An infantry transport moves quickly across a devastated landscape, traversing a flat area littered with rows of ruined buildings, some reduced to rubble by artillery fire. At one point, a plume of smoke can be seen wafting against the backdrop of a huge open-pit mine.
The drone footage shows the porter, marked with a red cross, stopping next to a building that is missing part of its roof and many of its windows. A Ukrainian paramedic rushes out and briefly peeks around the corner of the building as an injured person is brought out on a stretcher. Quickly loaded, the carrier drives off at high speed and comes under Russian artillery fire while attempting to leave the city.
The footage shows the ruins of the small Donbass salt-mining town of Soledar and a fleeting scene from a battle that has seen life, death and injury in casualties as close and not so close over the past week.
When Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Friday its forces had taken complete control of the salt-mining town, Western analysts suggested that if true, it would be at best a Pyrrhic victory won by militants of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary group would be won at great cost, who claimed the city fell on Wednesday.
Ukrainian officials dismissed the Russian claim and indicated that they were still holding out and counterattacking, with Ukrainian military spokesman Serhii Cherevatyi reporting “continued fighting”. Before and after photos give an impression of the destruction:
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While the situation on the battlefield was difficult to verify on Friday, the geolocation of reports by Russian war correspondents from Soledar by the end of the week suggested that Russian forces controlled large parts of the town. However, Ukrainian forces appeared to remain within Soledar’s municipal boundaries, still fighting to the north-west for the town’s salt mine and railway junction.
Crucially, Ukraine still appears to control the road behind the city connecting the neighboring towns of Bakhmut and Soledar to Sloviansk and Kostyantynivka, capture of which would further threaten the Ukrainian defenders at Bakhmut. What is clear is that the battle for Soledar and Bakhmut has become emblematic of the current state of the war on Ukraine’s eastern front, and more broadly a symbol of Moscow’s offensive.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed Thursday night to provide “everything necessary for the fighting for Soledar and Bakhmut…immediately and without interruption” as it appeared that even if most of Soledar had actually fallen, Russian forces were actively there have to defend.
Reports from both sides have depicted a “hellish” battle, amid claims by some Ukrainian fighters they heard Wagner fighters – many of them convicts recruited in exchange for pardons – being told by commanders they would be shot when they withdraw.
Map of the war in Ukraine
Oleksandr Pohrebyskyy, a Ukrainian soldier with the 46th Airmobile Brigade who was recently evacuated from Soledar with hypothermia, described the fighting in an interview with Ukraine’s Pravda this week.
Pohrebyskyy described the encounter with dead Russian militants, killed during an ammunition resupply in their vehicle: “It was only suicide … As we approached them, the dead, we saw that the driver and other soldiers were without body armor, without Helmets, with a magazine in the machine gun. In the very close infantry battles, we heard their commanders shout, “Don’t step back. We will shoot.’ We heard and saw it with our own eyes.”
In an interview with Radio NV, Yevhen Dykiy, a former commander of the Aidar battalion, described the experiences of some of his former comrades in the house-to-house fighting. “One of my friends fought right in a school: one wing of the school was ours, and another wing of the school was under the control of the invaders. Fighting broke out both in the school corridors and in the gym.”
Soledar’s ouster – if confirmed – would be a propaganda prize for the Kremlin, which has had little good news from the battlefield in recent months, but the significance beyond that is unclear.
While most analysts believe that Russia’s ultimate goal at Soledar is to weaken Ukraine’s defenses around Bakhmut to allow for its further encirclement, the cost of Russian deaths has so far been huge, with claims that Moscow is sometimes losing 100 soldiers a day. This tactic was laid out by “Witch” – a Ukrainian officer – in the Bakhmut sector when she was filmed walking through the city late in the week.
“The situation in Soledar is difficult at the moment. I’ll explain why. The enemy cannot attack directly [Bakhmut] from the front. So they decided to come in from the flanks [Soledar]counting on the edge, since this is not the case [reliably defended]. They rely on that.”
The Institute for the Study of War was skeptical about the advantage of the Russian forces.
“Russian intelligence operations have exaggerated the importance of Soledar, which is at best a Russian tactical pyrrhic victory,” reads a recent update. “[We] continue to believe that the capture of Soledar – a settlement smaller than 5.5 square miles – will neither allow Russian forces to assert post-Bakhmut control of critical Ukrainian ground communications lines nor better position Russian forces to to encircle the city at short notice.”
The fight over Soledar has also highlighted the increasingly toxic rivalries and dysfunctional relations between the leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry and Wagner Group founder Prigozhin, who has played an increasingly visible role in Ukraine.
His hasty statement Wednesday that Soledar was won solely by Wagner has been challenged by Defense Department reports detailing actions by airborne troops and other forces in the battle for Soledar, with some analysts suggesting that Vladimir Putin is restructuring military leadership this week is seen as an attempt to show that the MoD still has its support and is in charge as the troubled conflict nears the 11-month mark.