Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has dismissed concerns about a lack of progress by the Ukrainian army in its counteroffensive against Russia.
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"There is no stalemate," Kuleba said as he arrived at a meeting with NATO foreign ministers in Brussels on Wednesday.
"We have to continue, we have to keep fighting. Ukraine is not going to back down," he said.
Ukraine's strategic goal of retaking all its territory, including the peninsula of Crimea, "remains unchanged and nothing will stop us," he said.
The war's long front line - which stretches from the Black Sea coast up to Ukraine's northeastern border with Russia - is increasingly seen as being largely at a standstill, with Russia recently making some territorial gains.
Earlier this month, Ukraine's commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhny spoke of a stalemate in an interview with The Economist magazine.
"I think we need to realise that, yes, we haven't seen significant changes in the front line over the last months," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said after the meeting.
"But there is intense fighting going on," he said, adding that the Ukrainians are able "to inflict heavy losses" on the Russian army.
Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen said Ukraine was not losing the war.
"On the contrary, we cannot allow that," she said, adding that the current level of support by allies to Ukraine was however insufficient.
Kuleba again called on NATO members "to ramp up significantly production of weapons, ammunition and other military equipment" in support of Ukraine.
US State Secretary Antony Blinken expressed optimism that the US Congress will greenlight new aid for Ukraine "in the coming weeks".
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock renewed Germany's promise to support Ukraine as long as necessary.
"Nobody knows when this brutal, terrible war against humanity in Ukraine by Russia will come to an end," Baerbock said.
"That is still, as painful as it is, solely in the hands of the Russian president. This war could be over tomorrow if the Russian president withdraws his troops," she added.
NATO members "remain steadfast in their commitment to further step up political and practical support to Ukraine... and will continue their support for as long as it takes," a joint NATO-Ukraine statement issued after the meeting read.
On the battlefield, the Russian army said it had captured another village in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine.
The village of Artyomovskoye, also known as Khromove in Ukrainian, has now been brought completely under Russian control with support from the air and artillery, the Ministry of Defence in Moscow said on Wednesday.
The village is located west of Bakhmut, which was occupied by Russian troops and largely destroyed during the war.
The information could not be independently verified and there was initially no comment from Ukraine.
A Ukrainian HIMARS strike on a police station in the Russian-controlled part of the Kherson region on Tuesday killed four officers and wounded another 18 people, Russian state news agency TASS reported.
TASS quoted a local police representative as saying that five police officers had been critically wounded in the strike on a facility in the village of Yuvileine.
Fighting in Kherson region has heated up in recent months, with Ukrainian forces making a number of incursions on the Russian-held eastern bank of the Dnipro river, which divides the province.
with Reuters
Australian Associated Press
