The Russian advance in parts of eastern Ukraine is proceeding slowly but surely.
Since Wednesday morning the situation has not been clear. The Ukrainian village of Soledar north of Bakhmut is occupied by members of the Russian mercenary group Wagner, group commander Yevgeny Prigozhin said. Ukraine rejects it.
– Soledar is a fairly long area, stretching from west to east. My impression now is that the Russians have taken the eastern part. They are still fighting for the western parts. Such battles take time, they have to clear buildings for people, there will be counter-attacks and the situation is not clear, Norwegian Defense Academy lieutenant colonel and researcher Geir Hågen Karlsen told Nettavisen on Wednesday morning. Then he just looked at reports and maps over his morning coffee.
The village itself is not very important, but it can, as Nettavisen wrote on Tuesday, be a step towards the encirclement of Bakhmutthat Putin has been trying to capture since last summer.
– Wagner units have taken control of all of Soledar, Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said in a statement on Wednesday night, before adding:
– A circle has formed in the middle of the city, where street fights are now taking place.
This makes Hågen Karlsen sigh:
– It is descriptive of the situation. They say they’ve taken the city, but they’re still fighting anyway, the lieutenant colonel tells Nettavisen.
– Soledar was, is and remains Ukrainian, a statement of the Ukrainian military said on Wednesday.
Drone images of Russian soldiers
The Wartranslated Twitter account translates material from the war in Ukraine and posted a video on Wednesday that it said was filmed by Ukrainian soldiers in Soledar on Wednesday morning. Nettavisen is unable to verify the entire video, but it has been verified that parts of the drone footage were shot in Soledar and should show Russian soldiers crossing a street and walking through a neighborhood (around 2:40am early of the video below):
– There they cross the road. Damn, look how many there are. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Where are they going? 7, 8, 9, 10, pretty hell, left there, says the Ukrainian soldier in the recording.
– The only thing I want to tell you is not to believe false accusations, he says later in the same video.
– I repeat, the situation in Soledar is very difficult. The fighting intensifies. I don’t know how the locals survive here, the ones who are still here. Of course, there are still many of them in the city. But there’s no hysteria, no one is surrounded, no one has been given an ultimatum to surrender, says the soldier, as shots can be heard in the background.
Political reasons
Hågen Karlsen believes Wagner’s leader Prigozhin has his reasons for going out and declaring an early victory like this, even if everything indicates that Ukrainian soldiers are still fighting in the city:
– Prigozhin went from being an ordinary profit-making criminal who served his sentence in the old days to becoming a prominent white-collar criminal, who provided Russian public authorities with catering, food, etc. That’s why he is called “Putin’s chef”. He has gradually started to take on a political role and has been very outspoken lately. He needs a win too, so we have to consider Soledar for that too, Hågen Karlsen tells Nettavisen.
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This is why the Wagner group is also so forward in the media these days, believes Hågen Karlsen:
– He sharply criticized the Russian defense on several occasions. He needs to prove himself, prove that he is better than the Russian army and thus strengthen his reputation. What kind of political role he’s thinking of playing, I’m not sure, but that’s the political game that’s playing right now.
Prigozhin has recently leveled criticism at different parts of the Russian authorities.
– There has been a bad atmosphere there for a long time. What it doesn’t do, of course, is criticize President Putin. If so, it wouldn’t take much, says Hågen Karlsen dryly, before adding:
– But it may be that Putin needs a game like this. Then the criticism is aimed more at the defense and the defense minister than at the president. And when things are very bad, so bad that it’s impossible to deny it, then it’s okay for criticism to be channeled towards others.
– They trample the corpses of their fellow soldiers
On Tuesday, Nettavisen spoke to intelligence expert Tom Røseth at the Norwegian Military Academy about the rapid Russian advance north of Bakhmut. He believes the Russians need a breather if they are to capture and completely conquer Soledar.
Hågen Karlsen supports this prediction:
– I think that’s correct, but then I’d say they haven’t progressed dramatically. They attacked fiercely and lost a huge amount of people, to take a very small area considering the losses. But yeah, when you’ve been fighting such tough battles and so many casualties for so long, you need a break. You have to carry out dead and wounded, you have to bring in more ammunition and alternate crews. There’s always a lot of work to do and Russian logistics aren’t great, so this sort of thing tends to take some time, says Hågen Karlsen.
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Deputy Defense Minister of Ukraine Hanna Maliar also reproaches the attack strategy of the Russians via Telegram:
– The enemy literally tramples the corpses of his fellow soldiers, uses massive artillery and even hits his own soldiers, he writes.
– This is not Narvik
Hågen Karlsen largely agrees that Russians are used as “cannon fodder”:
– The Russians have a lot of people, but they are poorly trained, poorly equipped and lack officers. It can go relatively smoothly as long as you have to dig trenches and defend yourself – it’s not very difficult and it’s easy to coordinate because you’re just lying where you dug. But as soon as you are going to attack, go ahead, there is chaos, the wards attack next to you and everything needs to be coordinated, then it becomes much, much more difficult. That’s why they suffer such huge losses. There hasn’t been a war, at least not in Europe, since World War II in which “cannon fodder” has been more descriptive.
When asked to pass judgment on this form of warfare, the lieutenant colonel says:
– It costs a lot of life, but quantity is quality. If you have a lot of people to bring in, then there’s an opportunity to succeed, as you’re coming from a company that can take those losses. So far, Russia can do it. They have an apparatus to put down protests at home, when children and husbands fall out, everything seems hopeless and frustration is rampant. So they can keep doing it for a long time, says Hågen Karlsen.
– They’ve lost a lot of people to occupy fairly insignificant areas, he adds.
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Snort at reports that this is a strategically important area.
– It’s important to get him through. People talk about how this is strategically important to me here and strategically important to me there.
Draw a parallel with an event that was recently filmed in the cinema and which many Norwegians have seen these days.
– This isn’t Narvik during WWII, where they got control of the iron ore from Sweden. At best, Soledar is useful for taking Bakhmut, as a useful step forward. But there are still no strategically important areas that have been conquered or are about to be conquered. The price is very high for an unimportant piece of land, concludes Hågen Karlsen.
