In a Telegram post, Maliar said that over the past week the offensive group had taken seven settlements including Lobkove, Levadne and Novodarivka, along an approximately 100-km (60-mile) line running from west to east, just southeast of the city of Zaporizhzhia.

Maliar said troops had advanced a total of 6.5 km (4 miles). “The area of the territory taken under control was 90 square kilometers (56 square miles),” she said.

Ukraine has previously claimed its forces recaptured a cluster of four nearby settlements in the counteroffensive: Storozheve, Blahodatne, Neskuchne and Makarivka.

The push is already Ukraine’s most rapid advance for seven months, though the task of ending Moscow’s occupation of southern and eastern Ukraine is daunting, given Russia’s numerical superiority in men, ammunition and air power.

(Reporting by Elaine Monaghan; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Conor Humphries)