Moscow accelerates regional assault on Kyiv; Russia carries out war’s largest drone attack

27 Nov 2024

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 London over the past months, say analysts.

Russian forces staged their largest drone attack on Ukraine overnight, cutting power to much of the western region of Ternopil and damaging residential buildings in the Kyiv region, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday.

Of 188 drones used overnight, Ukraine shot down 76 and lost track of 96, probably due to active electronic warfare, the air force said. Five drones headed towards Belarus.

Russia accelerates advance in Ukraine’s east

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 London over the past month, analysts and war bloggers said on Tuesday.

Russian troops swept through swathes of Ukraine in early 2022 before being pushed back to its east and south. The 1,000km front line has been largely static for two years, until the latest, smaller-scale advances that began in July.

The war is entering what some Russian and Western officials say could be its most dangerous phase, with Russia reported to be using North Korean troops in Ukraine and Kyiv now using Western-supplied missiles to strike back inside Russia.

Moscow, which like North Korea has not confirmed or denied the presence of the troops, used a hypersonic intermediate-range missile on Ukraine last week while Ukraine reported the biggest Russian drone attack on its territory so far on Tuesday.

“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 235km2 in Ukraine over the past week, a weekly record for 2024, it said.

Russian forces had taken 600km2 in November, it said, citing data from DeepState, which studies combat footage and provides frontline maps.

On Tuesday, the Russian Defence Ministry reported the capture by its forces of another village, Kopanky, in the Kharkiv region, another focus of Russian military activity north of the main theatre of fighting in the Donetsk region.

Ukraine’s third separate assault brigade, in a post on Telegram on Monday, said it had cleared the village of Russian soldiers.

Ukrainian media quoted Nazar Voloshyn, a spokesperson for the Khortytsya group of troops, as saying Kyiv’s forces had repelled a Russian advance on the logistical centre of Kupiansk, also in the Kharkiv region. It was the second time this month that the Ukrainian military reported rebuffing an attack on Kupiansk.

Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst with Finland’s Black Bird Group, said Russian forces had taken control of an estimated 667km2 this month, citing data he said could include some October gains, noted with a delay.

President Vladimir Putin, who replaced his defence minister in May, has repeatedly said that Russian forces are advancing much more effectively – and that Russia would achieve all its aims in Ukraine, although he has not spelt them out in detail.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said he believes Putin’s main objectives are to occupy the Donbas, spanning the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and oust Ukrainian troops from Russia’s Kursk region, parts of which they have controlled since August.

A source on Ukraine’s General Staff said on Sunday that Ukraine now held around 800 of the 1,376km2 of Kursk that they initially held and would hold it “for as long as is militarily appropriate”.

Russia controls 18% of Ukraine including all of Crimea, just over 80% of Donbas and more than 70% of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south, as well just under 3% of the eastern Kharkiv region, according to open source maps.

The thrust of the advance has been in the Donetsk region, with Russian forces pushing towards the town of Pokrovsk and into the town of Kurakhove. Russia has increasingly encircled territory and then pummelled Ukrainian forces with artillery and glide bombs, according to Russian analysts.

Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said on Tuesday that Russia held the complete strategic initiative on the battlefield.

Neither side publishes accurate data on their losses, though Western intelligence estimates casualties to number hundreds of thousands killed or injured, while swathes of eastern and southern Ukraine have been turned into wastelands.

Ukrainian officials say it is hard to expand mobilisation without knowing when Western military assistance will arrive in practice and how reliable it will be.

The General Staff of Ukraine’s military said in an update on Tuesday afternoon that its forces had repelled 23 Russian attempts to advance along the Kurakhove part of the front line that evening. It said 25 attacks were repelled near Pokrovsk.

Russian war bloggers say that if Russia can pierce the Ukrainian defences around Kurakhove, they will be able to push westwards towards the city of Zaporizhzhia while securing their rear to allow a swing towards Pokrovsk.

Ukrainian military officials acknowledge the situation in the east is the worst now that it has been all year. Zelensky has blamed several factors including delays of up to a year in equipping brigades, partly because of the long time the US Congress took to sign off on a major Ukraine assistance package.

Russia hits power infrastructure in war’s largest drone attack

Russian forces staged their largest drone attack on Ukraine overnight, cutting power to much of the western region of Ternopil and damaging residential buildings in the Kyiv region, Ukraine’s officials said on Tuesday.

Intensified nightly drone attacks on Ukrainian cities are coinciding with a major push by Russia along frontlines in Ukraine’s east, where Russian forces have made some of the largest monthly territorial gains since 2022.

Of 188 drones used overnight, Ukraine shot down 76 and lost track of 96, probably due to active electronic warfare, the air force said. Five drones headed towards Belarus.

“The enemy launched a record number of Shahed attack UAVs and unidentified drones ...” it said, in addition to using four Iskander-M ballistic missiles. Russia uses cheaply produced “suicide” drones and low-cost “decoy” drones, which tie up Ukrainian air defences.

“Unfortunately, there were hits to critical infrastructure facilities, and private and apartment buildings were damaged in several regions due to the massive drone attack,” an air force statement said, adding that no casualties had been reported.

The attack damaged the power grid in Ternopil, a major city in western Ukraine, and cut power to about 70% of the region, governor Vyacheslav Nehoda said on national television.

“The consequences are bad because the facility was significantly affected and this will have [an] impact on the power supply of the entire region for a long time,” Nehoda said.

The attack also cut off water and disrupted heat supplies, head of regional defence headquarters Serhiy Nadal said via the Telegram messaging app.

Nehoda said the emergency services had mostly restored the water supply by morning and the local authorities were planning to introduce planned power cuts in the attack’s aftermath.

