Russia occupied the largest area of Ukraine this year last month. Steady advance outside the Donbas region
Russian soldiers with a self-propelled mortar in Ukraine: Russian Defense Ministry Press Service / AP / Profimedia
In November, the Russian army made the most significant advance on the Ukrainian front in the last year, according to an analysis carried out on Monday by AFP based on data provided by the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), reports Agerpres.
Russian troops thus occupied in November another 701 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, the second largest advance after the one in November 2024, when they occupied 725 square kilometers.
The Russian army currently occupies 19.3% of the territory of Ukraine, and since the beginning of the current year it has occupied about 5,400 square kilometers, almost 2,000 square kilometers more than the same period last year.
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However, Russian troop advances continued to slow in November in eastern Donetsk province, where they hold about 81 percent of the territory and are trying to complete the capture of the city of Pokrovsk, a key logistical hub for the Ukrainian military and the epicenter of the fighting.
By contrast, the Russian army made its biggest advances in November in the southeastern region of Zaporizhia, where it occupied another 272 square kilometers, as much as in the previous four months combined, and also managed to capture about 200 square kilometers in the east-central Dnipropetrovsk region, where Russian troops had not penetrated at all since the beginning of the war and now extended the front line there.
The war that began in February 2022 through the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to have the character of a bloody conflict of attrition, in which both camps suffer great human losses that are difficult to replace, and the progressive advance of Russian troops is also favored by their numerical superiority.
Encouraged by this advance and by the increasingly difficult situation of the Ukrainian army, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to a draft peace plan proposed by American President Donald Trump with the request that Russian sovereignty be internationally recognized over the Donbass (Donetsk and Lugansk provinces, the latter being almost completely controlled by the Russian army) and the Crimean peninsula. He threatened Ukraine that if it does not withdraw its troops from the territories claimed by Russia, it will lose them anyway in the fighting.
