The Russian Defense Ministry announced on Monday that Russian forces had captured the village of Andriivka (Andreyevka in Russian) in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region, Reuters reported.
The agency notes that it cannot independently verify this information. The Russian armed forces have been reporting slow but steady progress westward through Donetsk region for months.
Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov thanked the army for the “liberation of the village of Andreyevka in the Donetsk People's Republic“, the ministry's Telegram channel wrote, quoted by TASS.
Russia “is almost done“ with the issuance of Russian passports to the population of the occupied territories in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin announced yesterday, quoted by Agence France-Presse. This is a step towards tightening Moscow's grip on the regions it claims to have annexed, the agency noted.
Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has been putting pressure on the population of the territories it controls to accept Russian citizenship. A similar process, condemned by Kiev, has also taken place in the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed by Russia in 2014, as well as in eastern Ukrainian regions that have been under the control of pro-Russian separatists since before 2022.
“Last year, the issuance of passports to residents of the liberated areas of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics and the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions was practically completed“, Putin said during a meeting with representatives of the Interior Ministry in Moscow. According to Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev, a total of 3.5 million passports have been issued.