Russia claims another village in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk

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MOSCOW - Russia on Saturday 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 Zelensky 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.