The Ukrainian armed forces have been under pressure in the central Donbass for days due to numerous Russian attacks in the Bakhmut area.

How strong, Volodymyr Selenskyj made himself the indicator on Tuesday night.

"It's very difficult: there are hardly any intact walls left there," said the Ukrainian president in a video message, referring to the situation in Soledar.

Lorenz Hemicker

Editor in Politics

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The British Ministry of Defense also attests to the Russians' progress in the city in the Donetsk region, which used to have around 11,000 inhabitants.

Regular Russian troops and Wagner Group mercenaries have been making "tactical advances" for the past four days and are believed to be in control of most of Soledar by now.

The terrain gains are small, but Soledar isn't just any city.

It is around ten kilometers northeast of Bakhmut, the city over which the Ukrainians and Russians have been fighting for months, with high losses, in a trench warfare reminiscent of the First World War.

In turn, Bakhmut and Soledar are part of the defensive wall in front of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the two most important Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donbass, whose complete capture is a priority for the Russian side.

The hope on the Russian side of winning the battle for Bakhmut after months of costly attacks has now apparently grown in view of the most recent successes.

In its most recent briefing, the American Institute for War Studies (ISW) referred to many sources that now considered the city to be encircled.

However, the British Ministry of Defense does not share the optimism of the attackers.

Despite recent successes, it still considers such a scenario unlikely.

The Ukrainians' defensive positions were stable and they would continue to control the supply routes.

The American war researcher Michael Kofman also assumes that even a loss of Bakhmut would not mean a breakthrough for the Russian side.

"Bachmut doesn't offer much," Kofman said last Thursday on the "War on the rocks" podcast.

"It may seem relevant tactically, but strategically it is a bridge to nowhere." Kofman referred to the poor material situation on the Russian side and to the Ukrainian recaptures in the second half of last year, which posed the risk of a Russian pincer movement on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk was banned.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, at least, is trying to use the land gains strategically for himself.

The Wagner financier claimed the land gains in Soledar on Monday exclusively for his mercenaries.

The ISW understands that with real and imagined successes, he will try to sell his group as the only one with tangible success in Ukraine.