A new general in chief, and it starts again?
Three days after the appointment of General Valéri Guerassimov, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces since 2012, at the head of military operations in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin believes that “everything is going according to plan”.
“The dynamic is positive and everything is going according to the plans of the Ministry of Defense and the general staff.
I hope that our fighters will still delight us more than once with their military results, ”said the Russian president in an interview on state television, broadcast this Sunday.
A man that looks like Putin says there are positive trends in the "special military operation" after spending 10 months taking a town with 10,000 population, razing it to the ground.
pic.twitter.com/8BGgwcS0X3
— Dmitry (@wartranslated) January 15, 2023
Asked on the tarmac of an airport, near the Russian presidential plane, he answered the question of a journalist from the Rossia-1 channel on the "news coming from Soledar", which the Russian army claimed on Friday to have conquered, 36 hours after the declarations of the chief of the Wagner militia, who claimed this victory.
Read alsoWar in Ukraine: Soledar, a week of confusion around a deadly battle
After months of setbacks, notably the withdrawal of Russian troops in the fall from the Kharkiv region (east) then from the large city of Kherson (south), the capture of this small town in the Donbass was presented to Moscow as a success, and a decisive step to finally conquer the neighboring city of Bakhmout, which the Russian army and the paramilitary group Wagner have been fighting against Ukrainian forces since the summer.
On Saturday, the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavlo Kirilenko, however assured that Soledar is still “under Ukrainian control” and that “the fighting continues in the city and outside”.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, however, said it was highly unlikely that Ukrainian forces still held positions inside Soledar itself.
Wave of bombings
The Russian Ministry of Defense said on Sunday that it had carried out “missile fire” the day before on “the Ukrainian military command system and energy infrastructure linked to it”, and assured that it had achieved its objectives.
The wave of shelling cut a residential building in Dnipro in half, killing at least 25 people and injuring dozens.
The Ukrainian military said the building was hit by a Kh-22 missile, against which it has no air defenses.
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At least 21 dead and 73 injured in a bombed residential building in Dnipro, Ukraine
In the south, in Kryvyi Rig, one person was killed and another injured in the destruction of apartment buildings by a strike, according to an official report.
"The world must stop this evil," implored Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, denouncing "Russian terror".
In total, "the enemy carried out three air strikes and around fifty missile strikes during the day" on Saturday, said the staff of the Ukrainian army.
For their part, the Russian forces claimed advances towards the northern outskirts of Artemivsk, about fifteen kilometers from Soledar, and significant losses on the opposing side: "More than 80 Ukrainian soldiers, two tanks, three vehicles armored vehicles and three cars were destroyed in one day,” the Ministry of Defense said on its Telegram channel.
