Kyiv and Moscow said fierce fighting was continuing for the ruined town of Soledar in eastern Ukraine, where a Russian mercenary group said it had found the body of one of two British men who disappeared while doing aid work in the area.
“As regards Soledar: intense battles are continuing, and it’s a little inappropriate to estimate in percentage terms how much of the town we control and how much the enemy is trying to control. Battles are taking places, intense battles – that’s how it is for now,” senior Ukrainian military officer Oleksiy Hromov said on Thursday.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy called a meeting of top military officials and several Government ministers, at which he said particular attention was devoted to the situation around the neighbouring Donetsk-region towns of Soledar and Bakhmut.
“I emphasise that the units defending these cities will be provided with ammunition and everything necessary, promptly and without interruption,” he said, adding that the officials also “discussed the reinforcement of the armed forces of Ukraine with equipment and weapons coming from [foreign] partners.”
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Andrei Baevsky, an occupation official in partly Russian-controlled Donetsk region, said “there are still certain small pockets of resistance in Soledar, our guys continue to crush the enemy in these places”.
“In general, the operation has developed successfully and the western outskirts of Soledar are already completely under our control,” he added, while also claiming that control of Soledar would help Russian forces push for Bakhmut and then the bigger Kyiv-held cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was “too early to stop or rub our hands, as there is still a lot of work to do.”
“Immense efforts were made in Soledar, and those actions were absolutely self-sacrificing and heroic ... and they will continue,” he added.
Analysts say Soledar – which had about 10,000 residents before the war and is now mostly ruins and home to some 500 people – does not have great strategic significance, but Russia is committing major resources and giving intense media coverage to the battle there after suffering a series of defeats in recent months.
Much of the fighting for Soledar and Bakhmut is being done by Russia’s Wagner mercenary group, which has recruited convicts from prison to throw into battle on the promise of a pardon if they survive.
Wagner said it had taken full control of Soledar earlier this week, and now claims to have found the body of one of two British men who were reported missing last weekend after travelling from Kramatorsk to Soledar. Andrew Bagshaw and Christopher Parry had been in Ukraine for some time delivering aid and evacuating civilians in frontline areas.
Wagner also posted online photos of what appear to the men’s British passports, but the UK authorities said they could not confirm any information about the fate of the men.
Mr Peskov said the Kremlin only knew “from media reports that we are talking about British citizens who, in fact, were militants and took part in hostilities with weapons in their hands, and it seems their documents were found on the battlefield.”
He did not offer any evidence to support a claim that the men were fighting in Ukraine, rather than doing volunteer aid work in co-operation with local and foreign NGOs.
A day after Russia put its chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov in charge of its invasion of Ukraine, one of his new deputies – commander of Russian ground forces Oleg Salyukov – visited Belarus to inspect a joint force comprising troops from both nations.
Senior Ukrainian military commander Serhiy Nayev said: “As of today, the situation on the territory of Belarus does not present a direct threat of any land operations against Ukraine.”
