Moscow named a new commander for its invasion of Ukraine while Russian private military firm Wagner Group said its capture of the salt mining town Soledar in eastern Ukraine was complete, though the Ukrainian military said the battle was not over.

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Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu on Wednesday appointed Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov as overall commander for what Moscow calls its “special military operation” in Ukraine, now in its 11th month.

The change effectively demoted General Sergei Surovikin, who was appointed only in October to lead the invasion and oversaw heavy attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Wagner and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, said his forces had captured all of Soledar and killed about 500 Ukrainian soldiers after heavy fighting.

“I want to confirm the complete liberation and cleansing of the territory of Soledar,” Prigozhin said in a statement.

“The whole city is littered with the corpses of Ukrainian soldiers,” he said.

U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters on Wednesday he could not corroborate reports that Soledar was in Russian hands.

Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko told Ukrainian state TV that 559 civilians remain in Soledar, including 15 children, and it was impossible to evacuate them due to ongoing fighting. The town had a pre-war population of around 10,500.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the situation in Soledar.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy mocked previous Wagner claims to have seized part of Soledar but made no immediate comment on the latest assertions.

“The terrorist state and its propagandists are trying to pretend that part of our town of Soledar … is some sort of a Russian possession,” Zelenskiy said in a video address. “But fighting continues.”

In a statement on Facebook, the Ukrainian military general staff said Russian forces were suffering heavy losses as they tried to take Soledar and sever Ukrainian supply lines.

Russia has struggled to cement control over the town, which would be Russia’s most substantial gain since August after a series of retreats before Ukrainian counter-offensives in the east and south.

Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said the situation in Soledar was “approaching that of critical”.

“The Ukrainian armed forces are holding their positions. About one half of the town is under our control. Fierce fighting is going on near the town centre,” he said on YouTube.

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However, Zhdanov told Ukrainian television that if Russian forces seized Soledar or nearby Bakhmut it would be more a political victory than military.

“There is more politics than war here,” said Zhdanov.

“The Russians, if they take one of these towns, will try to put the event on par with capturing Berlin and they will use it for propaganda purposes as much for the outside market as for domestic consumption,” he said.

“Inside Russia, it will give them the opportunity to lift the spirits of conscripts and society as a whole. To unite them all…”

Russian military ‘fall guy’

A Russian Defence Ministry statement said its latest command reshuffle was meant to improve contacts between military branches and the effectiveness of the command structure.

One prominent military blogger who posts on the Telegram messaging app under the name of Rybar said Surovikin was being made the fall guy for recent Russian military debacles. Those included a Ukrainian attack on a Russian barracks that killed at least 89 Russian soldiers over New Year’s.

Surovikin was ordered to head the campaign after Ukrainian offensives turned the tide of the war and drew attention to poor training, equipment and morale among Russian forces.

If pro-Russian forces succeed in taking Soledar, it would be a stepping stone in Moscow’s thrust to capture Ukraine’s eastern Donbas industrial region. The town would be a base to attack the nearby city of Bakhmut, a supply line hub in eastern Ukraine, where defenders have held out for months.

Before Wagner’s latest statement, the Kremlin stopped short of claiming victory and acknowledged heavy casualties.

“Let’s not rush, let’s wait for official statements. There is a positive dynamic in progress,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

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A Reuters photographer who reached the outskirts of Soledar in recent days said many residents had fled the town in perishing cold. Smoke could be seen rising over the town and the incoming artillery fire was relentless, she said.

Missing Britons

Earlier, Russian state news agency RIA said Wagner had taken over Soledar’s salt mines and a photograph on the militia’s Telegram channel appeared to show Prigozhin and his fighters inside a mine.

Wagner separately said its forces found the body of one of two British voluntary aid workers reported missing in eastern Ukraine. It did not give the name of the dead man. A photo appeared to show passports bearing the names of Andrew Bagshaw and Christopher Parry, the two missing workers.

Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, saying Kyiv’s close ties with the West and ambitions to join NATO threatened its security. Kyiv and its allies accuse Moscow of an unprovoked war to seize territory in a neighbour it once dominated within the former Soviet Union.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans moved Tuesday to swiftly establish the marquee investigations of their new majority, voting to create panels focused on China and what they assert is rampant abuse of power in the federal government.

