The Russian and Ukrainian armies fight under a rain of missiles and gunfire for victory in Soledar, a small town in eastern Ukraine.
“Everything is going according to plan. Russian President Vladimir Putin said the military campaign in Ukraine followed a “positive dynamicafter the announcement of the capture of the city of Soledar, in the east of the country, still denied by kyiv. “I hope that our fighters will still delight us more than once with their military results“, he said in an interview with Russian public television, broadcast Sunday, January 15.
Asked about the tarmac of an airport, near the Russian presidential plane, he answered the question of a journalist from the Rossia-1 channel asking him about the “news from Soledar“, which the Russian army claimed on Friday to have conquered. At the same time, the emergency services were working to find survivors in the ruins of a building in Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, hit the day before by a strike whose toll rose to 23 dead.
Bakhmout objective
The capture of this modest locality was presented to Moscow as a victory, after several months of disappointments, in particular the withdrawal from the Kharkiv region (east) and the large city of Kherson (south) in the face of Ukrainian counter-offensives.
According to the Russian army, the conquest of Soledar, where there are important salt mines which could theoretically make it possible to protect equipment and to infiltrate behind enemy lines, is a step to encircle the neighboring city of Bakhmout, which Moscow has been trying to conquer for months. On Saturday, the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kirilenko, however assured that Soledar is still “under control“Ukrainian and that”fighting continues inside and outside the city“.
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