The ultra-nationalist contract militia Wagner, run by an ally of President Vladimir Putin outside the main chain of military command, claims to have taken Soledar after intense fighting that it says had left the town strewn with Ukrainian dead.
KYIV, Ukraine – Ukraine said on Thursday, January 12, its troops were holding out despite heavy fighting on a battlefield littered with bodies in a salt mining town in eastern Ukraine, where Russian mercenaries have claimed Moscow’s first significant gain in half a year.
The Russians were “moving over their own corpses”, she said. Reuters was unable to independently verify the situation. Moscow explained the decision – at least the third abrupt change of top commander in the 11-month conflict – as a response to the campaign’s growing importance. However, Mick Ryan, a retired Australian major general, suggested in a tweet that Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu had “set up Gerasimov as the fall guy for all of Russia’s failures”.
It had barely 10,000 inhabitants before the war. Russia has failed in repeated attempts to capture the far more important nearby city of Bakhmut, ten times as large.
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