The owner of the Wagner company, Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced that his forces had taken control of the entire strategic city of Solidar in Donetsk Province in eastern Ukraine, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, for his part, confirmed the difficult situation on the Donetsk front.

Prigozhin said in his account on Telegram, that Wagner units have taken control of the entire territory of Solidar, and that fighting is still going on in the city center with some besieged Ukrainian forces.

And the pro-Russian Donetsk authorities had said that the Wagner Group's forces had begun combing the strategic city after it took full control of it.

For her part, the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Defense said that the Ukrainian army is still defending its positions in Solidar, stressing that the Russian army continues to fight despite the huge losses.

And Russian media published a picture that it said was of the owner of the Wagner company, Yevgeny Prigozhin, accompanied by fighters inside one of the mine tunnels in the city of Solidar. For its part, RIA Novosti reported that the picture belonged to a salt mine.

Solidar is located in the industrial Donbass region, about 15 kilometers from the city of Bakhmut, where forces on both sides suffered heavy losses in some of the fiercest trench battles since the war began some 11 months ago.

The importance of Solidar lies in the network of underground salt and gypsum mining caves that extend to more than 160 kilometers, and can accommodate a large group of people at a depth of between 80 and 100 meters, and tanks and infantry fighting vehicles can also move in them, according to Prigozhin's statements last Saturday.

The city is also distinguished by its high hills, which give it the advantage of supervising the strategic supply lines between the regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, and seizing it means encircling the city of Bakhmut from the north, and disrupting the Ukrainian lines of communication.

On the other hand, the pro-Russian leader of Donetsk, Denis Pushlin, said, "The liberation of Solidar opens the way for the liberation of all lands in Donbass."

He added that the control of Solidar is a turning point on the way to complete the extension of control over all the lands, stressing that the "liberation" of this city with Bakhmut and Seversk will enable the Russian forces to destroy the front line along the Donbass front.

Donbass includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine.

For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stressed the difficult situation on the Donetsk front.

In his daily speech on Monday evening, Zelensky confirmed the continuation of fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian forces in the cities of Solidar and Bakhmut, in the east of the country, and said that his country had gained additional time thanks to the Ukrainian soldiers, and that it would liberate all of Donbass.


isolated battles

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian General Staff said that its forces had launched, during the past hours, about 20 air raids on the positions of Russian forces and their systems along the raging fronts in Ukraine.

The General Staff added that the Ukrainian artillery bombed three Russian control points and 10 sites of Russian personnel and equipment.

The authority's statement indicated that Russian forces launched 16 air raids on civilian infrastructure in Kherson, Zaporozhye, Kharkiv and Donetsk during the past 24 hours.

The governor of Kharkiv province, Oleg Sinhopov, said that the Russian army bombed the city of Kharkiv, the capital of the province, shortly after it was announced that the German Foreign Minister would visit the city yesterday.

He added that the bombing targeted residential neighborhoods and a fireworks factory, which led to fires in it, and indicated that the Russian army bombed more than 20 cities in the province, most notably the city of Kobyansk in the south.

For its part, the local authorities in the Donbass region, southeastern Ukraine, said that Russian bombing targeted the cities of Kostantinivka, Kramatorsk, and Sloviansk in the past hours, and Al-Jazeera correspondent added that the bombing caused explosions that caused material damage.

America and training on the Patriot system

On the other hand, Anatoly Antonov, the Russian ambassador to Washington, said in a tweet on Twitter that the US Department of Defense training Ukrainian forces on the Patriot system, at a base in Oklahoma state, confirms their actual participation in the conflict alongside what he described as the Nazis in Kyiv, as he put it.

And the US Department of Defense announced earlier that training of Ukrainian forces on the Patriot air defense missile system will begin next week at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, USA.

Pentagon spokesman Pat Ridder confirmed Washington's intention to speed up the training to take a few months instead of a full year, noting that Washington will hand over the Patriot system to Kiev after the end of the exercises.

On the other hand, CNN quoted senior US officials as saying that the United States has fundamentally changed the type of weapons provided to Ukraine.

The officials said the weapons provided to Ukraine would give it a much greater capability.

For his part, advisor to the Ukrainian presidency, Mikhail Podlyak, said that the training of Ukrainian forces on the Patriot systems, which will be obtained from the United States and Germany, will continue for three months.

Podlyak added in an interview that these systems will be an essential component of the future Ukrainian air defense system.


The nuclear triad

Meanwhile, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu confirmed on Tuesday that his country will continue to develop what he described as the nuclear triad and will maintain its combat readiness as a guarantor of its sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Shoigu stressed in a meeting at the Ministry of Defense that Russia also plans to expand its arsenal of modern offensive weapons in the near future, and will increase the use of aviation in the enemy's new air defense operations areas, as he put it.

The Minister of Defense said that plans for training and supplying equipment for the Russian armed forces should be drawn up based on the experiences gained in Syria and Ukraine.

Prisoners file

On the other hand, the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Ukrainian Parliament, Dmitry Lubinets, said that he met last night in the Turkish capital, Ankara, with the Russian Commissioner for Human Rights, Tatyana Moskalkova, in the presence of the Turkish Commissioner for Human Rights, to discuss the outstanding humanitarian issues between the two countries, especially the file of prisoners.

The Interfax-Ukraine news agency quoted Lubinets as saying that the meeting discussed cases related to providing assistance to the citizens of the two countries, and exchanged specific proposals.

The Ukrainian commissioner confirmed that the aim of the meeting is the return of Ukrainian military prisoners of war and work to recover civilians stranded in the Ukrainian regions under Russian control.