THE RUSSIAN army over-ran three settlements in the southern Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, Kiev’s top military commander said today, as Moscow’s forces expand their efforts to capture more Ukrainian territory.

Dense fog enabled Russian troops to infiltrate Ukrainian positions in Zaporizhzhia, General Oleksandr Syrskyi wrote on the messaging app Telegram, adding that Ukrainian units are locked in “gruelling battles” to repel the Russian thrust.

He noted, however, that the fiercest battles are still in the besieged Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, in the eastern Donetsk region, where close to half of all front-line clashes took place over the previous 24 hours.

The cities of Kupiansk and Lyman in Ukraine’s north-eastern Kharkiv region have also recently witnessed an uptick in combat.

Russia launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbour almost four years ago and now occupies roughly one fifth of Ukrainian land.

New US sanctions that take aim at Russia’s oil sector, which is the mainstay of the Russian economy, are due to come into force on November 21, in the hopes that Russian President Vladimir Putin will be compelled to accept a ceasefire.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky called for the removal of the beleaguered country’s justice and energy ministers today, amid a wide-reaching corruption scandal involving the state nuclear power company.

“Among other things, this is a matter of trust,” Mr Zelensky said in a video statement on his Telegram channel as he urged the prime minister to remove Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko and Energy Minister Svitlana Grynchuk.

The announcement came after Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency said on Tuesday that it had detained five people and identified seven other suspects in a major corruption investigation involving alleged kickbacks worth about $100 million (£76.1m) in the energy sector.

The National Anti-Corruption Bureau did not identify the suspects but said they include a businessman believed to be the mastermind, a former adviser to the energy minister, and an executive with the power company Energoatom.