MOSCOW (Dispatches) -  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 defense ministry said its troops had seized the village of Novomykolaivka near the border with the Donetsk region — the epicenter of fighting on the front.
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. 
 Russian battlegroups’ spokesmen reported that Ukrainian forces lost around 1,465 troops across all areas of the special military operation in the past 24 hours.
Reports from battlegroups East, North, West, Dnepr, Center, and South on Saturday also described in detail the enemy’s losses of hardware and equipment.
Russia launched its “special military operation” in Ukraine in February 2022 to liberate, demilitarize, and denazify the Russian-speaking regions.
Moscow seeks to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and opposes the use of Ukraine by the West to pressure Russia.
Diplomatic efforts have been ongoing but face repeated setbacks. In early 2025, three rounds of talks in Istanbul produced agreements on prisoner and body exchanges.
The Interfax news agency reported on Saturday that Russians MiG-31 fighter jets equipped with hypersonic ballistic missiles completed a four-hour flight over the neutral waters of the Barents Sea as part of ongoing ‘Zapad 2025’ military exercises, 
Russia and Belarus began the joint drills on Friday during a tense moment in the Russia-Ukraine war, days after Poland shot down suspected Russian drones over its airspace.