MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia said on Wednesday it had captured two more villages in Ukraine and was attacking in the town of Vuhledar, a longtime Ukrainian stronghold.
Russia's Defence Ministry said its forces had taken the villages of Hostre and Hryhorivka, whose capture Reuters could not independently confirm.
State news agency RIA cited the Russian-installed head of Donetsk region, Denis Pushilin, as saying that fighting was taking place inside Vuhledar, which had a pre-war population of 14,000.
The Ukrainian governor of the region, Vadym Filashkin, said Russia's troops had not reached the outskirts of Vuhledar but its reconnaissance groups were operating there.
"Our defenders are trying to knock them out. The town has not been captured," he said in televised comments.
Asked about reports that Russian forces had encircled Vuhledar, a fortified mining town that has anchored Ukrainian defences in the southern Donetsk region since the start of the war in 2022, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "The dynamic is positive."
Russian forces in eastern Ukraine advanced at their fastest rate in two years in August, even though a Ukrainian incursion into Russia's Kursk region sought to force Moscow to divert troops.
Analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said Russia appeared to be intensifying a push on Vuhledar but its capture would not substantially alter Moscow's prospects for further advances, as it already controlled most of the main roads running into the town.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Mark Trevelyan and Felix Light; Editing by Alex Richardson)