Newly empowered, GOP lawmakers are vowing to bring accountability to the Biden administration, pledging to investigate federal law enforcement agencies, including those that are conducting probes into former President Donald Trump.

Republicans also established a committee, with broad bipartisan support, to investigate “strategic competition” between the U.S. and China, in line with the party’s push for a more hardline approach to the Asian nation.

The creation of the committees is the first of many investigative steps Republicans plan to take as they settle into their slim majority and attempt to serve as a check against President Joe Biden and his agenda on Capitol Hill.

It amounts to a massive reshuffling away from the oversight priorities of Democrats, who used their majority to form a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. That committee is no more, and Republicans have no plans to revive it, vowing instead to take a closer look at the actions of law enforcement.

Republicans officially labeled one of the committees as reviewing “the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” a name that from the outset suggests the panel’s investigations may be one-sided. The probe will be conducted under the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee, which is headed by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a hardliner who is a close ally of Trump.

The committee is being given a broad mandate, told to investigate “the expansive role” of the executive branch to “collect information on or otherwise investigate citizens of the United States, including ongoing criminal investigations.” Notably, the panel will have access to classified information, a privilege usually reserved for the intelligence committees in the House and Senate.

First up is investigating what they call a coordinated effort by Justice Department “to go after parents” and deem them domestic terrorists following an increase of threats targeting school board members, teachers and other employees in the nation’s public schools.

“The real focus has always been what 14 FBI agents have come and told Judiciary Republican staff about what’s going on with the FBI and the very first one was on the school board,” Jordan told reporters Monday. “We’ll start with those individuals and we’ll move from there once we get up and running with who’s on our committee.”

The GOP focus on issues like parents’ rights in schools stems from the unruliness that engulfed local education meetings across the country since the pandemic began, with board members regularly confronted and threatened by angry protesters. There is no evidence the FBI ever declared protesting parents “domestic terrorists,” despite Republican rhetoric.

Jordan, who is expected to lead the investigation, said the committee is modeled after the bipartisan “Church Committee,” a 1970s congressional investigation that sought to investigate allegations that the U.S. government spied on its own citizens for decades. That investigation led to significant reforms with the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires intelligence agencies to seek permission from a secret court before surveilling Americans.

Democrats opposed the creation of the committee, calling it a partisan tool for Republicans to go after the Justice Department as Trump is the subject of several federal criminal investigations, including for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and his handling and storing of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago.

“Republicans claim to care about law enforcement. But this new committee is about attacking law enforcement,” Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the ranking member of the Rules Committee, said on the House floor. “It’s about going after people. It’s about destroying people’s careers and lives. It’s about undermining the Department of Justice.”

The sharply partisan debate over the Judiciary committee stood in stark contrast to the bipartisan support for the China panel, which will be led by Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin. Members of both parties said more attention should be devoted to the global implications of China’s economic competition strategy.

“You have my word and my commitment. This is not a partisan committee,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy said. “That is my hope, my desire, my wish that we speak with one voice that we focus on the challenges that we have.”

He added, “The threat is too great for us to bicker with ourselves.” Close to 150 Democrats voted for the committee’s creation on Tuesday.

Who will serve on either committee beyond the chairs will be a decision for congressional leaders. The House is in the process of seating the various standing committees, a process that is expected to be contentious as McCarthy has already pledged to retaliate against Democrats for removing several far-right members from their committee assignments in the last Congress.

Some of the names being floated for the Judiciary subcommittee include Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., whose phone was seized in August as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection.

“Why should I be limited just because someone has made an accusation?” Perry said in a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week” with host George Stephanopoulos. “Everybody in America is innocent until proven guilty.”

But Democrats are alleging that members like Perry and Jordan will be using the committee as a way to push back on agencies that are investigating them and their allies.

“They’re effectively trying to pardon themselves with the creation of this select committee,” McGovern said. “This is unconscionable.”

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An earlier version of this story mistakenly reported that the National Security Agency was a byproduct of the work of the “Church Committee.” That reference has been deleted.

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