Ukraine is strengthening its positions around Bakhmut in the eastern Donbass region after days of relentless attacks by Russian forces led by the Wagner mercenary group.
Bakhmut and the neighboring town of Soledar have been the focus of intense Moscow efforts to make headway in an area where Russian forces have been desperate to advance since early summer.
In recent days, Russian attacks have focused on Soledar in an apparent attempt to cut the city off. “The enemy again made a desperate attempt to storm the city of Soledar from different directions, throwing into battle the most professional units of the Wagnerians,” Ukraine’s military said Monday, echoing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s comments on Sunday.
The capture of Soledar, which lies northeast of Bakhmut, would put Ukrainian forces in the area at risk of being encircled and provide a potential way for Russia to approach that city.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group that has been trying for months to capture Bakhmut and Soledar at the cost of many lives on both sides, said on Saturday their importance lies in the network of mineral mines there. “It is not just [has the ability to hold] a large group of people at a depth of 80-100 meters, but tanks and armored personnel carriers can also move,” he said.
Military analysts say the strategic military benefit for Moscow would be limited. A US official said Prigozhin, a powerful ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is eyeing the salt and gypsum from the mines.
In nightly video comments on Sunday, Zelenskiy said Bakhmut and Soledar held out despite widespread destruction after months of attacks. “Our soldiers are fending off constant Russian advances,” he said. In Soledar “things are very difficult,” he added.
Smoke rises from shelling in Soledar. The capture of the city could cut off Ukrainian forces. Photo: Roman Chop/APAt an evacuation center in nearby Kramatorsk, Olha, 60, said she fled Soledar after moving from apartment to apartment as each was destroyed in tank battles. “For the past week we haven’t been able to get outside. Everyone was running around, soldiers with automatic weapons, screaming,” said Olha, who only gave her first name.
“There isn’t a single house left intact,” she said. “Apartments burned and collapsed in half.” Serhiy Cherevatyi, a Ukrainian military spokesman for the eastern region, said the situation could be stabilized.
“There is brutal and bloody fighting there – 106 shells in one day,” he said on Ukrainian television. “Our troops in Soledar have been allocated additional forces and resources and everything is being done to improve the operational situation.”
Recent aerial photos from the Bakhmut-Soldar sector have shown heavily cratered battlefields strewn with the bodies of fallen Russian troops as Moscow has attempted to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenses through sheer numbers and persistence, resulting in an increase in Russian combat deaths led.
Analysts have suggested that despite speculation that Russia is preparing to conscript up to 500,000 more soldiers, Putin’s conscription strategy could be contributing to the spike in Russian deaths.
In his weekly analysis of the situation in Ukraine, Phillips P. O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at St Andrews University, suggested that the high attrition of Russian forces in eastern Ukraine did not bode well for a new mobilization.
O’Brien calls the mass mobilization in the fall of Putin’s “second army” and argues that the “crude number of soldiers” alone is unlikely to matter.
“Modern industrial warfare requires far more first-class equipment and well-trained soldiers than masses of ill-motivated conscripts.
“We can see that in the Russian experience so far. Putin’s second army, much of which has been formed since conscription in September, has actually fared worse than the more professional force the Russians started the war with. Since September, Russian soldiers have died in large numbers and made little gains.”
The latest fighting came amid strong doubts about Russian claims of killing 600 Ukrainian soldiers at a barracks in Kramatorsk and journalists visiting the town could find no evidence of major casualties.
A Portal team visited two student dormitories that Moscow said were temporarily housing Ukrainian staff and that it had targeted as revenge for a New Year’s Day attack that killed scores of Russian soldiers and sparked an outcry in Russia.
None of the dormitories appeared to have been directly hit or seriously damaged. There were no obvious signs that soldiers had lived there, and no signs of bodies or traces of blood.
However, the Kremlin said it was confident its defense ministry was right when it said 600 Ukrainian soldiers were “destroyed” in the attack. Some pro-Kremlin military bloggers have criticized the claims.
“Let’s talk ‘cheating’,” wrote a prominent war blogger on messaging app Telegram, who posts under the alias Military Informant and has more than half a million subscribers.
“It is not clear to us who and for what reason decided that 600 Ukrainian soldiers died inside at once when the building was not actually hit (even the lights stayed on).”