The Ukrainian army reported fewer Russian ground attacks in the past 24 hours, but it said there was still ongoing shelling in many places along the front lines in the east and south of the country.
The overall picture suggests relatively static front lines, with Russian troops still unable to take towns and villages they first attacked a month ago.
In its operational update for Friday, the General Staff indicated that Russian forces appeared to be regrouping and that efforts to take territory were limited to a few areas, such as the Popasna in the Luhansk region.
Serhii Hayday, head of the military administration in Luhansk, said Popasna “is being bombed around the clock. The enemy is attacking daily in whole battalions. The city is almost destroyed.”
He said some civilians were still in Popasna, but they had been cut off. He added that fierce fighting had continued around Vojevodivka, where “the settlement has passed from the Russians to us a few times”.
The General Staff named a series of other towns in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, such as Severodonetsk and Avdiivka, saying that “the enemy was not engaged in active hostilities”.
In the south, the General Staff said the Russians “did not engage in active hostilities and maintain occupied borders, strengthen their air defense systems and electronic warfare; fire at the positions of our troops.”
In the area where the Kherson and Mykolaiv regions meet, the Russians had conducted aerial reconnaissance, the General Staff said. Both sides have tried to take territory in this area, with the Russians trying to push north and the Ukrainians trying to threaten Russian control of the city of Kherson, an important link with Crimea.
On Thursday, Russian journalists reported that the Russian flag had been raised in the town of Snihurivka in the Mykolaiv region.
Reports from the regions also suggest that most of the Russian activity took the form of rocket and artillery strikes.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region, the Kryvyi Rih district had been shelled, but there were no casualties, said Valentyn Reznichenko, head of the military administration.
Oleksandr Vilkul, head of the military administration of the city of Kryvyi Rih, said that “the enemy has been firing intensely all night along the entire line of contact.”
Meanwhile, a cruise missile hit Pokrovsky, which lies deep in Dnipropetrovsk, damaging the local power line, according to the regional council.
Russian forces have sporadically aimed missiles at infrastructure in the Dnipropetrovsk region, but do not control any part of the region, according to Ukrainian forces.