War in Ukraine: “Everything is going according to plan”, Vladimir Putin reasoned

A new commander-in-chief, and everything will start all over again? Three days after General Valery Gerasimov was appointed Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces in 2012 as head of the military operation in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin believes that “everything is going according to plan.”

“The dynamics are positive, everything is going according to the plans of the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff. I hope that our fighters will please us with their combat results more than once,” the Russian President said in an interview with state television, which was broadcast this Sunday.

When asked on the airport airfield, next to the Russian presidential plane, he answered a question from a Rossiya-1 journalist about the “news coming from Soledar” that the Russian army claimed to have conquered on Friday, 36 hours after the statement the chief of the Wagner militia, who claimed this victory.

After several months of setbacks, in particular, the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Kharkiv region (east) in the fall, and then from the large city of Kherson (south), the capture of this town in the Donbass was presented to Moscow as a success, and a decisive step towards the final conquest of the neighboring city of Bakhmut, for which the Russian army and the Wagner paramilitary group have been fighting against Ukrainian troops since the summer.

However, on Saturday, the governor of the Donetsk region, Pavel Kirilenko, assured that Soledar was still “under the control of Ukraine” and that “fighting continues in the city and beyond.” However, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said it was unlikely that Ukrainian forces were still holding positions inside Soledar itself.

A wave of explosions

The Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday that it carried out a “rocket attack” on “the Ukrainian military command and control system and associated energy infrastructure” the day before, and assured that it had achieved its goals. A wave of explosions cut a residential building in Dnipro in half, killing at least 25 people and injuring dozens.

The Ukrainian military said the building was hit by a Kh-22 missile, against which it has no air defenses.

In the south, in Krivoy Rog, one person died and another was injured in the destruction of residential buildings as a result of the strike, according to an official statement. “The world must stop this evil,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged, condemning “Russian terror.” In just a day, the enemy launched three air strikes and about fifty missile strikes, the headquarters of the Ukrainian army reported.

For their part, Russian troops announced an attack on the northern outskirts of Artemovsk, about fifteen kilometers from Soledar, and significant losses from the opposite side: one day, ”the Defense Ministry said in a Telegram channel.