On Saturday, Russia announced that it had taken control of a new village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, which Moscow claims its forces have reached since early July.

The Russian defense ministry reported that its troops had captured the village of Novomykolaivka, situated near the border with the Donetsk region, a key area of ongoing conflict.

However, AFP was unable to verify this assertion.

According to DeepState, an online battlefield mapping tool used by Ukrainian military analysts, the village remains under Ukrainian control.

In the region, Russian forces are significantly better equipped and outnumber Ukrainian troops. They have been conducting offensive operations in Ukraine for several months and are making advances along the eastern front.

At the end of August, Ukraine admitted that Russian troops had entered the Dnipropetrovsk region, which Moscow claimed to have made progress in at the beginning of the month.

Currently, the Russian military occupies approximately one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.

The Kremlin has insisted that Ukraine withdraw from the eastern Donbas region as a prerequisite for ending hostilities, a condition that Ukraine has firmly rejected.

The Dnipropetrovsk region is not among the five regions—Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea—that Moscow has officially declared as Russian territory.

On Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin aims to “occupy all of Ukraine” and would continue until this goal is reached, even if Ukraine were to concede land.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin mentioned on Friday that peace talks with Kyiv are currently on “hold,” following multiple unsuccessful attempts in recent months to resolve the conflict that escalated due to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.