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 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, which 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 (local time), 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 that peace negotiations with Kyiv were on “pause”, after the failure of several attempts in recent months to diplomatically resolve the conflict triggered by Russia’s full-scale offensive in February 2022.
Russian shelling on the town of Kostyantynivka in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region killed three people earlier on Saturday (local time), regional prosecutors said.
– Agence France-Presse
