Russia has declared it seized control of a village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, an area Moscow’s forces reportedly reached in early July.
According to the Russian Defence Ministry, their troops took over Novomykolaivka, a village near the Donetsk region, currently a hotspot of intense fighting.
However, AFP has not been able to independently verify this claim.
Ukrainian military analysts operating DeepState, an online battlefield monitoring tool, maintain that the village remains under Kyiv’s control.
Russian forces, better equipped and significantly larger in number, have been conducting ongoing offensives across Ukraine’s eastern front, steadily making territorial gains.
At the end of August, Ukraine admitted for the first time that Russian troops had entered the Dnipropetrovsk region, where Moscow had announced advances earlier that month.
Currently, Russian forces occupy roughly 20% of Ukrainian land.
The Kremlin insists Ukraine must withdraw from the eastern Donbas region before any peace talks can resume, a demand Kyiv has firmly rejected.
Notably, the Dnipropetrovsk region is not among the five Ukrainian regions, Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Crimea, that Russia has officially claimed as part of its territory.
On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of aiming to “occupy all of Ukraine,” warning that Moscow would not halt its campaign even if Kyiv conceded territory.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin announced on Friday that peace negotiations remain on hold after multiple unsuccessful attempts to resolve the war diplomatically since Russia’s large-scale invasion began in February 2022.
In a recent incident, Russian shelling struck the town of Kostyantynivka in Donetsk, killing three people, according to Ukrainian regional prosecutors.
