A Russian strike on Friday killed five people and wounded 23 in Ukraine鈥檚 industrial Dnipropetrovsk region, where Moscow has stepped up fatal bombardments, authorities said.
Russian forces, which invaded Ukraine early in 2022, are vying to gain a foothold in Dnipropetrovsk for the first time in the war.
鈥業n total, Russians killed five people there are 23 people injured,鈥� regional governor Sergiy Lysak said after the attack on the town of Samar, outside the region鈥檚 main city Dnipro.
Russian forces earlier this week struck both Dnipro and Samar with missiles, leaving at least 23 dead.
Ukrainian military officials have said that previous Russian strikes near Samar hit Ukrainian military training facilities.
Moscow earlier this week claimed to have captured two more villages near the border of the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Separately, authorities in the northern region of Kharkiv said Russian attacks killed one person and wounded three others, without specifying where the attack had taken place.
Russian president Vladimir Putin said Friday that Russia and Ukraine鈥檚 demands for peace were 鈥榓bsolutely contradictory鈥�, after two rounds of peace talks have failed to bring the sides closer to an elusive ceasefire.
Russian and Ukrainian negotiators swapped memorandums outlining their visions for how to end the three-year conflict at peace talks in Istanbul this month.
But other than large-scale prisoner exchanges, the talks have failed to result in any progress toward ending the fighting, triggered by Russia launching its military offensive in February 2022.
鈥楢s for the memorandums, as expected, nothing surprising happened these are two absolutely contradictory memorandums,鈥� Putin said at a press conference in Minsk, Belarus.
