(Reuters) – Ukrainian forces are curbing one of the most powerful Russian offensives since the start of Moscow’s large-scale invasion of its smaller neighbor, the commander-in-chief of kyiv’s forces said on Saturday.
Russian troops advanced in September at their fastest pace since March 2022, the month after President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion, according to open source data. Ukraine joined Russia’s Kursk region in August.
“Ukrainian armed forces are preventing one of the most powerful Russian offensives from launching a full-scale invasion,” General Oleksandr Syrskyi wrote on the messaging app Telegram.
After failing to capture the capital kyiv early in the war and achieve a decisive victory, Putin scaled back his war ambitions by seizing the industrial heartland of Donbass in eastern Ukraine, which covers the regions Luhansk and Donetsk.
Donbass has since become the main theater of the war, where some of Europe’s biggest battles in generations took place and thousands of soldiers from each side died.
On Saturday, Moscow announced it had captured two more settlements along the Donbass front line. In the week of October 20-27 alone, Russia captured nearly 200 square kilometers (80 square miles) of Ukrainian territory, according to Russian media group Agentstvo, which analyzed open source Ukrainian maps.
The war is entering what Russian analysts see as its most dangerous phase as Moscow’s forces advance, North Korea sends troops to Russia and the West considers how the conflict will end.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has traveled the world to pressure NATO countries to allow kyiv to use long-range missiles they have supplied to strike targets deep inside Russia.
Ukraine is bracing for what could be the harshest winter of the war after long-range Russian airstrikes destroyed what officials say is about half of its power-generating capacity .
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; editing by William Mallard)
