Russia has rejected a US-backed peace plan as it continues to make battlefield gains in eastern Ukraine and push its maximalist war aims.

On Monday, the Kremlin claimed Russia’s armed forces had captured the city of Pokrovsk , a major logistical hub. Sitting on critical road and rail lines in the Donetsk region, Krasnoarmeysk – as it is known in Russian – had been the focus of fierce fighting for months.

The city’s capture “would threaten a Ukrainian garrison nearby with encirclement and could give Russian forces a staging ground for further advances to the north and west”, said the independent Moscow Times .

The suggestion by President Vladimir Putin and leading Russian government and military figures that Ukraine’s frontline faces “imminent collapse” is, however, a “false narrat

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