LAST UPDATE | 13 Jan 2023
RUSSIA HA SAID its forces have wrested control of the war-scarred town of Soledar in east Ukraine, Moscow’s first claim of victory in months of battlefield setbacks.
“On the evening of January 12, the liberation of the city of Soledar was completed,” the defence ministry announced, claiming this would pave the way for more “successful offensive operations” in the Donetsk region.
Ukraine denied the Russian claim and said “severe fighting” was on in the nearly completely destroyed town that is now the epicentre of the war.
“Ukraine’s armed forces have the situation under control in difficult conditions,” said Sergiy Cherevaty, a spokesman for the eastern group of the Ukrainian armed forces.
Both sides have conceded heavy losses, with Moscow eager to sell any win back home after repeated battlefield humiliations and Ukraine desperate to hold and win back ground.
Moscow’s announcement came as the UN Security Council was preparing to meet to discuss the war.
Ukraine’s deputy defence minister said earlier that Russia had “relocated almost all of its main forces to the Donetsk front” to ensure Soledar’s capture.
“This is a difficult phase of the war,” Ganna Malyar conceded.
The Russian mercenary group Wagner has claimed that it spearheaded the offensive for Soledar and already announced this week that its forces were controlling it.
But both the Kremlin and the Russian defence ministry said fighting was ongoing at the time, an indication of the fractious Russian groupings involved in the fight.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowed yesterday that Ukrainian forces defending Soledar and neighbouring Bakhmut would be armed with everything they need in some of the bloodiest battles of the war.
Observers are divided over the strategic significance of Soledar, a salt mining town with a pre-war population of around 10,000 people.
It could act as a bridgehead for Russia to develop its offensive for Bakhmut, a larger town nearby that Russian forces have been attacking for months.
But analysts have also said that Moscow is desperate to sell any victory after several months of battlefield setbacks.
Both sides have conceded heavy losses in the fight.
The US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a military observation group, said in an analytical note that Russian forces had likely captured Soledar on Wednesday.
“But this small-scale victory is unlikely to presage an imminent encirclement of Bakhmut,” it cautioned.
ISW said its assessment of Russia’s “likely” control over Soledar was based on geolocated footage earlier this week, adding that Moscow’s troops “likely pushed Ukrainian forces out of the western outskirts of the settlement.”
A Moscow-based defence analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the move to AFP as “unprecedented” and said it indicated “very serious problems” on the battlefield.
The deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said Russian forces had killed four civilians in fighting the previous day and injured eight more.
Two of those killed followed attacks in Donetsk, he said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s move to replace his top commander in Ukraine is a sign of military disarray and his growing impatience in a war he is not winning, according to analysts.
The battle for Soledar comes after a major military reshuffle in Moscow, with Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov now in charge of its operations in Ukraine.
His predecessor, Sergei Surovikin, a veteran of Moscow’s wars since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, will become Gerasimov’s deputy, working alongside two other generals, it said.
Russian and Western observers said the move was a sign of Putin becoming exasperated by Ukrainian resistance, but also by fault lines in the Russian army command as it faces difficult demands which could include launching a possible major offensive within weeks.
Analysts said putting an army chief of staff in charge of an operation on the ground is highly unusual, as the job is usually removed from the battlefield, involving coordination, political contacts, threat evaluation and logistics choices.
That Putin made the appointment anyway shows that “things are not going to plan”, said a Moscow-based defence analyst, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity.
Troop morale took a major hit when Russia suffered its worst military losses from a single Ukrainian attack with the death of at least 89 servicemen in Makiivka in eastern Ukraine over the New Year.
Experts questioned by AFP said Moscow’s move may well herald intensifying military action, such as a fresh offensive and a possible new mobilisation drive.
“It is obvious that there are plans to expand the scale of fighting,” Alexander Khramchikhin, a Russian military analyst, told AFP.
He said the goal would be to gain full control of the four Ukrainian regions annexed by Russia on 30 September – Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Russia currently does not control the full extent of the Ukrainian regions of Lugansk and Donetsk, while Russian forces pulled out of Kherson city in November. Russia has meanwhile never occupied Zaporizhzhia city.
“This is confirmation, if we needed it, that there will be serious offensives coming, and that even Putin recognises that poor coordination has been an issue,” said Mark Galeotti, at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in the UK.
Some observers said Putin’s personnel change in Ukraine was perhaps motivated by the desire for a loyal ally, but Galeotti said the basis for such trusted partnerships was dwindling.
“If you keep appointing, rotating, burning your stars, setting unrealistic expectations, arbitrarily demoting them, that’s not going to win loyalty,” he said.
The Russian leader will also find it increasingly hard to assuage the doubts of parts of the Moscow elite and public opinion, Khramchikhin said, detecting “discontent on why … (Russia) has not won this war yet”.
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