By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia said on Tuesday it had taken two eastern Ukrainian towns and open-source data indicated that Moscow’s forces were advancing at their fastest pace in at least a year amid signs the conflict is drawing in new players such as North Korea.
The 2-1/2-year-old war in Ukraine is entering what Russian analysts say is its most dangerous phase as Moscow’s forces advance, North Korea sends troops to Russia and the West ponders how the conflict will end.
Russia said its forces had seized control of the town of Selydove, which had a population of 20,000 before the war and had been under sustained attack over the last week.
Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov also congratulated Russia’s 114th motorised rifle brigade on taking Hirnyk, which had a pre-war population of over 10,000 and lies about 12 km (7.5 miles) from Selydove.
Ukraine’s military did not comment directly on the Russian claims but reported 31 combat clashes on the Pokrovsk front during the past 24 hours, including near Selydove.
Ukraine’s Deep State open-source intelligence map showed part of Selydove as being under Russian control, with about a third as a grey zone.
Russian pro-war bloggers said Moscow’s forces had pierced Ukrainian defences at key points along the front in southern Donbas. Russian forces are moving to encircle the town of Kurakhove and preparing for an attack on Pokrovsk.
FASTEST ADVANCE
Russian forces, which President Vladimir Putin ordered into Ukraine in February 2022, advanced in September at their fastest rate since March 2022, according to open-source data, despite Ukraine taking a part of Russia’s Kursk region.
But during the week of Oct. 20-27, Russia made even bigger gains – taking 196.1 square km (75.7 square miles) of Ukrainian territory, according to the Russian media group Agentstvo which analysed Ukrainian open-source maps.
“The Russian army has not had such a rapid weekly advance since at least the beginning of this year,” Agentstvo, which is considered by Russia to be a “foreign agent”, said on its Telegram channel.
It said it had used raw data from Ukraine’s Deep State analysts to make the conclusion, adding that Ukrainian defences in the Donbas had been weakened by Kyiv’s decision to send troops into Russia’s Kursk region.
The advance of Moscow’s forces, which control just under a fifth of Ukraine, has underlined Russia’s vast numerical superiority in men and materiel as Ukraine pleads for more weapons from the Western allies that have been supporting it.
Russia controls Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, about 80% of the Donbas – a coal-and-steel zone comprising the Donetsk and Luhansk regions – and more than 70% of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.
To control all of Donbas, Russia would have to take an additional 10,000 square km (3,860 square miles) of territory.
The U.S. will not impose new limits on Ukraine’s use of American weapons if North Korea joins Russia’s war, the Pentagon said on Monday, as NATO said North Korean military units had been deployed to Kursk.
The Pentagon estimated that 10,000 North Korean troops had been deployed to Russia for training.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Helen Popper)
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