Russia said Sunday it had captured two more settlements in east Ukraine, one in the Donetsk region and one in the Kharkiv region.<\/p>\n
Ukraine did not immediately comment on Russia’s claims.<\/p>\n
Moscow has been grinding forward on the front line for over a year, pressing its advantage against overstretched and outmanned Ukrainian troops.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, Russia said it had captured the village of Piddubne<\/a> in Donetsk and Sobolivka<\/a> in Kharkiv.<\/p>\n Piddubne was home to around 500 people before the conflict and lies just 7 kilometers (4 miles) from the border of Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region.<\/p>\n The Sobolivka village lies some 3 kilometers (2 miles) west of the town of Kupiansk, outside of areas Russia claims it is holding, according to battlefield maps by the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).<\/p>\n In two separate Telegram posts, the Russian Defense Ministry said its army units had \u201cliberated\u201d the settlements of Poddubnoye and Sobolevka, using Russian spellings for the localities.<\/p>\n The Russian military accelerated its advances for a third consecutive month in June.<\/p>\n Its territorial gains for that month were the biggest since November last year, according to an AFP analysis of ISW data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Russia said Sunday it had captured two more settlements in east Ukraine, one in the Donetsk region and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[8874,2000,299,14431,32631,657,753],"class_list":{"0":"post-242819","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-donetsk","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-kharkiv","12":"tag-occupied-ukraine","13":"tag-ukraine","14":"tag-ukraine-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114806626990453718","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}