Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the audience at the 80th Golden Globe awards Tuesday night that his country will stop Russia’s invasion but warned that there are “still battles and tears ahead.”
A Ukrainian soldier in his position as a tankman as the Russia-Ukraine war continues on the Bakhmut front line in Donetsk, Ukraine, on Jan. 8, 2023.Ukraine is continuing to reject Russian claims that its forces have captured the Donetsk town of Soledar.
This morning, Ukraine's operational update said Soledar was among the settlements in Donetsk that were being shelled, while Reuters reported that from the outskirts of the town, plumes of smoke could be seen rising, describing the incoming artillery fires as "relentless." "Although Russia maintains a large number of forces in Belarus, they are mostly involved in training. They are unlikely to constitute a credible offensive force," it noted. There has been persistent speculation that Russia's ally Belarus could actively enter the war in Ukraine to fight alongside Russian forces, despite an insistence from the government in Minsk that it will not join the fighting.
Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Oleksii Arestovych said Tuesday that Soledar was "semi-surrounded, if we look at open sources it looks like this: the western parts are [taken] by the enemy, but the center and northwest, and southwestern parts [of the city] are standing," in YouTube in comments translated by NBC News.Tuesday that fighting was continuing in Soledar.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian businessman and close ally of Vladimir Putin. He recently admitted to creating the Wagner Group, a private military company fighting in Ukraine, in 2014.Prigozhin has achieved a much higher-profile since Russia invaded Ukraine and his Wagner fighters joined in Russia's war effort. He previously denied links to the paramilitary group that he founded in 2014 in order to support pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
"It is even more important now when Russia is gathering forces for another escalation," Zelenskyy said during a nightly address on his official Telegram channel."The free world has everything necessary to stop Russian aggression and bring the terrorist state to a historic defeat and it is important not only for us, it is important for global democracy, for all those who value freedom," Zelenskyy added.
Russia is believed to see the capture of Soledar as a step toward its bigger target, that of capturing Bakhmut in Donetsk where fighting has been intense for months.
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