Russian forces take control of two more Ukrainian villages, defence ministry says

MOSCOW, March 17 (Reuters) – Russian troops have taken control of the village of Sopych in Ukraine’s northern Sumy region and Kalenyky in the eastern Donetsk region, the Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.

The Russian announcement was issued a day after Moscow and Kyiv issued conflicting claims on which side was making advances along the 1,250 km (775 mile) frontline in the four-year-old war.

“The armed forces of the Russian Federation liberated the settlement of Kalenyky in (Donetsk) as well as establishing control over the settlement of Sopych in Sumy region,” the ministry said in a post on Telegram.

In an assessment of the progress of Russian forces, top general Valery Gerasimov on Monday said his troops were continuing to set up buffer zones in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions.

Sopych is located on the border with Russia in the Sumy region, where Russian forces have for months been trying to establish a presence.

Ukraine’s public broadcaster, Suspilne, last week quoted the former head of the country’s foreign intelligence agency as saying that Russian troops had entered the village of Kalenyky and forcibly taken 19 residents into Russian territory.

Kalenyky is located east of the heavily defended city of Sloviansk. Gerasimov, in his assessment, said Russian troops were “actively moving towards Sloviansk”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Monday said Kyiv’s troops had disrupted a planned Russian offensive, with the intensity of attacks “not what Russia had planned and what its command promised to Russia’s political leadership”.

Russia’s Defence Ministry, in its latest tally, said its air defence units had intercepted 35 Ukrainian drones from 1:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. (1000-1700 GMT), most of them over Krasnodar region on Ukraine’s eastern border.

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Lucy Papachristou Editing by Andrew Osborn, Ron Popeski and Michael Perry)