The Russian Defense Ministry said on Friday that its troops had captured the eastern salt mining town of Soledar, a claim quickly denied by the Ukrainian military, which said its soldiers were entrenched.
After a series of setbacks for Russia, capturing Soledar will be the biggest success for Moscow’s forces in months, although military analysts have warned that the small town has strategic value. limit.
The battle strongly supported Russia’s costly and fierce offensive in eastern Ukraine as it attempted to capture the nearby city of Bakhmut, part of its goal of controlling the entire Donbas region. While capturing Soledar is not expected to quickly change the course of the battle in the east, it will provide Moscow’s forces with new places to place artillery, with the possibility of partially encircling Bakhmut from north, and could put pressure on Ukraine’s supply lines running east. city.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said in a statement on Friday that their troops had “completed” capturing the town for the night. But Serhiy Cherevaty, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military in the east, denied reports that Soledar had been captured, saying Russia was “disinformation”.
“This is not true,” Cherevaty said in a speech to Ukrainian news agencies on Friday afternoon. “The war is on.”
Russian forces in the region outnumber the remaining Ukrainian forces, according to people familiar with Ukrainian affairs in the Donbas region. They said the fighting was fierce and resupply efforts were hampered by heavy Russian tank fire.
Over the past few days, there have been conflicting reports about who controls Soledar, where hundreds of civilians are trapped in a town that has largely been reduced to rubble. This week, the head of the mercenary group Wagner, who is fighting for Russia in Ukraine, announced that his fighters took control of the town. Ukraine denied the reports and the Kremlin withdrew the assertion at the time.
The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement Friday that Soledar is “of great importance for the continuation of successful offensive operations” in the Donbas region.
Military analysts say that even if Soledar falls, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Bakhmut – or the entire Donbas – will be next.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, said in an analysis on Thursday, geolocation footage indicated that Moscow’s forces were “capable of controlling most if not all of Soledar” but called the capture “at best a Pyrrhic tactical victory by Russia” after Moscow had committed substantial resources. It added that the battle would contribute to the “declining combat strength and accumulated exhaustion of the Russian forces”.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby echoed those sentiments on Thursday when asked about Soledar’s condition, warning that it was important to “keep this in perspective.”
“We don’t know how it’s going to play out, so I’m not going to predict failure or success here,” he told reporters. “But even if both Bakhmut and Soledar fell into Russian hands, it wouldn’t make — it wouldn’t have a strategic impact on the war itself.”
He added: “If you look at what’s been happening in the last 10 and a half months, especially in the Donbas, towns and villages have changed hands quite often.”
About 559 civilians – including 15 children – were trapped in Soledar as the brutal battle unfolded, Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of Ukraine’s local military government, said on Ukrainian state television on Thursday. .
Ivan Nechepurenko contribution report.
