MOSCOW — Russia on Friday said it had captured the eastern Ukrainian city of Kostyantynivka, a key post on the road leading to the last major cities in the Donbas region under Kyiv’s control.
The battle for this city, which had around 78,000 inhabitants before the war, has been taking place since late 2025 and now constitutes the main Russian effort on a front more than 1,000 kilometers long.
“Kostyantynivka has been completely taken. The city is now entirely under our control,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, including those from AFP, announcing that President Vladimir Putin had spoken with the military about it.
Appearing on television in uniform in front of his general staff, Putin thanked Russian soldiers, stating that the capture of Kostyantynivka is of “major strategic importance”.
“The Russian armed forces continue to firmly maintain the strategic initiative” at the front, Putin added.
A Russian commander, Anton Grunis, said the army was engaged in “search and elimination operations against isolated soldiers of the Ukrainian armed forces who are trying to hide in buildings, cellars and ruins”.
Kostyantynivka is one of the last Ukrainian strongholds on the way to the key cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, whose capture is the Kremlin’s ultimate objective in the Donbas.
Peskov said Putin went to a Russian army command post, where he listened to a report from his general staff and thanked the Russian soldiers.
Russian forces now control the entire Lugansk region in eastern Ukraine, one of the two regions that make up the Donbas, Peskov added.
Chief of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, meanwhile said Russian forces were now nine kilometers from Zaporizhzhia, a major city in southern Ukraine that had more than 700,000 inhabitants before the war.
Another commander reported that his troops were 10 kilometers from the regional capital of Sumy in the north, which had around 250,000 inhabitants before the war.