Russia Claims Fresh Push Into Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk Region

Russia's army on Wednesday claimed to have captured another village in Ukraine's eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, accelerating its advance into an area that had previously been largely spared Moscow's intensive ground offensive.

The Defense Ministry said its troops had captured the village of Verbove, some 13 kilometers (eight miles) into the region that Russia said it had first crossed into back in July.

According to a battlefield map published by DeepState, run by Ukrainian military analysts, Russia's forces have advanced around 10 kilometers in the last 10 days in that part of the front line.

Such are gains relatively fast at this stage in a war that has been grinding on for more than three-and-a-half years and where both sides have failed to make rapid progress on the heavily entrenched and fortified front lines.

The Dnipropetrovsk region is not one of the five Ukrainian regions - Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea - that Moscow has publicly claimed as Russian territory.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky recently warned that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin still wants to capture the whole of Ukraine.

The Russian army currently controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory.

But there have been few major changes on the front line recently, with both sides suffering heavy losses.

According to AFP analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War, Moscow has captured around 1% of Ukraine's land over the past year.