Russia Captures Several More Villages In Eastern & Southern Ukraine

Russian forces have continued rolling up villages in the east and south of Ukraine on Saturday and Sunday. A full battlefield press has continued even amid President Trump’s efforts to get all sides at the negotiating table.

First, on Saturday Russia’s defense ministry announced the capture of the two villages of Shchebraki in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and Panteleimonivka in the eastern Donetsk region.

“Russia is making a mockery of peacekeeping efforts around the world. It is dragging out the war and sowing terror because it still feels no real pressure,” Zelensky has said, condemning also stepped up drone strikes.

For example in the overnight and early Saturday hours there had been over 170 drones launched on Ukraine. Four people had been killed in Dnipro after a strike hit a hotel, injuring an additional 21 – including a pregnant woman.

On Sunday another key village was captured which lies less than ten kilometers from Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region. This particular boundary has not yet been breached after more than three years of war.

Russian forces “liberated the village of Zaporizhzhia” in the eastern Donetsk region, the defense ministry said.

Ukraine forces are still on the retreat in Kursk region, but there are reports of new fighting erupting inside Russia’s Belgorod.

“Just as Ukrainian forces are losing their grip on the pocket of Russia’s Kursk region they captured last year, they have staged a little-publicized incursion into the adjacent Belgorod region, according to Russian military bloggers,” Reuters reports.

“Several Russian military correspondents said on Friday that Ukrainian troops were inside Belgorod and fighting battles with Russian forces there,” the report adds.

As for the now failed Kursk operation, The NY Times has offered some new information on Washington and Kiev clashing on whether or not to launch the operation in the first place.

Via ‘War Mapper’: An overview map of the situation in Ukraine as of 27 March 2025.

“For the Americans, the incursion’s unfolding was a significant breach of trust. It wasn’t just that the Ukrainians had again kept them in the dark; they had secretly crossed a mutually agreed-upon line, taking coalition-supplied equipment into Russian territory,” the Times report states.

“It wasn’t almost blackmail, it was blackmail,” a Pentagon official said, based on an apparent agreement that Ukrainians could only fire American weapons within a limited zone.