The situation at the front
Heavy fighting continues in the Bakhmut direction . According to WarGonzo, the Ukrainian army is fighting heavy defensive battles near Kleshchievka. PMC Wagner attacks from the south and east. The road to Bakhmut passes through this settlement. The Wagnerites were also able to advance in the Red Mountain area. Thus, Russian mercenaries are advancing on Bakhmut from the south, east and north.
Fighting continues in Soledar . The founder of PMC Wagner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, declares that the city has been taken by his mercenaries and a cleansing is taking place.
“Once again I want to confirm the complete liberation and cleansing of the territory of Soledar from units of the Ukrainian army. Civilians were withdrawn, the fighters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who did not want to surrender, were destroyed. Killed about 500 people. The whole city is littered with the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers. There can be no talk of any humanitarian corridor. We are starting to clean up the mines, ”said Prigozhin.
Earlier, Prigozhin had already stated that Wagner PMC mercenaries captured Soledar on the night of January 11. This was not confirmed either by the Armed Forces of Ukraine or the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.
Colonel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the reserve, military expert Roman Svitan, in an interview with The Insider, noted that Soledar is not a line of defense, and it is not as important as Russian propaganda portrays.
“It's not about Soledar, but about Bakhmutka, because it is a frontier of defense. The river goes from Bakhmut towards Seversk. On the left side of the river there is a highway, and on the right side there is a railway. Soledar starts from the railway, from the Sol station, and these three lanes: the highway, the river and the railway – they hold the Russians. How they begin to cross this line will be a problem, but for now they simply do not do it. Where they were stopped in Soledar – at the beginning, in the middle or somewhere else – does not matter. This is like a point on the map for us, but not a line of defense. What Prigozhin and the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation do in the information space is that they simply use names. When they cross Bakhmutka, the next line of defense is the road to Slavyansk, and all this only in order to encircle Bakhmut. It is these lines that are defended by the troops, not Soledar.
The Russian Ministry of Defense earlier today stated that Soledar was blocked by airborne units from the northern and southern parts of the settlement, and the VKS were striking at the city. “Assault squads are fighting in the city,” the department’s summary says. Apty Alaudinov, deputy commander of the 2nd army corps of the People’s Militia of the “LPR”, said on the Rossiya-1 TV channel that Russian forces were “cleansing Soledar”, and the city can be considered “already taken”.
At the same time, on the eve of the press service of Yevgeny Prigozhin, it was reported that only the forces of the PMC Wagner were participating in the assault on Soledar: “I want to emphasize once again that no units other than the fighters of the PMC Wagner participated in the assault on Soledar.” In addition, a photograph of Yevgeny Prigozhin next to a tank, surrounded by Wagner group mercenaries, appeared on Telegram channels, this photograph was allegedly taken in a salt mine in Soledar.
A subscriber of the Moscow calling Telegram channel, who has been in Ukrainian mines, notes that Prigozhin was in the gypsum workings of the Siniat ODO on the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut.
The channel published photos of gypsum and salt mines, even a non-specialist can see the difference.
It is noted that the Siniata mine, like any gypsum, is shallow, knocked down with the surface by slopes, standard vehicles move inside. You can't drive a tank into the salt mines.
Surovikin lasted three months
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu appointed a new commander of the Joint Group of Forces in Ukraine, Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov. According to the Ministry of Defense, the former commander, General Sergei Surovikin, became his deputy. He led the Joint Grouping of Forces in Ukraine from 8 October.
General Oleg Salyukov, Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, and Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Colonel General Alexei Kim.
Under Surovikin, the Russian army began massive shelling of Ukraine's energy infrastructure and retreated from Kherson. The appointment of Surovikin was supported by the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov and the founder of PMC Wagner Prigozhin. At the same time, Kadyrov, like a number of pro-Russian bloggers, criticized Gerasimov. In December , there were rumors about the dismissal of Gerasimov, but they were not confirmed.
In December, Aleksey Arestovich, an adviser to the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, in an interview with Russian lawyer Mark Feigin, said that the UAF tried to kill Gerasimov, thereby confirming the information from The New York Times investigation. According to Bloomberg sources, Gerasimov was one of those with whom Vladimir Putin made the decision to invade Ukraine.
