By Lidia Kelly and Oleksandr Kozhukhar
(Reuters) – Russian troops have been advancing in Ukraine at their fastest pace since the first months of the war, moving into the city of Kurakhove and taking advantage of Kyiv’s military defenses, analysts said on Monday.
“The Russian military has recently been expanding faster than it did in 2023,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in a report.
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The report said the incident was confirmed in the battlefield near Vuhledar and Velyka Novosilka, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine.
The Russian army occupied about 235 square kilometers (91 square miles) in Ukraine last week, a weekly record for 2024, according to a report published by the independent Russian news group Agentstvo.
Agentstvo analyzed data from Deep State, a group with close ties to the Ukrainian military that studies attacks and provides advanced maps.
The Institute for the Study of War report and pro-Russian military bloggers say that the Russian army is in Kurakove, which represents a step towards the Pokrovsk area in Donetsk. The Deep State said on the Telegram messaging app on Monday that Russian forces are close to Kurakhove.
Deep State data analyzed by Agentstvo showed that Russia took more places in Ukraine from the beginning of November than in the whole of October, which had seen a rapid increase from the first months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“The advance of the Russian army in the southeast of Ukraine is largely the result of the discovery and the use of techniques that are vulnerable in Ukrainian lines,” researchers at the Institute for the Study of War said in their report.
Overwhelmed by Russian forces, Ukraine’s military is struggling to recruit and supply new units, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy relentlessly pleading with Kyiv’s Western allies for military aid.
Zelenskiy said he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s main goal is to take over all of Donbas, which includes Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and drive Ukrainian forces out of Kursk region, where they have been controlling parts of that area since August.
(Writing by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)