MOSCOW, January 12. /TASS/. Colonel Vitaly Kiselyov, a military analyst in the Lugansk People’s Republic, on Friday said it will be practically impossible for Ukrainian forces to retake control of Soledar.
He said Ukrainian forces, on orders from Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, had been trying to storm Soledar for several days.
"Their attempts to attack Soledar using light vehicles have caused large losses. I’m stating today that a return of Soledar under the control of Ukrainian forces is practically impossible," he said on Channel One television.
According to Kiselyov, Ukrainian forces will continue to try to attack Soledar because the government in Kiev needs to "show to its masters" that they haven’t abandoned Soledar and are trying to retake it.
"Their losses will be huge because they suffered large losses of personnel and military equipment," he said.
According to the analyst, Ukrainian forces will need to muster a huge number of people to storm Soledar.
"They can certainly deploy unprepared mobilized conscripts from the Kharkov Region -10,000; 20,000; 30,000 of them. And what will they get? A field of buried soldiers," he said.
Commenting on why Kiev hasn’t conceded yet its retreat from Soledar, Kiselyov said it’s a usual practice for the Ukrainian government to not concede retreat from settlements immediately.
"It happened before, when Rubezhnoye, Severodonetsk and Lisichansk were liberated. <...> They were saying they would return there soon anyway," he said.
Businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin said Tuesday night into Wednesday morning that Soledar, which had been at the center of battles in recent days, was seized by the fighters of the Wagner private military company. Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Lieutenant-General Igor Konashenkov said on Wednesday that Russian troops had blocked Soledar from the north and south and battles were raging inside the city.
The importance of taking Soledar is that it opens the way for direct artillery fire on the road between Slavyansk and Artyomovsk and striking targets on the Artyomovsk axis with artillery fire, according to Andrey Bayevsky, a lawmaker at the legislature of the Donetsk People’s Republic and a colonel of the People’s Militia. He described the capture of Soledar as an important step toward storming Artyomovsk.