In addition to regular Russian troops, several mercenary units also fight in Soledar, including the notorious Wagner Group. “The number of prisoners of war will be announced tomorrow,” Prigozhin said on one of Wagner’s Telegram channels. There it was also said that the surrounded Ukrainian soldiers were given an ultimatum to surrender at midnight. The information initially could not be independently verified.
Initially, there was no comment from the Ukrainian side. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his evening speech that Bakhmut and Soledar would continue to be defended. Soledar was largely destroyed and the country littered with Russian corpses.
More than 500 civilians are currently in Soledar, as the Ukrainian military administrator of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kirilenko, announced on Tuesday night. “Some of them would like to leave the city immediately, which is not possible at the moment because of the intense fighting,” he said on television. “Until there is a safe exit from the city, there will be no evacuation.”