A destroyed research institute building is seen after an attack in Donetsk, a Russian-controlled city in Ukraine, on August 26, 2026. Local Russian-installed authorities described the incident as a Ukrainian strike amid the continuing Russia-Ukraine war.
Stringer | AFP | Getty Images
Russian troops have stepped up assaults across Ukraine’s so-called “fortress belt,” a chain of heavily defended industrial cities in the eastern Donetsk region, as Moscow seeks to increase pressure on some of Kyiv’s most important strongholds after more than four and a half years of full-scale war.
The strategic cities of Kostyantynivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk have remained major targets for Russian forces, forming a central part of the Kremlin’s broader effort to seize all of Donetsk Oblast, one of its stated priorities in the conflict.
Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, speaking Thursday from an undisclosed location, said Russian units had pushed to within four kilometers, or about 2.5 miles, of Sloviansk’s eastern outskirts.
Gerasimov further claimed that Russian forces had breached the first defensive line of the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk fortified area in some sectors, adding that military operations were now unfolding across a front stretching roughly 160 kilometers.
The claims follow recent battlefield data from Deep State, a Ukrainian open-source mapping project, which identified the area around Kostyantynivka as one of the most active zones of combat. The city is widely viewed as a key gateway to the wider Donbas region.
Analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said earlier this week that Russian forces had renewed and intensified efforts to move on Sloviansk from the east and southeast, after earlier advances from the northeast failed to gain traction.
In its latest assessment of the Ukraine war, ISW challenged Gerasimov’s recent claims of battlefield advances, however, saying they appeared to be designed to construct a narrative of “pervasive” Russian military success and “remain divorced from reality.”
Away from the front line, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha on Friday welcomed a fresh push from four European Union member states seeking to leverage frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine’s war effort.
“It is only fair and logical to use Russian assets, rather than only European taxpayers money’, to cover additional costs of defending Ukraine and the rest of Europe from the Russian threat,” Sybiha said in a social media post.
“This discussion needs to be rational, not emotional,” he added.
Ministers representing Spain, Sweden, Poland and the Netherlands on Thursday sent a letter to the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, calling on Brussels to restart work on plans to use more than 200 billion euros ($232.9 billion) in Russian central bank assets immobilized under EU sanctions.
Talks on the initiative, which Russia considers “blatantly illegal,” collapsed last year when Belgium blocked the move over liability concerns.
