Russia announced on Saturday that its forces had seized control of Novomykolaivka, a small village in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, near the border with Donetsk, the epicenter of fighting along the eastern front.
According to Moscow’s defence ministry, the advance marks further progress in its months-long offensive, with Russian troops pressing westward after claiming to have reached the region in early July.
However, the claim remains unverified. Independent confirmation has not been possible, and DeepState, a popular battlefield monitoring platform run by Ukrainian military analysts, reported that the village remains under Kyiv’s control.
Russia currently holds about one-fifth of Ukraine’s territory and has been intensifying attacks across the east, leveraging its advantage in manpower and equipment over Ukraine’s stretched forces.
At the end of August, Kyiv admitted for the first time that Russian troops had entered Dnipropetrovsk, though Ukrainian officials have rejected Moscow’s assertions of significant territorial gains there.
The Kremlin continues to demand Ukraine’s withdrawal from the Donbas as a precondition for halting hostilities—a demand firmly rejected by Kyiv.
Notably, the Dnipropetrovsk region is not among the five territories—Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea—that Moscow has formally claimed as part of Russia.
On Friday, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks nothing less than the total occupation of Ukraine. “He will not stop, even if we agree to cede territory,” Zelensky said.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, confirmed that peace talks with Ukraine remain “on pause,” following multiple failed attempts at negotiation since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
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