“Gigantic work has been done in Soledar,” he said.

Peskov, however, stopped short of confirming a claim by Wagner Group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin, who boasted about capturing Soledar on Wednesday.

“There is still a lot to be done and it’s too early to stop and rub our hands, the main work is still ahead,” he said in a conference call with reporters.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, Hanna Malyar, said at a briefing on Thursday: “The enemy continues the assaults, but suffers significant losses and is not successful.”

The AP was unable to verify the claims made by either side.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed that the troops defending Soledar “will be guaranteed ammunition and everything necessary”.

Russia’s Defence Ministry made no mention of Soledar in its daily briefing on Thursday. The ministry announced on Wednesday that the country’s top military officer — the chief of the military’s General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov — was put in charge of the military operation in Ukraine. He replaces General Sergei Surovikin, who was demoted to deputy only three months after he was installed in that job.

Ukrainian officials also said they were taking note of personnel changes at the top levels of the Russian military command, describing them as a sign that Moscow isn’t achieving what it had hoped.

“Personnel changes would not occur with such frequency if they were doing well,” a senior Ukrainian military official, Brigadier General Oleksiy Hromov, said.

Fighting continued elsewhere in Ukraine.

The deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, reported that two civilians were killed and a further eight were wounded in Russian attacks on Wednesday.

Citing data from regional officials, Tymoshenko said that one civilian died and five were wounded in the southern Kherson province, where shells hit a maternity hospital, private houses and apartment buildings, while one person was killed in Donetsk.

Two people were wounded in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia province, with one further civilian sustaining injuries in the southeastern Dnipropetrovsk province.