The head of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group says he has raised a Russian flag over Bakhmut’s city hall in Ukraine.
In a night-time video, Yevgeny Prigozhin said Bakhmut was now Russian “in a legal sense”.
However he admitted Ukrainian forces were still concentrated in western districts.Ukraine has insisted its army still holds Bakhmut – an eastern city which Russia has spent months trying to capture.
The General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said on Sunday that while Russia hadn’t stopped its assault on the city, “Ukrainian defenders are courageously holding the city as they repel numerous enemy attacks”.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, has urged people to “calmly respond to the fakes of those who invent a ‘victory’ that does not exist in reality”.
Ukraine’s Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said the Wagner claim was “a funny fake”.
In the video, Mr Prigozhin said a tribute to Russian military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, who died in an explosion at a St Petersburg cafe on Sunday, had been written on the flag.
The BBC has not been able to verify the footage.
Analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said that as of Sunday, Ukraine still held much of the city – although Russian troops were attempting to envelop it from the south and east.
—BBC
