Moscow — Russia said Friday its forces had captured a village near the embattled supply hub of Pokrovsk and another near the industrial town of Kurakhove, gaining ground in two key areas of the east Ukraine front line.   

Moscow has been advancing in east Ukraine for months, pressing its advantage against overstretched and outgunned Ukrainian soldiers.  

Russian army units “liberated the settlements” of Sukhi Yaly and Pustynka in the eastern Donetsk region, Moscow’s defense ministry said in a daily briefing.   

Sukhi Yaly is about 13 kilometers southwest of Kurakhove, a strategic industrial town on the banks of a reservoir that Moscow is trying to encircle.   

Pustynka lies just south of Pokrovsk, an embattled logistics hub at the intersection of rail and road routes supplying Ukrainian troops across the front line.   

The nearly three-year conflict has escalated sharply in recent months, with Kyiv deploying U.S. and British-supplied long-range missiles in attacks on Russian soil and Moscow firing an experimental hypersonic weapon at Ukraine in response.   

Ukraine has been trying to put itself in as secure a position as possible ahead of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January.   

The Republican has promised to swiftly end the conflict once in power, raising concerns in Kyiv that Ukraine will be forced to make massive territorial concessions to Moscow. 

Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones struck the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky on Friday, killing three people and seriously wounding three others, the region’s Moscow-appointed governor said.   

Images shared by Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed governor of Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, showed what appeared to be bodies lying on a street and outside a building, covered with blankets.   

“This morning, Alyoshki was subjected to an inhumane kamikaze drone attack,” Saldo said, using the Russian spelling of the town’s name.   

He said the drones targeted an aid distribution point in the town, accusing Kyiv of directing the attack “exclusively at the civilian population.”   

“As a result… three people were killed. Three more citizens were seriously injured,” he said.   

Kyiv did not immediately comment but denies targeting civilians in Russian-occupied areas of the country.   

Oleshky had a population of about 20,000 people before Moscow launched its military assault on Ukraine in February 2022.   

It lies in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region, on the Russian-occupied eastern bank of the Dnipro river.   

The river acts as a de facto front line between Moscow’s and Kyiv’s forces, with both sides regularly accusing each other of firing artillery and drones across the vast waterway. 
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