Kyiv, Ukraine — Russia’s Defense Ministry stated Friday that its forces had captured the salt-mining city of Soledar, the focus of a bloody battle between Russian and Ukrainian forces for months. A Ukrainian navy commander rapidly rejected the declare, nevertheless, saying the “severe” battle was nonetheless raging.
Soledar is situated in japanese Ukraine’s Donetsk province, one in every of 4 Ukrainian areas that Moscow illegally annexed in September and has been making an attempt to wrest full management over since.
The city’s fall would mark a uncommon victory for the Kremlin after a sequence of battlefield setbacks in its invasion of Ukraine. From the outset, Moscow recognized Donetsk and neighboring Luhansk province as priorities, and it has handled the areas as Russian territory since their alleged annexation.
“The liberation of the town of Soledar was completed in the evening of Jan. 12,” Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Russian Defense Ministry’s spokesman, declared, including that the event was “important for the continuation of offensive operations in the Donetsk region.”
Taking management of Soledar would enable Russian forces “to cut supply lines for the Ukrainian forces” within the Donestsk metropolis of Bakhmut after which “block and encircle the Ukrainian units there,” Konashenkov claimed.
But Sergiy Cherevaty, a spokesman for the Ukrainian armed forces’ within the nation’s east, was quoted by the French news company AFP as saying “severe fighting” was nonetheless underway, together with his troops managing to maintain “the situation under control in difficult conditions.”
While the battle for the small city has turn into massively symbolic, and it does sit in shut proximity to the bigger Ukrainian-held metropolis of Bakhmut, the Institute for the Study of War, a assume tank in Washington, stated a Russian seizure of Soledar wouldn’t signify “an operationally significant development and is unlikely to presage an imminent Russian encirclement of Bakhmut.”
The institute stated that Russian info operations have “overexaggerated the importance of Soledar,” a small settlement, arguing as nicely that that lengthy and troublesome battle has contributed to the exhaustion of Russian forces.
An ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who runs the Wagner group, claimed earlier this week that his mercenary forces — who function with some extent of coordination with Russian common troops — had captured Soledar. His declare was rapidly challenged by each the Russian and Ukrainian militaries, nevertheless, which stated the combat continued.
The vicious combating over Soledar and Bakhmut has highlighted a rift between the Russian Defense Ministry’s management and Prigozhin and his non-public navy pressure, with Putin’s shakeup this week of the navy brass seen as a bid to indicate that the Ministry nonetheless has his help because the troubled battle nears the 11-month mark.
On Wednesday, the ministry introduced unexpectedly {that a} new commander was being put answerable for the conflict in Ukraine, which Russian officers confer with solely as a “special military operation.” The transfer, coming solely three months after the earlier commander was tapped, was a transparent indication of unease in Moscow over the trajectory of the conflict.