By Lidia Kelly and Oleksandr Kozhukhar
(Reuters) – Russian forces are advancing into Ukraine at the fastest pace since the early months of the war, moving toward the strategic town of Kurakhove and exploiting vulnerabilities in kyiv’s troops, analysts said on Monday.
“Russian forces have recently advanced at a rate significantly faster than in all of 2023,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in a report. .
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The report notes recent confirmed battlefield gains near Vuhledar and Velyka Novosilka, which are in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
The Russian military captured nearly 235 square kilometers (91 square miles) in Ukraine over the past week, a weekly record for 2024, according to a report published by independent Russian news group Agentstvo.
Agentstvo analyzed data from Deep State, a group closely linked to the Ukrainian military that studies combat footage and provides maps of the front.
The report from the Institute for the Study of War and pro-Russian military bloggers say Russian troops are in Kurakhove, which represents a stepping stone to Donetsk’s Pokrovsk logistics center. Deep State said on its Telegram messaging app on Monday that Russian forces were near Kurakhove.
Deep state data analyzed by Agentstvo showed that Russia has conquered more territory in Ukraine since the beginning of November than in the entire month of October, which had seen the fastest pace since the first month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“The advances of Russian forces in southeastern Ukraine are largely the result of the discovery and tactical exploitation of vulnerabilities in Ukrainian lines,” said analysts at the Institute for the Study of the war in their report.
Outnumbered by Russian troops, Ukraine’s army is struggling to recruit soldiers and provide equipment to new units, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy relentlessly pleading with kyiv’s Western allies for more military aid.
Zelenskiy said he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s main goals were to occupy all of Donbass, which includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and to oust Ukrainian troops from the Kursk region, where they have controlled parts of this territory since August.
(Writing by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; editing by Edwina Gibbs)
