Russian President Vladimir Putin considers that the military campaign in Ukraine maintains a “positive dynamic” after the announcement of the capture of the city of Soledar (east), still denied by kyiv.
“The dynamics are positive and everything is going according to the plans of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff. I hope that our fighters will please us more than once with their military results,” Putin said in an interview on Russian state television. , broadcast this Sunday.
Interviewed on the runway of an airport, near the Russian presidential plane, Vladimir Putin responded to a question from a journalist from the Rossia-1 channel about the “news coming from Soledar”, which the Russian army claimed on Friday to have won.
The capture of this small town was presented in Moscow as a victory, after several months of disappointment, namely the withdrawal from the Kharkiv region (east) and the large city of Kherson (south), before the Ukrainian counteroffensives.
According to the Russian army, the conquest of Soledar, where there are important salt mines that would theoretically allow equipment protection and infiltration behind enemy lines, is a step towards the siege of the neighboring city of Bakhmout, which Moscow has been trying to conquer for some time. months.
The military offensive launched by Russia against Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was condemned by the broader international community, which has responded by sending weapons to Ukraine and political and economic sanctions on Moscow.
The Russian invasion has so far caused the flight of more than 14 million people -6.5 million internally displaced persons and more than 7.9 million to European countries-, according to the latest data from the United Nations, which catalogs this crisis of refugees as the worst in Europe since the Second World War (1939-1945).
The United Nations considers 6,952 civilians dead and 11,144 wounded, stressing that these figures are far below the real ones.
Source: TSF
