Russia Says Its Forces Reach Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Region

Russia said its ground forces crossed into Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time, a symbolic milestone in their grinding offensive as prospects for a US-brokered ceasefire remain elusive.

The claim couldn’t be independently verified, and Ukraine’s southern defense forces, in response, said its troops were “holding their section of the front” while involved in a “tense” situation. 

Units of the 90th tank regiment crossed the western border of Donetsk into the adjacent Dnipropetrovsk region, Russia’s defense ministry said Sunday on its Telegram channel. 

It would be the first time Moscow’s land forces have set foot in one of Ukraine’s most populous and industrialized areas since the start of the large-scale invasion more than three years ago. 

The value of reaching the edge of the region appears mostly symbolic, as Kremlin troops are still more than 140 kilometers away from the regional capital of Dnipro, which is also protected by the river of the same name and its system of estuaries. 

Yet pushing further west could fuel the aggressive posture taken by President Vladimir Putin, who’s sticking with maximalist goals in Ukraine while resisting US President Donald Trump’s efforts to bring him to the negotiating table.

Dnipro is Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, behind Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa, with a pre-war population of about 1 million people. 

The advance takes place at a time Russia has recently seized small amounts of territory near the nations’ border in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region. It also brings the war onto the soil of two provinces which so far haven’t been officially earmarked for annexation by Putin. 

The Russian president has demanded that Kyiv surrender all of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson provinces, which Russia illegally annexed in 2022 but doesn’t fully control. That’s in addition to Crimea, which Kremlin forces illegally annexed in 2014. 

Russia’s slow-going ground war has picked up speed recently, with its capturing a small amount of territory in late May. 

Before the war’s start, Dnipropetrovsk was Ukraine’s second most populated region after Donetsk, and is the second-largest territory by land mass after the Odesa region. It’s home to a major steel industry, coal mining and machine building and is an important logistics hub for the army.

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