Kyiv said on Monday that Russian forces were “very far” from capturing the eastern city of Bakhmut, and that fighting was continuing around an administrative building where a group of Wagner mercenaries claimed to have hoisted a Russian flag.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s Eastern Military Command told Reuters it was unclear where Russian forces had raised their flag and that they had falsely claimed to have captured the city.

“They raised a flag over some toilet. They attached it to I don’t know what (building), hung a canvas and said that they captured the city. OK, let them think that he was conquered,” official Serhiy Cherevaty said by phone.

Fighting is going on around the town hall (in Bakhmut), legally nothing has been seized,” Cherevaty said.

“Bakhmut is Ukrainian, and they haven’t captured anything, and it’s a long way from that, so to speak,” he added.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Russian mercenaries of the “Wagner” PMC, said on Sunday evening that his forces raised the Russian flag on the administrative building. Prigozhin claimed that from a “legal” point of view, Bakhmut was captured by Russia.

Bakhmut was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war, with huge casualties on both sides and much of the city destroyed by bombing.