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KYIV/NEAR Russia ordered its top general on Wednesday to take charge of its faltering invasion of Ukraine in the biggest shake-up yet of its malfunctioning military command structure after months of battlefield setbacks.
It did so as Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Russia’s private military firm Wagner, said his forces had captured all of the eastern Ukrainian mining town of Soledar and killed about 500 Ukrainian soldiers after heavy fighting.
“I want to confirm the complete liberation and cleansing of the territory of Soledar from units of the Ukrainian army … Ukrainian units that did not want to surrender were destroyed,” he said in a statement.
“The whole city is littered with the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers,” said Prigozhin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Minutes earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy mocked previous Wagner claims to have seized part of Soledar, saying fighting was still going on.
“The terrorist state and its propagandists are trying to pretend that part of our town of Soledar … is some sort of a Russian possession,” he said in a video address. “But fighting continues. The Donetsk theatre of operations is holding.”
There was no immediate Ukrainian comment on Wagner’s latest assertions.
In a separate statement on Facebook, the Ukrainian military general staff said Russian forces were suffering heavy losses as they tried to take Soledar and sever Ukrainian supply lines.
Russia has struggled to cement control over the salt-mining town, which would be Russia’s most substantial gain since August after a series of retreats before Ukrainian counter-offensives in the east and south.
Wagner is among a number of semi-autonomous Russian forces whose high battlefield profile after more than 10 months of war has underlined the ineffectiveness of Russia’s core military in an invasion it had expected to finish in days.
