is again writing about some kind of explosion near the airfield. Sevastopol's governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, posted to Telegram. This is a lie. Ship crews are training. This is a lie. Ship crews are training. Hell on earth in the frontline city in Ukraine, shocking pictures reveal how a Ukrainian city has been reduced to a dystopian wasteland by Vladimir Putin's Russian forces. Gray ruins surrounded by mountains of debris create the illusion of a dystopian landscape where all life has been wiped out. Mariinka has been a battleground long before the war started last year. When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, the town was already under fire by the Russians. But the intense fighting since the February 24 invasion last year has left no building in the town, which once housed 10,000 people, intact. Many are barely recognizable as buildings at all. Shellfire has also made matchsticks of the town's trees, many of them ripped apart at the trunk. Russian tank fire, filmed on February 19, further added to the destruction, pounding what appeared to be Ukrainian positions amid the ruins. Mariinka's police chief, Artem Shus, describes his town as completely destroyed. Apart from soldiers, the town has been entirely evacuated because there is no way for the civilian population to live there, he said. Still, according to the police chief, dozens of townspeople have been killed and many wounded. Shus believes that Russian forces are deliberately razing the ruins, blasting walls that still stand, to destroy all cover, regardless of whether it is a civilian shelter or a military facility. He added, they destroy everything because, with their tactics, they cannot defeat our troops and resort to the destruction of all living things. The war has moved on and is currently raging in Bakhmut, 70 miles north. Oleksandr Marchenko, the deputy mayor of Bakhmut, told the BBC that the remaining 4,000 residents are holding out in shelters without gas, electricity or water, as Russians are trying to encircle the almost-destroyed city now laying in ruins like Mariinka and Mariupol. The town, around 400 miles southeast of Kiev, has for months been a prime target of Moscow's grinding eastern offensive in the war, with Russian forces and Private Wagner Group surrounding Ukrainian units. The city is almost surrounded, with Russian forces now occupying the east, north and south of the city and only one road out, a situation top Ukrainian commander Volodymyr Nazarenko described as hell. It has now become too dangerous for the last remaining residents to make it out of the area by vehicle, with a woman killed and two men badly wounded by shelling as they tried to cross a makeshift bridge yesterday. Ukraine's forces have been relentlessly attacking the small mining town as part of efforts that would give them a first major victory in more than half a year. Much of the town has now been reduced to rubble following repeated shelling, with around 4,000 residents said to still be living in the area. Bakhmut's deputy mayor, Oleksandr Marchenko, has accused Russian troops of turning the town into a new Mariupol. According to the BBC, not a single building remains untouched. They want to destroy Bakhmut like they did with Mariupol. Mariupol is now fully in the hands of Russian forces, having been cut off from the rest of Ukraine early in the war and subject to horrifying barrages and a siege. Civilians were left without heat, food or water for weeks and described melting snow for something to drink before drinking from radiators when the snow ran out. It was the scene of perhaps the deadliest single attack of the war when a Russian jet bombed a theater with the word children scrawled on the pavement outside, killing up to 600 people sheltering inside. Thousands are known to have died in the siege with their bodies often piled into mass graves, hastily dug alongside roads. Alexander Rodnyansky, an economic advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, noted that Russia was using the best troops of the Wagner Group to try to encircle the city while Zelensky accused Moscow of throwing waves of men into Bakhmut with no regard for their lives. Recent drone footage shows the scale of devastation in the city while Zelensky has said it has been destroyed. Flames and smoke rise into the sky from blazing buildings while constant gunfire and explosions ring out from within the city's crumbling walls. It comes amid fears of a looming withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from Bakhmut, with units having destroyed two key bridges in the past two days, including one linking it to the nearby town of Chesyv Yar along the last remaining supply route. The destruction of the bridges prevents Russian forces from taking them and gaining a pivotal supply route. Britain's Ministry of Defense said in a Twitter update that the destruction of the bridges came as Russian fighters made further inroads into Bakhmut's northern suburbs. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based thing, TankTank, said Ukrainian troops may conduct a limited and controlled withdrawal from particularly difficult sections of eastern Bakhmut while seeking to inhibit Russian movement there and limit exit routes to the west. Capturing Bakhmut would not only give Russian fighters a rare battlefield gain after months of setbacks, but it might rupture Ukraine's supply lines and allow the Kremlin's forces to press toward other Ukrainian strongholds in the Donetsk region. But Mykhailo Pudelyak, an advisor to the Ukrainian presidential office, said yesterday that its forces will not be leaving the area. Some reports also told of plans for reinforcements, despite President Zelensky last week saying the situation in the town was becoming more and more difficult. Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigoshin also said on Wednesday that so far he had seen no signs of a Ukrainian withdrawal from the city. He claimed that Kiev has in fact been reinforcing its positions there. Thank you for tuning in to our video, we'd love to hear your thoughts. So please leave a comment below to share your opinions on today's topic. Don't miss our future videos on TV news by subscribing and turning on notifications with a bell icon. We'll catch you in the next one.