How do you define towns and cities? The Russians have taken Kherson, Melitopol, Berdyansk, Volnovakha, to name just a few examples. Are those towns or cities in your eyes?
The fundamental problem here is that the Russians botched the initial phase of the campaign and are now struggling to recover. They vastly underestimated the Ukrainians based on Putin's delusions about how they're all "one people" and flawed intelligence assessments saying this campaign was going to be just like 2014. Now the Russian army is in the middle of a full-blown conventional war that it simply wasn't prepared to fight. On the plus side for the Russians, it seems like they finally *get it*...by which I mean they have settled on the strategic plan they should have had in the beginning: seize Donbas, establish a land bridge to Crimea, cripple the Ukrainian military. I doubt that capturing Kiev and Odesa are part of the plan anymore. They gave up on those objectives a long time ago, and they were smart to do so.