Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected Russian statements about the capture of a village in the northeastern region of Sumy.
“As of this morning, the Russian flag in the village (Ryzhivka) has been destroyed and there are no longer any occupiers,” Zelensky wrote in Telegram on Monday.
The alleged capture of the village was a Russian propaganda campaign, he added.
On Sunday evening, the head of Russia’s semi-autonomous republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, said a special unit had captured the border village of Ryzhivka in the Sumy region and inflicted significant losses on Ukrainian forces.
However, military observers quickly doubted this claim, although there had been speculation for weeks that Russian forces would open a new front in Sumy.
Ukraine has been fending off an all-out Russian invasion for more than two years.
