Moscow not officially claiming the region. Freezing temperatures have not calmed the fighting as the fourth anniversary of the war looms, and as an end-of-year diplomacy push to end Europe's worst conflict since World War II has so far yielded no breakthrough. Russia's defence ministry said in a statement that Moscow's army took the village of Bratske, in the south of the Dnipropetrovsk region. Moscow announced the capture as Kyiv said Russian night-time attacks on the Dnipropetrovsk region left more than a million people without power.

Moscow's advance in Ukraine picked up pace in the autumn, with outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian troops struggling to hold them back. Russian troops entered the Dnipropetrovsk region -- which lies west of the Donetsk region -- in August last year. It is not one of the four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions -- Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson -- that the Kremlin has proclaimed as Russian. Moscow also occupies parts of Ukraine's north-western Kharkiv region as well as the pocket it controls in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Last week, Ukraine said it had ordered the evacuation of thousands of children and their parents from frontline settlements in the Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Russian leader Vladimir Putin has in recent weeks insisted that Moscow intends to take the rest of eastern Ukraine -- whether by force or by diplomatic means. Russia launched its full-scale offensive on Ukraine in February 2022. (Bssnews)