At the end of last week, Russia and Ukraine put forward conflicting versions of the situation at the front in the Zaporizhzhia region, Reuters reported on Monday.

Moscow says it has halted Kyiv’s counteroffensive, while the Ukrainian army says it is still advancing, Agerpres reports.

Since June, when the counteroffensive began, Ukraine has recaptured only a few villages in this southeastern region; progress has been slight, and the front line in the east and south has changed little over the past year.

“The enemy has been stopped, and his vaunted counteroffensive has been completely blocked,” Evgeny Balytskyi, Russia’s elected leader in Zaporizhzhia, told the Russian state news agency. According to him, small battles are being fought. the villages of Robotine and Shcherbaki, located at a distance of approximately 20 km from each other.

The Ukrainian General Staff announced on Sunday evening that Russian troops had unsuccessfully attacked Robotyne and Verbove several kilometers to the east.

The Ministry of Defense in Moscow revealed at a daily press briefing the same day that Russian forces had repelled Ukrainian attacks near the two villages.

Over the weekend, Russia also said that its air defenses had repelled attacks from Ukraine in the same area.

Both sides control the spread of information from the front and claim successes in small areas, making it difficult to determine much progress or the intensity of the fighting, Reuters reported.

Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank, believe that the Ukrainians have made “limited progress west of Verbovoy.”

The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy denied that the war had reached a “dead end” after the commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valery Zaluzhny, said that the conflict was about to become static, exhausted.