Russia claims Donbas town but Ukraine says it’s in control
Bloomberg News
Russia claimed Moscow’s troops had taken Soledar, a small town in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, in one of their first victories in months. Kyiv rejected the claim.
A salt mining town with a population of 10,000 before Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, Soledar has limited strategic value but has been the site of weeks of fierce and deadly fighting. If confirmed, Russian control of the town would mark a rare triumph after months of retreats in the face of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the capture of Soledar would open the way to retaking the bigger city of Bakhmut nearby by making it possible eventually to cut it off from supply lines. Russian forces, primarily from the Wagner mercenary company, have been fighting street-to-street battles there for months. That’s reduced both localities to rubble, with corpses piling up on a battlefield that in places resembles those of World War I, according to video footage from the area.
Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed in a video published early Wednesday that his forces had taken Soledar and surrounded a group of Ukrainian troops there. With close ties to President Vladimir Putin, Prigozhin has emerged as a powerful force in the invasion, often criticizing commanders from the regular army. The Defense Ministry in Moscow said Friday that Russian forces took full control of Soledar the previous night.
The Ukrainian military indicated, however, that battles are continuing in the town. The situation in Soledar is “very difficult” but “under control,” Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told the BBC in an interview.
The Kremlin had positioned the most experienced Wagner units, who had experience of fighting in Syria and Libya and other conflicts, near Soledar, according to Ukrainian operational command spokesman Serhiy Cherevatyi. Convicts recruited with the promise of a pardon if they live were at the forefront of the bloody assault.
Russia’s capture of Soledar would be “at best a Russian Pyrrhic tactical victory,” said the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War.
It would not enable Russia’s military to exert control over critical Ukrainian ground lines of communication into Bakhmut and has severely degraded Russian forces needed for the next push southwest, it said.
“But even if both Bakhmut and Soledar fall to the Russians, it’s not going to have a strategic impact on the war itself,” U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Thursday. “And it’s certainly not going to stop the Ukrainians or slow them down in terms of their efforts to regain their territory.”