Russia on Saturday (September 13, 2025) said it had captured a new village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, which Moscow’s forces say they reached at the beginning of July.

The Defence Ministry said its troops had seized the village of Novomykolaivka near the border with the Donetsk region — the epicentre of fighting on the front.

AFP was unable to confirm this claim.

DeepState, an online battlefield map run by Ukrainian military analysts, said the village was still under Kyiv’s control.

Russian forces are better equipped and vastly outnumber Ukrainian troops. They have been carrying out offensives in Ukraine for months and gaining ground across the eastern front.

At the end of August, Ukraine had for the first time acknowledged that Russian soldiers had entered the Dnipropetrovsk region, where Moscow had claimed advances at the start of the month.

The Russian army currently controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory.

The Kremlin is demanding that Ukraine withdraw from its eastern Donbas region as a precondition for halting hostilities, something that Kyiv has rejected.

The Dnipropetrovsk region is not one of the five Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Kherson, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea — that Moscow has publicly claimed as Russian territory.

On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, wanted to “occupy all of Ukraine” and would not stop until his goal was achieved, even if Kyiv agreed to cede territory.

For its part, the Kremlin noted on Friday that peace negotiations with Kyiv were on “pause,” following the failure of several attempts in recent months to diplomatically resolve the conflict triggered by Russia’s full-scale offensive in February 2022.

A Russian shelling attack on the town of Kostyantynivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region killed three people earlier Saturday, regional prosecutors said.

Russian forces launched more than 500 drones and missiles at Ukraine in a large-scale combined attack that mainly targeted the west of the country, Kyiv said on Wednesday (September 3, 2025).

The Ukrainian air force said Moscow had fired 502 drones and 24 missiles, while regional officials in the west of the country said several people were wounded and residential homes and civilian infrastructure were damaged.

“Three missiles and 69 strike drones hit in 14 locations, and the debris of downed projectiles fell in 14 locations,” the air force added.

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The Russian army said Wednesday (August 20, 2025) it had captured three villages in eastern Ukraine, claiming fresh territorial gains despite U.S.-led peace efforts and a flurry of diplomacy to end the conflict.

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Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Telegram its troops had “continued to advance deep into the enemy defences” in the embattled Donetsk region, taking the villages of Sukhetske and Pankivka.

They are near a section of the front where the Russian army broke through Ukrainian defences last week, between the logistics hub of Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka.

In the neighbouring central-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region the Russian army said it had captured the village of Novogeorgiivka.

Moscow’s troops first entered the region — previously spared from fighting — in July.

These latest advances come amid accelerated efforts by the U.S. and European leaders to broker a peace deal that would end the offensive, now in its fourth year.

U.S. President Donald Trump said his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, had agreed to meet the Ukrainian leader and accept some Western security guarantees for Kyiv.

These promises were met with caution in European capitals.

According to three sources familiar with a Monday call between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, the Russian leader proposed holding the summit with Volodymyr Zelensky in Moscow — an idea rejected by the Ukrainian President.