After days of fighting for the eastern Ukrainian city of Soledar, the notorious Russian Wagner mercenary group has announced that it has captured the city.
According to Russia’s state news agency TASS, Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin said on Tuesday evening that Soledar had been captured. A group of Ukrainian soldiers was still surrounded in the center of the village. Some ten and a half months after the Russian attack on Ukraine, fighting in Donetsk is currently particularly fierce. The cities of Soledar and Bakhmut are of strategic importance: they are part of the Ukrainian defensive wall facing the conurbation between Slovjansk and Kramatorsk.
From the Russian perspective, capturing the area would be a significant step towards conquering the entire Donbass, one of the Kremlin’s war goals. In addition to regular Russian troops, various mercenary units also fight in Soledar, including the infamous Wagner group. “The number of prisoners of war will be announced tomorrow,” Prigozhin said on one of the Wagner Telegram channels. There it was also said that the surrounded Ukrainian soldiers were given an ultimatum to surrender by midnight.
“Scattered with the corpses of the attackers”
Initially it was not possible to independently verify the information. Earlier in the evening, Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maljar reported violent assaults by Russian troops. “Heavy fighting in defense of Soledar continues,” she said on Telegram. “Regardless of their casualties, the enemy keeps attacking.” The area in front of the Ukrainian defensive lines was “littered with the bodies of the attackers”. Referring to Bakhmut and Soledar, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said everything had been completely destroyed and there was “almost no life” left.
The entire area around Soledar is covered “with the corpses of the occupiers and with the scars of the attacks”. “That’s what madness is like.” The British Defense Ministry tweeted that Russian troops had advanced into Soledar in recent days, together with mercenaries from private group Wagner, and likely controlled large parts of the city. The British report went on to say that the capture of the town, ten kilometers north of Bakhmut, was probably the immediate objective of the Russian army and part of a strategy to encircle Bakhmut.
However, Ukrainian troops maintained stable defenses and controlled supply routes. Some of the fighting around Bakhmut centered around the entrances to the abandoned salt mine tunnels. The tunnels extended underground for about 200 kilometers. Both sides likely feared that the tunnels could be used for infiltration behind their own lines.
