Russia announced on Saturday that it has captured a new village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, claiming that its forces reached the area at the beginning of July. The Russian defense ministry stated that troops had seized the village of Novomykolaivka, located near the border with the Donetsk region, which has been the epicenter of ongoing fighting.
However, AFP was unable to independently verify this claim. According to DeepState, an online battlefield map managed by Ukrainian military analysts, Novomykolaivka remains under Kyiv’s control.
Russian forces, which are better equipped and significantly outnumber Ukrainian troops, have been conducting offensives in Ukraine for several months, making gains across the eastern front. By the end of August, Ukraine acknowledged for the first time that Russian soldiers had entered the Dnipropetrovsk region, where Moscow claimed advances earlier that month.
Currently, the Russian army controls approximately one-fifth of Ukrainian territory. The Kremlin is demanding that Ukraine withdraw from the eastern Donbas region as a condition for halting hostilities, a demand that Kyiv has firmly rejected.
It is important to note that the Dnipropetrovsk region is not among the five Ukrainian regions—Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea—that Moscow has publicly claimed as Russian territory.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated on Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin aims to “occupy all of Ukraine” and will not cease his efforts, even if Kyiv agrees to cede territory.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin indicated that peace negotiations with Kyiv are currently on “pause,” following several unsuccessful attempts to diplomatically resolve the conflict that escalated after Russia’s full-scale offensive in February 2022.
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