KIEV/KRAMATERSK, UKRAINE (Reuters) Jan,9– Ukraine has strengthened its forces in the eastern Donbass region to repel persistent attacks on Bakhmut and other towns by the Russian mercenary group Wagner, Ukrainian officials said. said on Monday.
Reinforcements are being sent to Soledar, a small town near Bakhmut, where the situation is particularly difficult, they said.
“The enemy again made desperate attempts to storm the city of Soledar from different directions, throwing into battle the most specialized Wagnerian units,” the Ukrainian military said in a statement.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his comments on Sunday’s nightly video that after months of attacks, Bahmut and Soledar have held up despite widespread destruction.
“Our soldiers are fending off constant Russian advances,” he said. “Things are very difficult” at Soledar.
At a shelter in nearby Kramatorsk, Olha, 60, said he fled Soledar after moving from apartment to apartment, each destroyed in a tank battle.
Military analysts say Moscow has limited strategic military interests. US officials said Prigozhin, a strong ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was eyeing salt and gypsum from mines there.
Serhiy Cherevaty, spokesman for the Ukrainian Army in the Eastern Region, said he believed the situation would stabilize. Further north in the Kharkiv region, a 60-year-old woman was killed and several others injured in a Russian missile attack on a market in the village of Shevchenkov, said regional governor Olev Sinekhbov.
Seriously injured people lay on the ground as rescuers searched piles of rubble, fallen and burning stands and a large crater, according to video footage provided by police and the Ukrainian president’s office. A police officer carried the girl with blood on her face from the scene.
Ukraine never agreed to a ceasefire, explaining that this was a pretext for Russia to reinforce its forces. Both sides accused the other of continuing hostilities throughout the period. On Sunday, Russia said 600 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in a missile attack on Kramatorsk, northwest of Bakhmut, but a Reuters reporter at the scene saw no visible signs of casualties.
A Reuters team visited two university dormitories that Moscow said were temporarily housing Ukrainian personnel, and the New Year’s Day attacks that killed dozens of Russian soldiers sparked protests in Russia.
None of the dormitories appeared to have been hit or severely damaged. There were no obvious signs that soldiers lived there, and there were no corpses or traces of blood.
The Kremlin said Monday it was confident the Defense Ministry was right when it said 600 Ukrainian soldiers had been “destroyed” in the attack. As Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine approaches a year later, the Russian military faces domestic pressure to achieve battlefield success.
Hawkish voices have called for an escalation of the war effort after setbacks such as the loss of occupied territory and high casualty rates.Some pro-Kremlin military bloggers have criticized the Russian Defense Ministry’s claims. .
Both Russian and Ukrainian armies have often exaggerated enemy casualties while minimizing their own casualties.
A senior Ukrainian military official said about 760 Russian soldiers were killed or wounded in his two attacks last week against Moscow-controlled areas of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions. These reports could not be independently verified.
