Russia claims Donbas town but Ukraine says it’s in control

Bloomberg

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 US-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,” US 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.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine needs tanks and artillery to continue its defense against the Russian invasion, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video speech to the Lithuanian parliament when accepting a Lithuanian Freedom Prize. “It’s important that Russia doesn’t get a break, doesn’t get time to adapt and doesn’t regain strength,” Zelenskiy said. “This year will be decisive.”
Zelenskiy called for new sanctions to help “keep on constant pressure on the aggressor” and for an international tribunal to prosecute those responsible for the aggression against Ukraine. Russia now has “fewer hopes it had earlier” about its military goals because “it’s losing power that it used to be so proud of, they only talk about if they can avoid losing,” Zelenskiy said.
The Nato military alliance said it will deploy Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) surveillance planes to Bucharest, Romania from Jan. 17. The aircraft “will support the alliance’s reinforced presence in the region and monitor Russian military activity,” Nato said in a statement.