Bakhmut: After the bloodiest and longest battle of the war, Russia's Wagner private army claimed on Saturday to have finally taken Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine; however, Kiev denied the city had fallen, despite describing the situation there as critical.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner, claimed that his troops had finally driven the Ukrainians out of the last built-up area inside the city, which, if true, would mark Moscow's first significant victory in more than ten months.

But it seems likely that Russia will only feel temporary triumph. The announcement follows a week in which Ukrainian forces advanced on Bakhmut's northern and southern flanks at their fastest rate in six months, putting Prigozhin's troops inside the city in danger of being encircled.

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Prigozhin, who has frequently criticised Russia's regular military for giving up territory that his men had earlier captured, announced that his own forces would withdraw from Bakhmut in five days to rest and turn over the city's ruins to the regular military.

In a video, Prigozhin appeared in combat fatigues in front of a line of fighters waving Russian flags and Wagner banners and declared, "Today, at 12 noon, Bakhmut was completely taken. "From house to house, we took the entire city."

Serhiy Cherevatyi, a spokesman for the Ukrainian military, told Reuters: "This is untrue. We have troops fighting in Bakhmut. Hanna Maliar, the deputy minister of defence for Ukraine, reported "heavy fighting in Bakhmut. The situation is urgent, she wrote on the messaging app Telegram.

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As of right now, our defenders are in charge of some infrastructure and industrial facilities in the neighbourhood.

Whether or not the Ukrainian forces have left Bakhmut, they have been gradually retreating inside of it to groups of structures on the western edge of the city.

But in the meantime, they have made their fastest gains in the neighbourhood in six months, taking large swaths of territory from Russian forces to the north and south.

While disputing claims made by Prigozhin that the flanks around the city protected by regular troops have collapsed, Russia has acknowledged losing some ground around Bakhmut over the past week.

According to Kyiv, its goal in Bakhmut was to draw Russian forces from other points on the front into the city, inflict heavy casualties there, and weaken Moscow's defensive line elsewhere before a major counteroffensive was planned.

Oleksander Syrskyi, commander of Ukraine's ground forces, told troops at the Bakhmut front this week that Wagner troops entered Bakhmut "like mice into a trap."

The battle around Bakhmut, according to British defence intelligence, appeared to be getting more intense on Saturday as more troops were sent there despite a shortage elsewhere. According to a tweet from the Russian military, it was highly likely that up to several battalions of its limited reserves had been sent to reinforce the Bakhmut sector.

The conflict for Bakhmut has exposed a growing rift between the regular Russian military and Wagner, a mercenary force that has amassed thousands of prisoners from Russian prisons. For the past two weeks, Prigozhin has released daily audio and video messages criticising Russia's military leadership, frequently using foul language.

In the video from Saturday, he claimed that "five times more guys died than they should have" as a result of the "whims" of Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov. "He gave us this chance and great honour to defend our motherland," he thanked President Vladimir Putin.

Moscow has long argued that seizing Bakhmut would allow it to advance further into the Ukrainian Donbas region, which it claims to have annexed. It has turned it into the main target of a massive winter and spring offensive that was unsuccessful in making any real progress elsewhere.

However, Prigozhin has acknowledged that Bakhmut, a city with 70,000 residents prior to the war, has little strategic significance despite having a significant symbolic significance due to the magnitude of losses.

The gruelling conflict is coming to a head just as Kyiv is getting ready for its counteroffensive, the next significant stage of the conflict after six months of keeping its forces back on the defensive while withstanding Russia's major offensive.

On Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky attended the G7 summit of major industrial powers in Japan and received support from there, as well as a signal from Washington that it would now support the training of Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 warplanes. Sending combat aircraft had previously been frowned upon.

The summit demonstrated for Zelensky a newfound confidence in travelling the world to make his case in person. Zelensky only recently travelled outside of Ukraine for the first time after the invasion last December. He made a stop at on his way to Japan.

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It offered a pronounced contrast to Putin, who has only made one trip outside of the former Soviet Union since ordering the invasion—a day trip to Tehran in July of last year.

Putin once made the G7 summits the G8, but he was expelled after a previous, smaller-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2014. He is currently sought by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged war crimes, and this week's summit of former Soviet Central Asian states in China was notable for his absence.