Here are the latest developments in the war in Ukraine.

Fierce fighting was underway Friday across a band of southeastern Ukraine, engulfing towns and villages on the banks of the Dnipro River, and Ukrainians acknowledged that Russia had taken control of some 42 small towns and villages in recent days.

But Russia has so far failed to make any major territorial gains in its renewed offensive, according to Ukrainian and Western officials.

A Russian general, Rustam Minnekayev, said Russia suggested that Russia’s aims were even broader, seeking to take control of a swath of territory that stretches all the way westward to a pro-Russia separatist enclave of Moldova, Ukraine’s neighbor to the southwest.

While it was unclear if General Minnekayev’s statement reflected official policy, Ukrainians have long warned that Russia’s aims go far beyond Western assessments. Analysts who study the Russian military and politics said they doubted that such an important shift in Moscow’s stated goals would be announced by someone as little-known as General Minnekayev, whose official duties involve propaganda, not military strategy.

Taking Ukraine’s south would require a breakthrough that Russia has thus far been unable to make. But the outlines of the grinding fight are just beginning to take shape, as the two militaries square off along increasingly fortified front lines that stretch over 300 miles. The Kremlin has largely achieved one of its strategic goals, seizing a “land bridge” along the Azov Sea that links the eastern Donbas region, now the focus of the war, with Crimea, the peninsula President Vladimir V. Putin invaded and annexed in 2014.

The only significant pocket of resistance remaining is a sprawling steel mill complex in the ruined port city of Mariupol, where hundreds of civilians and the last Ukrainian fighters are holed up in underground bunkers, under heavy bombardment and issuing urgent pleas for help.

Moscow scaled back its ambitions to focus on the east after failing to seize Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, along with other northern cities and being pushed back in its drive to the southern city of Odesa. Fighting is concentrated on a roughly 300-mile front in and west of Donbas. Read more

@nytimes