By Pavel Polityuk and Vladyslav Smilianets
KYIV/KRAMATORSK, Ukraine (Reuters) -Ukraine said it was strengthening its forces around Bakhmut in the eastern Donbas region and repelling constant attacks there by Russian mercenary group Wagner, whose leader has vowed to capture the area’s vast underground mines.
Kyiv had sent reinforcements to Soledar, a small town near Bakhmut where the situation was particularly difficult, Ukrainian officials said.
“The enemy again made a desperate attempt to storm the city of Soledar from different directions and threw the most professional units of the Wagnerites into battle,” Ukraine’s military said in a statement.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner mercenary group, has been trying to capture Bakhmut and Soledar for months at the cost of many lives on both sides. He said on Saturday its significance lay in the network of mines there.
“It not only (has the ability to hold) a big group of people at a depth of 80-100 metres, but tanks and infantry fighting vehicles can also move about.”
Military analysts say the strategic military benefit for Moscow would be limited. A U.S. official has said Prigozhin, a powerful ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is eyeing the salt and gypsum from the mines.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in nightly video remarks on Sunday that Bakhmut and Soledar were holding on despite widespread destruction after months of attacks.
“Our soldiers are repelling constant Russian attempts to advance,” he said. In Soledar “things are very difficult”.
In an evacuee centre in nearby Kramatorsk, Olha, 60, said she had fled Soledar after moving from apartment to apartment as each was destroyed in tank battles.
“All of last week we couldn’t come outside. Everyone was running around, soldiers with automatic weapons, screaming,” said Olha, who gave only her first name.
“There isn’t one house left intact,” she said. “Apartments were burning, breaking in half.”
Pro-Russian bloggers quoted Prigozhin as saying his forces were fighting for the administration building in Soledar.
The Ukrainian military said reinforcements had been sent to Soledar and everything was being done to fend off the enemy.
“There are brutal and bloody battles there – 106 shellings in one day,” Serhiy Cherevatyi, a spokesman for the military in the east, said on Ukrainian television.
Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian presidential staff, said Moscow was suffering huge losses to try to justify its mobilisation of reservists, but was not succeeding. “Our soldiers’ feat is titanic,” he wrote on Telegram.
Reuters was not able to independently verify the battlefield reports.
MARKETPLACE STRIKE
Further north in the Kharkiv region, a Russian missile strike on a marketplace in the village of Shevchenkove killed two women and wounded four others, including a 10-year-old girl, regional prosecutors said.
Badly injured people lay on the ground and rescue workers sifted through piles of rubble, overturned and burning stalls, and a large crater, video footage from police and Ukraine’s presidential office showed. A police officer carried a girl with blood on her face from the scene.
Yermak said the perpetrators were “common terrorists”. Russia did not immediately comment on the reports from the village, which Kyiv recaptured from Moscow in September.
Zelenskiy made a fresh denunciation of what he called Russia’s failure to observe a ceasefire it had declared for Russian Orthodox Christmas on Friday and Saturday.
Ukraine never agreed to the ceasefire, which it called a Russian excuse to reinforce troops. Both sides accused the other of continuing hostilities throughout the period.
“Russians were shelling Kherson with incendiary ammunition immediately after Christmas,” he said, referring to the southern city abandoned by Russian forces in November. Air strikes also hit Kramatorsk and other cities in the east, he said.
On Sunday, Russia said a missile strike on Kramatorsk had killed 600 Ukrainian soldiers. But a Reuters reporter found no visible signs of casualties at the scene of the attack, billed by Moscow as revenge for the deaths of scores of Russian troops at New Year.
As Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine grinds towards the one-year mark, Russia’s military is under domestic pressure to deliver battlefield successes.
Hawkish voices have sought an escalation of the war effort after the loss of captured territory and high rates of death and injury.
The Kremlin stood by the Russian defence ministry’s claim to have killed hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers in the Kramatorsk strike, but some pro-Kremlin military bloggers said Moscow was hurting its own cause with unreliable propaganda.
“Let’s talk about ‘fraud’,” wrote Military Informant, a pro-war Russian blogger on the Telegram messaging app with more than half a million subscribers. “It is not clear to us who, and for what reason, decided that 600 Ukrainian soldiers died inside, all at once, if the building was not actually hit (even the light remained on).”
Russia, which initially cited a need to rid Ukraine of nationalists, now says it is fighting a Western threat to its own existence. Kyiv and its Western allies, which have imposed broad sanctions on Moscow and sent Ukraine weapons to defend itself, say the invasion was entirely unprovoked.
Britain is considering supplying Ukraine with tanks for the first time, Sky News reported, citing a Western source. Britain’s Ministry of Defence did not immediately respond to a request for comment. France, Germany and the United States all pledged last week to send armoured fighting vehicles, fulfilling a major long-standing request of Kyiv.
The Kremlin said new deliveries of Western weapons would “deepen the suffering of the Ukrainian people” but not affect the outcome of the conflict.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaux; Writing by Lincoln Feast and Philippa Fletcher; Editing by Lisa Shumaker, and Clarence Fernandez and Peter Graff)
