Russian Federation Army Makes Record Advances on Ukraine Battlefield

Reuters news agency on November 27 quoted analysis by experts and war bloggers saying that Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine at the fastest pace since the conflict between the two countries broke out on February 24, 2022.

Russian forces advanced across much of Ukraine in early 2022 before being pushed back east and south, Reuters reported. The 1,000-kilometer frontline has largely held for the past two years, but Russian forces have begun making small advances on the battlefield since July.

Currently, some Russian and Western officials warn that the Russia-Ukraine conflict may be at its most dangerous stage, when Moscow is said to be using third-party forces in Ukraine while Kiev is allowed by the US, UK and France to use long-range missiles provided by the West, including the US-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), to attack inside the territory of the Russian Federation.

Last week, the Russian Federation used the Oreshnik medium-range hypersonic ballistic missile to attack a military target located in the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine, while Kiev reported that Russia had carried out its largest-ever attack using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) on its territory on November 26 with the participation of 188 UAVs, causing severe damage to the power grid in the city of Ternopil.

But most notably, as the independent Russian news group Agentstvo reports, Moscow has “set new weekly and monthly records for the amount of territory it has captured in Ukraine.”

According to a report by the independent news group Agentstvo, over the past week, the Russian Federation's military has occupied nearly 235 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, marking a new record for weekly area occupied in 2024.

In November, according to data from DeepState, an organization that studies war imagery and provides maps of the front lines, Russian forces captured a total of 600 square kilometers in Ukraine.

Most recently, on November 26, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported that its forces had captured the village of Kopanky in the Kharkiv region, another hotspot in the Russian military operation north of the main fighting zone in Donetsk.

Meanwhile, on November 25, Ukraine's Third Independent Strike Brigade said on Telegram that they had pushed Russian Federation forces out of the village.

Ukrainian media also quoted Nazar Voloshyn, a spokesman for the Khortytsya militia, as confirming that Kiev forces had repelled a Russian attack on the logistics center of Kupiansk, also in the Kharkiv region. This is the second time this month that the Ukrainian military has reported successfully repelling attacks in Kupiansk.

According to Mr. Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst at the Finnish Black Bird group, in November, the Russian Federation's forces controlled about 667 square kilometers, including some areas captured since October, but recorded late.

President Vladimir Putin, who replaced his defense minister in May, has repeatedly said that Russian forces are advancing more effectively and that Moscow will achieve all its goals in Ukraine, although he has not disclosed details of these goals.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that the main goal of the Russian leader is to occupy the Donbass region, including Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as push Ukrainian forces out of the Kursk region of the Russian Federation.

According to a source from the Ukrainian General Staff, Ukraine currently holds about 800 square kilometers of the original 1,376 square kilometers in Kursk and will continue to hold this position “as long as it is militarily appropriate.”

Reuters cited open intelligence sources as saying that currently, Russian Federation forces control 18% of Ukraine's territory, including the entire Crimean Peninsula, more than 80% of Donbass, more than 70% of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south, and nearly 3% of the Eastern Kharkiv region.