Battle for Soledar: 'First Russia sends Wagner mercenaries, then highly trained paratroopers'
The fate of a devastated salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine hangs in the balance this week in one of the bloodiest battles of Russia's invasion.
Russian forces used jets, mortars and rockets to bombard Soledar in an unrelenting assault.
Soledar's fall, while unlikely a turning point in the nearly 11-month war, would be a prize for a Kremlin starved of good battlefield news in recent months.
It would also offer Russian troops a springboard to conquer other areas of Donetsk province that remain under Ukrainian control, such as the nearby strategic city of Bakhmut.
On the battlefield, a Ukrainian officer near Soledar told The Associated Press the pattern is that first, the Russians send one or two waves of soldiers, many from the private Russian military contractor Wagner Group, who take heavy casualties as they probe the Ukrainian defences.
When Ukrainian troops suffer casualties and are exhausted, the Russians send a fresh wave of highly-trained soldiers, paratroopers or special forces, said the Ukrainian officer, who insisted on anonymity for security reasons.
Ukrainian officials denied Russian claims that Soledar had fallen, but the Wagner Group's founder repeated the assertion of a breakthrough late Wednesday.
“Once again I want to confirm the complete liberation and cleansing of the territory of Soledar from units of the Ukrainian army,” Yevgeny Prigozhin wrote on his Russian social media platform.
“Civilians were withdrawn. Ukrainian units that did not want to surrender were destroyed." He claimed about 500 people were killed and that "the whole city is littered with the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers.”
Ukraine’s military said late Wednesday that Russian forces had suffered “huge losses” in the Soledar fighting.
It is not
Read more on euronews.com
