MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russian forces pressing their slow advance through eastern Ukraine have captured the village of Sichneve in east-central Dnipropetrovsk region, the Russian Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.
Russian forces have for months been pushing westward along sections of the 1,000-km (620-mile) front line, capturing new villages nearly on a daily basis, mainly in Donetsk region.
Ukraine’s military says its forces are holding their frontline positions and on Monday issued a pointed denial that its troops were surrounded in Pokrovsk, a logistics hub in Donetsk region under heavy attack for months.
Russian forces now hold about 20% of Ukraine’s territory since invading their smaller neighbour in February 2022 and have formally annexed four regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
Moscow says it has full control of Luhansk region and holds parts of the others, plus Crimea, a peninsula it seized in 2014.
Authorities in Kyiv made no mention of Moscow’s latest announcement of a captured village in Dnipropetrovsk region and for weeks have denied that Russian forces have entered the region.
Reuters could not independently confirm the battlefield report.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s military said Ukrainian forces continued action to contain Russian forces that have been trying to move closer to Pokrovsk, once a city of 60,000 residents and site of Ukraine’s only colliery producing coking coal.
“At the same time, some sources are disseminating information suggesting that our units are surrounded in Pokrovsk,” it said in an evening report. “This is absolutely not true.”
Ukraine’s top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, writing on Facebook, said Russian forces were trying to advance along the entire length of the front line.
He said Ukrainian forces were facing the toughest fighting near Pokrovsk and two other areas of Donetsk region.
But he added Kyiv’s troops had “achieved successes” in Sumy region on Ukraine’s northern border, where Russian forces had secured a foothold in recent months.
He also said they continued to fight in Russia’s Kursk region, where Kyiv staged a mass incursion a year ago. Russia said it had expelled all Ukrainian troops from Kursk in April.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou; Editing by Mark Trevelyan, Ron Popeski and Sandra Maler)
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