For Moscow, reports from the front on Wednesday gave cause for joy for the first time in months.

During the night, businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin boasted that he and his "Wagner" mercenaries had taken Soledar, a now largely destroyed town in the Donetsk region.

Russia's war enthusiasts built this "liberation" but most of all that many Ukrainian defenders had fallen.

Frederick Smith

Political correspondent for Russia and the CIS in Moscow.

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The war blogger Alexandr Koz from the tabloid “Komsomolskaya Pravda” summed up that with regard to the area, “the extent of the success” of Soledar cannot be compared with Kharkiv and Kherson;

there the occupiers had been thrown back in September and November respectively.

But Kyiv kept sending new brigades to Soledar, "who left the combat area on the backs of pickups in black sacks," that is, as dead.

Therefore, according to Koz, the "biggest defeat" of the Ukrainian armed forces since the battle for the port city of Mariupol last spring is "the main success" of Soledar.

Koz and other war bloggers left no doubt that this "success" was due to Prigozhin.

They spread a photo montage that shows the "Wagner" leader in military gear through a peephole.

"That awkward moment when the neighbor knocks and wants salt," it says: a joke.

In Soledar, where a good 10,000 people used to live, salt was mined – sol in Russian, hence the name.

Once upon a time, the local company Artyomsol provided most of Ukraine's salt needs.

The destruction of the plant led to a shortage in the country last year.

Combined war and raw material interests

For other cities in the region, the invaders, who hate independent Ukraine, use the old Soviet names.

So for Soledar's heavily contested neighboring town of Bakhmut "Artjomowsk".

The fact that the attackers made an exception for Soledar may be due to the fact that the town bore the unwieldy name "Karlo-Libknechtowsk" until 1991, in honor of the German socialist Karl Liebknecht.

Prigozhin's amalgamation of war and raw material interests has been documented from other theaters, from Syria and African countries.

But for Soledar, the entrepreneur denies that he is interested in salt.

During the war, he presents himself as President Vladimir Putin's best fighter, exploiting his patron's preference for historical lines.

For example, Prigozhin compared the rush of his mercenaries, many of whom he recruited from prison camps, against the Ukrainian army at Bakhmut to “historic” battles like Borodino's 1812 battle against Napoleon.

When footage circulated recently that allegedly showed the corpses of dozens of "Wagner" fighters killed off Bakhmut on the battlefield, Prigozhin was asked about his "responsibility".

He described the area around Bakhmut and Soledar as a "unified defense system" and called the "icing on the cake" the "system of tunnels of Soledar and Bakhmut, in fact a network of underground cities".

At a depth of 80 to 100 meters, not only people but also tanks and troop transporters could be moved.