STORY: After days of fighting, the Russian mercenary group Wagner announced the capture of the eastern Ukrainian city of Soledar. Russian news agencies quoted Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin on Tuesday as saying that “Wagner units took control of the entire Soledar area.” He also announced that the number of prisoners would be announced on Wednesday. The fighting continued. In most cases, reports of battles cannot be independently verified. Soledar in the eastern Ukrainian industrial region of Donbass is only a few kilometers away from the strategically important city of Bakhmut. There, volunteers are distributing food and relief supplies to the remaining, mainly old people and children who live under extremely difficult conditions. Like this local resident: 70-year-old local resident, Liudmyla: “I sleep in the same clothes I walk around in. We haven’t bathed in four months. Soon everything will freeze here anyway: both the kitchen and the toilet.” The people of Bakhmut live in makeshift shelters in basements. This boy talks about his everyday life: 14-year-old Hlib: “I used to ride my scooter around when it was quiet. Now I help anyone who asks me to. We distribute the relief supplies that volunteers bring among the people in the Proximity. There are a lot of people here: grandfathers, grandmothers. Nobody goes anywhere.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his evening speech on Monday that Bakhmut and Soledar would continue to be defended. Soledar was largely destroyed and the country littered with Russian corpses. The British Ministry of Defense had already assumed that the Russian army and Wagner mercenaries had most of the small salt mining town under their control. On Tuesday, Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock was the first top foreign politician to make a surprise visit to the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv in the north-east of the country, not far from the Russian border. For them, Kharkiv is a symbol of the absolute madness of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine. At the invitation of the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, she got an idea of the situation on the ground. Kuleba called Baerbock’s visit “symbolic” and expressed his belief that Ukraine would also receive German Leopard-type main battle tanks.
Source: Stern
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