Russia announced today that it has completely captured Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, TASS reported, BTA reported.
"Units of the grouping of troops "West" have completed the liberation of the Luhansk People's Republic," the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation said. This statement has not been independently confirmed. There has been no reaction from the Ukrainian side so far.
In September 2022, Russia declared Luhansk and three other eastern Ukrainian regions - Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson - annexed. However, it has not established full control over any of these regions.
Russia captured Luhansk region almost entirely at the beginning of the war. This and the neighboring Donetsk region form the industrial region of Donbas, where a pro-Russian separatist rebellion broke out in 2014.
The Russian army is advancing slowly but methodically into the Donetsk region, of which it claims to have captured over 80%. Its demand that Ukraine withdraw its troops from the rest of the Donetsk region is one of the main stumbling blocks in the peace talks that Kiev and Moscow are conducting with the mediation of Washington, and according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it is supported by the United States as a condition to provide guarantees for his country's security.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), for their part, announced today, quoted by Ukrinform, that they had repelled the largest attack by Russian motorized units since the beginning of the year in the Slavyansk direction.
After Kramatorsk, Slavyansk is the largest city in the Donetsk region that remains under Ukrainian control.
As for the situation on the front as a whole, the AFU recorded 171 battles yesterday.
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation reported today that two villages in Ukraine had been captured, TASS reported.
The first is Verkhnyaya Pisarevka in the northeastern Kharkiv region, a few kilometers south of the city of Vovchansk, which has become the scene of fierce fighting.
The second village is Boykovo in the southeastern Zaporizhia region. It is located near the administrative border with Dnipropetrovsk region, a region where the Ukrainian Armed Forces claim to have recently recaptured hundreds of square kilometers of territory.