Luhansk

The fate of a devastated salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine hung in the balance Wednesday in one of the bloodiest battles of Russia's invasion, while Ukraine's unflagging resistance and other challenges prompted Moscow to shake up its military leadership again.

Russian forces used jets, mortars and rockets to bombard Soledar in an unrelenting assault.

Burned-out cars and splintered trees smolder in the aftermath of a missile strike on Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine. A body lies on the ground, covered by a sheet. Wounded residents sit dazed and covered in blood. A crater has been gouged in the center of a once-calm, sunlit courtyard.

During the night, Ukrainian forces targeted Melitopol twice with long-range multi-barreled rocket launchers, said Vladimir Rogov, a member of the main council of the state administration of the Zaporozhye region.

Here are the highlights of events related to the war in Ukraine over the past 24 hours:

Kyiv: The last bastion in eastern Ukraine may fall

A group of young off-duty Ukrainian soldiers gathered at a military distribution center to enjoy a rare respite from the fighting that has again engulfed their fractured home in eastern Ukraine.

Russia drew closer to its goal of fully capturing Ukraine's eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories as the Kremlin claimed to have taken control of 97% of one of the two provinces that make up the Donbas region.

The current ceasefire in the war in eastern Ukraine, the so-called Minsk-2 agreement, was signed last February, but they never actually ceased firing. At least a thousand more people have been killed in the fighting since then, and on one night last month (Aug. 14) the monitors of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) recorded 175 separate ceasefire violations.

Ukrainian authorities and pro-Russia rebels on Saturday agreed on a complete ceasefire and a buffer zone a bid to bolster the preliminary truce signed on September 5.