By Guy Faulconbridge and Lidia Kelly
MOSCOW (Reuters) -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 Greater London over the past month, analysts and war bloggers say.
The war is entering what some Russian and Western officials say could be its most dangerous phase after Moscow’s forces made some of their biggest territorial gains and the United States allowed Kyiv to strike back with U.S. missiles.
“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 235 sq km (91 sq miles) in Ukraine over the past week, a weekly record for 2024, it said.
Russian forces had taken 600 sq km (232 sq miles) in November, it added, citing data from DeepState, a group with close links to the Ukrainian army that studies combat footage and provides frontline maps.
Russia began advancing faster in eastern Ukraine in July just as Ukrainian forces carved out a sliver of its western region of Kursk. Since then, the Russian advance has accelerated, according to open source maps.
Russia’s forces are moving into the town of Kurakhove, a stepping stone towards the logistical hub of Pokrovsk in Donetsk, and have been exploiting the vulnerabilities of Kyiv troops along the frontline, analysts said.
“Russian forces recently have been advancing at a significantly quicker rate than they did in the entirety of 2023,” analysts at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said in a report.
The General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said in its Monday update that 45 battles of varying intensity were raging along the Kurakhove part of the frontline that evening.
The Institute for the Study of War report and pro-Russian military bloggers say Russian troops are in Kurakhove. Deep State said on its Telegram messaging app on Monday that Russian forces are near Kurakhove.
“Russian forces’ advances in southeastern Ukraine are largely the result of the discovery and tactical exploitation of vulnerabilities in Ukraine’s lines,” Institute analysts said in their report.
Russia says it will achieve all of its aims in Ukraine no matter what the West says or does.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly said peace cannot be established until all Russian forces are expelled and all territory captured by Moscow, including Crimea, is returned.
But outnumbered by Russian troops, the Ukrainian military is struggling to recruit soldiers and provide equipment to new units.
Zelenskiy has said he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s main objectives were to occupy the entire Donbas, spanning the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and oust Ukrainian troops from the Kursk region, parts of which they have controlled since August.
(Additional reporting by Oleksandr Kozhukhar in Kyiv; Writing by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne and Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Clarence Fernandez)