Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine at the fastest rate since the early days of the 2022 invasion, taking an area half the size of London over the past month.
Russian troops swept through swathes of Ukraine in early 2022 before being pushed back to its east and south. The 1000km front line has been largely static for two years, until the latest, smaller-scale advances that began in July.
The war is entering what some Russian and Western officials say could be its most dangerous phase, with Russia reported to be using North Korean troops in Ukraine and Kyiv now using Western-supplied missiles to strike back inside Russia.
Moscow, which like North Korea has not confirmed or denied the presence of the troops, used a hypersonic intermediate-range missile on Ukraine last week and Ukraine reported the biggest Russian drone attack on its territory so far on Tuesday.
"Russia has set new weekly and monthly records for the size of the occupied territory in Ukraine," independent Russian news group Agentstvo said in a report.
The Russian army captured almost 235sqkm in Ukraine over the past week, a weekly record for 2024, it said.
Russian forces had taken 600sqkm in November, it added, citing data from DeepState, which studies combat footage and provides front line maps.
On Tuesday, Russia's Defence Ministry reported the capture by its forces of another village, Kopanky, in Kharkiv region, another focus of Russian military activity north of the main theatre of fighting in Donetsk region.
Ukraine's third separate assault brigade, in a post on Telegram on Monday, said it had cleared the village of Russian soldiers.
President Vladimir Putin, who replaced his defence minister in May, has repeatedly said that Russian forces are advancing much more effectively - and that Russia will achieve all its aims in Ukraine, although he has not spelled them out in detail.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said he believed Putin's main objectives are to occupy the Donbas, spanning the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and oust Ukrainian troops from Russia's Kursk region, parts of which they have controlled since August,
A source on Ukraine's General Staff, said on Sunday that Ukraine now held around 800 of the 1376sqkm of Kursk that they held initially and would hold it "for as long as is militarily appropriate".
Russia controls 18 per cent of Ukraine including all of Crimea, just over 80 per cent of Donbas and more than 70 per cent of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south, as well just under three per cent of the eastern Kharkiv region, according to open source maps.
The thrust of the advance has been in Donetsk region, with Russian forces pushing towards the town of Pokrovsk and into the town of Kurakhove. Russia has increasingly encircled territory and then pummelled Ukrainian forces with artillery and glide bombs, according to Russian analysts.
Ukrainian officials say it is hard to expand mobilisation without knowing when Western military assistance is going to arrive in practice and how reliable it will be.
The General Staff of Ukraine's military said in an update on Tuesday afternoon that its forces had repelled 23 Russian attempts to advance along the Kurakhove part of the front line that evening. It said 25 attacks were repelled near Pokrovsk,
Russian war bloggers say that if Russia can pierce the Ukrainian defences around Kurakhove, they will be able to push westwards towards the city of Zaporizhzhia while securing their rear to allow a swing towards Pokrovsk.
Ukrainian military officials acknowledge the situation in the east is the worst now that it has been all year. Zelenskiy has blamed several factors including delays of up to a year in equipping brigades, partly because of the long time the US Congress took to sign off on a major Ukraine assistance package.
with DPA
