Fighting apparently continues
Wagner chief reports conquest of Soledar
1/11/2023 4:02 am
Soledar’s Ukrainian defenders have been subjected to the heaviest attacks for days. Now Wagner boss Prigoschin claims that his men have conquered the city. However, the fighting is not over yet.
After days of fighting, the Russian mercenary group Wagner has announced the conquest of the eastern Ukrainian city of Soledar. “Wagner units have taken the entire Soledar area under their control,” Russian news agencies quoted a statement by Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin as saying on Tuesday. The number of prisoners should be announced today, he announced. But the fighting continued. The information cannot be independently verified. There was initially no comment from Ukraine.
Soledar in the eastern Ukrainian industrial region of Donbass is just a few kilometers from the embattled city of Bakhmut. Both places are part of the Ukrainian defensive wall in front of the conurbation between Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. From the Russian point of view, taking the territory would be a significant step towards conquering the entire Donbass – one of the Kremlin’s war aims.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his evening speech on Monday that Bakhmut and Soledar would continue to be defended. Soledar was largely destroyed and the country littered with Russian corpses.
The British Ministry of Defense had already assumed that the Russian army and Wagner mercenaries had most of the small salt mining town under their control. It would be an important step in taking Bachmut. Prigozhin recently justified the bitter advance on the Bakhmut transport hub with the huge tunnel systems there, in which troops and tanks could find shelter.