What did 10 January 2023 reveal about the war?

What did 10 January 2023 show about the war and the politics around it? Three separate reports from that day, one from Kyiv, one from the Donetsk front and one from Yerevan, point to pressure being applied in different arenas.

A citizenship stripped

On 10 January 2023, President Volodymyr Zelensky deprived the pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuk and three other people of Ukrainian citizenship. The charge was high treason. The decision was reported as an act of denaturalisation, which put the legal status of the four people at the centre of the government's response to the Russian invasion.

Two versions of Soledar

The same day, the front line produced a dispute over what had actually happened. The UK Defence Ministry said Russian forces controlled most of Soledar in Donetsk Oblast. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group, claimed the town had been taken in its entirety. The two accounts differed in scope: one described control of most of the town, the other of all of it.

Soledar was the scene of a series of military engagements within the wider Battle of Donbas, part of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

A postponement in Yerevan

Further south, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan announced that joint military exercises with the Russian Armed Forces, planned under the Collective Security Treaty Organization, would be postponed this year. His stated reason was that the organisation had refused to condemn Azerbaijan in the disputes between the two countries. The announcement came in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and touched Armenia's relations with Russia.

What the day showed

Taken together, the reports describe a day on which the war was fought through legal measures, competing battlefield claims and shifting regional ties. In Kyiv, the state used the law against a named political figure. At Soledar, the question was how much ground had changed hands, and who was entitled to say so. In Yerevan, a leader chose to delay exercises with Moscow rather than proceed, and he named the security organisation's stance on Azerbaijan as the cause.

Each report concerned a different place and a different instrument, but all three were shaped by the consequences of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the relationships around it.