Ukraine has said its troops have recaptured a fourth village in a cluster of settlements in the southeast, a day after reporting the first small gains of a counteroffensive against Russian forces.
Soldiers held up the Ukrainian flag in Storozheve in the Donetsk region in unverified video footage posted online and the defence minister thanked the 35th Separate Brigade of Marines for regaining control of the village.
Ukraine has enforced strict operational silence to avoid compromising an operation it hopes will retake swathes of land in the east and south, and threaten the land bridge Russia uses to supply the occupied Crimea peninsula.
Russia, which said last week the counteroffensive had begun, has depicted it as a failure so far, posting images of destroyed American and German-made fighting vehicles and tanks.
Reuters was unable to verify the situation on the battlefield.
Ukraine said yesterday its forces had liberated three villages - Blahodatne, Neskuchne and Makarivka - that lie on the edge of Donetsk region next to Zaporizhzhia region.
Storozheve is adjacent to Blahodatne.
The reported advance, if confirmed, appears modest, with Makarivka about 5 km from what had been the frontline.
Makarivka is 90 km from the southern rim of the Russian land bridge on the Sea of Azov.
Some prominent Russian military bloggers said fighting for Makarivka was still raging but confirmed Ukrainian forces had taken Blahodatne and Neskuchne.
Russia has built sprawling fortifications to defend against an attack by Ukrainian troops trained and equipped by the West.
Ukraine's armed forces general staff said in its regular fighting update that 25 battles raged in the previous 24 hours near Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Maryinka in the Donetsk region, and near Bilohorivka in the Luhansk region.
Serhiy Cherevatyi, spokesperson for the eastern military command, said Ukrainian forces had continued to counterattack on the flanks of Bakhmut and had pushed Russian forces back by up to 700 metres there.
Russia said it captured the devastated city last month after some of the bloodiest fighting of its February 2022 full-scale invasion.
Both sides have said their forces have inflicted heavy losses on each other over the past week
Analysts at Washington-based think tank the Institute for the Study of War say that Kyiv's forces have launched counteroffensive operations in at least four front-line areas.
After months of building expectations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed on Saturday that a counter-offensive against Russian forces had begun.
Russia's defence ministry said Ukraine had made an unsuccessful attack Saturday night on a Russian warship in the Black Sea.
The Priazovye is on patrol duties monitoring the natural gas pipelines there.
The ministry said the attack, by drone boats, had been repelled and its vessel was not damaged.
The civilians killed and wounded in the shelling of the rescue boat were caught in the fallout from Tuesday's destruction of the Russian-controlled Kakhovka dam along the front line in the southern Kherson region.
Ukrainian officials say seven people died and 35 people, including seven children, are still missing following the devastating flood unleashed by the dam's destruction.
While Ukraine accuses Russia of blowing up the dam on the Dnipro River, Moscow says Kyiv fired on it.
"This is the worst environmental catastrophe since Chernobyl so we are investigating not only a war crime but also an ecocide," Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin said after visiting the site with representatives of the International Criminal Court.
A total of 450 tonnes of turbine oil have spilled into the waters of the Dnipro and the Black Sea, he added.
Ukrainian Interior Minister Igor Klymenko said 77 towns and villages had been flooded in Kherson, where five people died, and Mykolaiv, where two died, while 162,000 people were without water supplies.
President Zelensky said 4,000 people had been evacuated in the two regions.
An employee at Kherson's meteorological agency, Lora Musiyan, said the level of water had dropped by 1.7m from its peak measurements recorded last week.
In Kherson city, the largest population centre near the dam, the water has begun to subside enough to allow locals to return to assess the damage, an AFP correspondent at the scene said.
"The losses are significant. I don't even know what to do now," said Oleksiy Gesin, surveying the scene after his grocery store was flooded to chest height.
Damage to the dam may also be a problem for an upstream reservoir used to cool nearby reactors at Europe's largest nuclear power plant.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said its experts need access to a location near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to assess "a significant discrepancy" in water level measurements, as well as to the electrical switchyard at the thermal power plant.
"Even though the (plant) has not been producing electricity for several months now, it still needs access to water and power for cooling and other essential safety and security functions and to avoid the risk of a potential fuel meltdown and release of radioactive material," the IAEA said in a statement.
