Ukraine war: Soledar 'still standing', Russia mulls draft expansion, Sweden has 'something to hide'
Ukraine said on Thursday its troops were holding out despite heavy fighting on a battlefield littered with bodies around a salt mining town in eastern Ukraine, where Russian mercenaries have claimed Moscow's first significant gain in half a year.
The ultra-nationalist contract militia Wagner, run by an ally of President Vladimir Putin outside the main chain of military command, claims to have taken Soledar after intense fighting that it said had left the town strewn with Ukrainian dead. But Moscow has held off officially proclaiming victory.
"At the moment, there are still some small pockets of resistance in Soledar," Andrei Bayevsky, a Russian-installed local politician, said in an online broadcast.
Ukraine has acknowledged Russian advances, but Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said fighting was still fierce.
The Russians were "moving over their own corpses", she said.
Serhiy Cherevatyi, the spokesperson for Ukraine's eastern military command, told Ukrainian TV there was constant shelling in Soledar. "The enemy is trying to take the initiative and attack. But they are failing to break through our defences."
A 24-year-old Ukrainian soldier, positioned outside the small town, said: "The situation is difficult but stable. We're holding back the enemy ... we're fighting back."
With fighting on Ukraine's eastern front as attritional as ever, Kremlin watchers were poring over Russia's latest switch of battlefield leadership a day after Valery Gerasimov, chief of the military's general staff, was unexpectedly given direct command of the invasion.
The previous commander of three months' standing, Army General Sergei Surovikin, was effectively demoted to become one of Gerasimov's three deputies.
Moscow explained the decision -- at
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