Mobilized in ice
Servicemen of the 3rd battalion of the 10th company of the 392nd motorized rifle regiment of the RF Armed Forces recorded a video message in which they expressed bewilderment about the conditions in which they found themselves on the front line. The fighters were thrown into an ice trench. There were no promised funds for heating shelters in almost 20-degree frost. The military was not even provided with a potbelly stove.
“Initially, our command offered us to move to ready positions. Now it's minus 20 outside, we are offered to live here, in the ice. At the same time, our superiors are blackmailing us: they do not give us the opportunity in medical care, in provision, until we move to these positions. We propose to consider this video message to the military prosecutor's office, the FSB, and personally to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The guys here will just freeze, get sick. Who will fight at all?
When we arrived in the NVO zone, we were told that we would move to equipped positions. The command reports that the funds are over. Moreover, they are not shy in expressions, they tell us directly that the money was simply stolen. And now we are being asked to move here. Initially, we equipped everything ourselves in another forest belt. We bought everything with our own money: potbelly stoves, made roofs, dug everything ourselves, shovels – all our own, nothing was provided to us. From time to time there are failures with water supply," the military said.
As the Rybar Telegram channel notes, there is another important point in the video. One of the shots was hit by a concrete cap designed to equip a firing point. It is not disguised in any way, acting as an easy target.
Arms deliveries
Canada will buy a NASAMS anti-aircraft missile system from the United States to transfer it to Ukraine. This was stated by Canadian Minister of Defense Anita Anand. She noted that Canada will transfer an air defense system to Ukraine for the first time.
The anti-aircraft system will help protect Ukrainian population centers and critical infrastructure from drones, missiles and airstrikes, Canada's defense minister said. “NASAMS has a very high hit rate and this is a valuable contribution to the defense capability of Ukraine,” she added.
The total cost of the purchase will be 406 million Canadian dollars ($302 million), and it is part of a package of additional military assistance to Ukraine, which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced on November 14.
The United States has already delivered several NASAMS to Ukraine. Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder, meanwhile, confirmed that training for Ukrainian troops to use the Patriot air defense system will begin next week in Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He specified that from 90 to 100 Ukrainian servicemen will be trained during the training.
Turkey supplies Ukraine with cluster artillery munitions made during the Cold War. Foreign Policy writes about this, citing European and American ex-officials familiar with this issue. According to the publication, the supply of dual-purpose advanced conventional ammunition (DPICM) began in November 2022, but Turkey tried to hide this fact. They were manufactured under an agreement with the United States. According to one FP source, the move indicates that Turkey is becoming an important supporter of Ukraine, despite ties to Russia. At the same time, it remains unclear whether Ukraine used the received ammunition in combat.
Poland will transfer Leopard tanks to Ukraine, Polish President Andrzej Duda said after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Lithuanian leader Gitanas Nauseda in Lviv. “We have decided that such support from the Polish side will be provided to Ukraine. A company of Leopard tanks will be transferred as part of the international coalition,” he said.
According to the newspaper Rzeczpospolita , the tank company has 14 vehicles – three platoons of 4 tanks each and a control section, including 2 tanks. The Polish army has 142 Leopard tanks in the 2A4 version and 105 vehicles in the 2A5 version.
Ruins of a vocational school in Makeevka
Journalist and blogger Denis Kazansky published new footage from Makiivka, where on New Year's Eve the Armed Forces of Ukraine attacked the building of the vocational school, which housed the Russian mobilized. The Ukrainian side claims that there were about 400 Russian soldiers in the building. The Russian Ministry of Defense acknowledged the death of 89 people, most of them were mobilized from the Samara region. Later, a petition was published in which the signatories demanded the publication of a complete list of names of those killed in Makiivka.
The military commissar of the Samara region, Alexei Vdovin, said that the lists of the dead in Makeevka would not be published, arguing that the list of the names of the dead "can be used by foreign intelligence."
Childbirth in the trench
A serviceman of the Armed Forces of Ukraine delivered a cat in a trench. Right during the shelling, a pregnant cat came into the trench, after a while she started having contractions. The fighter took birth from an animal.
“Life didn’t prepare me for this. Frost -12, in a trench under shelling, giving birth to a cat is tough. Somehow we will keep warm, we will think of something, ”said the military man. He posted the video on his Tik Tok page.
See also The Insider's military summary for January 10: “ Wagner PMC in the center of Soledar, Georgia will not return Buki, Russia's shell hunger to Ukraine. What's happening on the front lines ."