Russia also targeted the capital Kyiv overnight, the military administration of the city said on Telegram, adding that air defence units destroyed more than 10 Russian drones.

Falling debris damaged four private residences, two high-rise apartment buildings, two garages and a car in the region surrounding the capital, its governor Ruslan Kravchenko said.

The drones approached Kyiv in waves and from several directions, but there was no damage or injuries in the city, Serhiy Popko, head of Kyiv’s military administration said on Telegram.

Most of Ukraine was under overnight air raid alert for hours, air force data showed.

Russia throws out British diplomat for alleged spying

Russia said on Tuesday it was expelling a British diplomat for spying – an accusation denied by London – in the latest blow to the already dire state of relations between the two countries.

The diplomat, whose photo was splashed across TV news bulletins, was named by the FSB security service as Edward Wilkes. It said, without giving details, that he had intentionally provided false information when he entered Russia.

“During counterintelligence work, the Russian Federal Security Service has discovered an undeclared British intelligence presence under the cover of the national embassy in Moscow,” the FSB said in a statement.

“At the same time, the Russian FSB has discovered signs of the said diplomat conducting intelligence and subversive work that threatens the security of the Russian Federation.”

A spokesperson for Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “This is not the first time that Russia has made malicious and baseless accusations against our staff. We will respond in due course.”

The Russian Foreign Ministry said it summoned British ambassador Nigel Casey to receive a “strong protest”.

It said he was told that Moscow would take an “uncompromising line” towards any undeclared British spy activity. “In addition, if London escalates the situation, the Russian side will immediately give a ‘mirror’ response.”

Moscow also said it was adding 30 more British names – including leading members of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s cabinet – to a “stop list” of people banned from entering Russia. The move is symbolic, as no British minister has visited Russia since before President Vladimir Putin sent his troops into Ukraine in February 2022.

Relations between Britain and Russia have plunged to post-Cold War lows since the start of the Ukraine war. Britain has joined successive waves of sanctions against Russia and provided arms to Ukraine.

Russia said Ukraine fired British Storm Shadow cruise missiles at its territory last week for the first time. Putin cited that, and the launching of US Atacms ballistic missiles by Ukraine, as the reason Russia fired a new hypersonic missile at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on 21 November.

Gazprom plans for no 2025 transit via Ukraine to Europe — source

Russian state-controlled gas giant Gazprom is assuming that no more gas will flow to Europe via Ukraine after 31 December in its internal planning for 2025, a person familiar with the plans said.

Kyiv has said it wants to end the transit deal, which will bring an end to more than half a century of gas flows from Siberia to the markets of central Europe that began during Soviet times and has been a steady source of Russian budget revenues.

While Ukraine has said it would not consider extending the transit deal, which generates up to $1-billion a year in transit fees for Kyiv, Moscow has signalled it was open for talks and continuation of the flows via the route.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow is ready to continue pumping gas through Ukraine.

Russia, which before the Ukraine war was Europe’s number one natural gas supplier, has lost almost all its European customers as the European Union tries to wean itself off Russian energy and after the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany was blown up in 2022.

Gazprom did not reply to a request for comment.

EU weighs up adding tankers, Chinese drone firms to Russia sanctions list

European Union envoys will discuss a 15th package of sanctions on Wednesday in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, including on tankers carrying Russian oil and Chinese firms involved in making drones for Moscow, EU diplomats said.

A total of 29 entities and 54 individuals are lined up to be added to more than 2,200 on the existing sanctions list, which bans travel and freezes their assets within the 27-member bloc, the diplomats said. They did not anticipate significant dissent.

A more significant package will be proposed in January once Poland takes over the EU’s rotating presidency from Hungary, whose Russia-friendly leader has frequently delayed or blocked measures that help Ukraine.

In September, Reuters uncovered that Russia had established a weapons programme in China to develop and produce long-range attack drones.

The proposal to add 48 tankers to the list is part of efforts by Western allies to limit Russian oil revenues by strengthening the Group of Seven nations (G7) price cap on Russian oil.

The effectiveness of the cap, imposed in late 2022, was always expected to decrease over time, Western officials said.

As previously reported by Reuters, the 16th package is expected to tighten restrictions on Russian liquefied natural gas flows and expand the use of the “No Russia” clause that would oblige subsidiaries of EU companies in third countries to prohibit the re-export of certain goods to Russia.

The EU also wants to pressure financial institutions that help Russia circumvent Western restrictions, in line with a move Washington made earlier this year.

G7 renews support for Ukraine, condemns Russian ‘escalation’

Foreign ministers from the Group of Seven democracies on Tuesday expressed their support for Ukraine and condemned what they described as Russia’s “irresponsible and threatening nuclear rhetoric”.

They also warned that North Korean support for Russia marked a dangerous expansion of the conflict, with serious consequences for European and Indo-Pacific security, and called on China, a long-standing ally of North Korea, to act against it.

“Russia’s use of an intermediate-range ballistic missile on 21 November is further evidence of its reckless and escalatory behaviour,” they said in a joint statement after their meeting.

“Our support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence will remain unwavering,” they said.

The G7 ministers added that they hoped to start distributing funds from a $50 billion loan package stemming from frozen Russian assets by the end of the year. They also pledged to act against groups helping Russia to evade sanctions imposed on it after its invasion of Ukraine almost three years ago.

Russia condemns ‘irresponsible’ talk of nukes for Ukraine

Discussion in the West about arming Ukraine with nuclear weapons is “absolutely irresponsible”, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Tuesday, in response to a report in the New York Times citing unidentified officials who suggested such a possibility.

The New York Times reported last week that some unidentified Western officials had suggested US President Joe Biden could give Ukraine nuclear weapons before he leaves office.

“Several officials even suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent. But such a step would be complicated and have serious implications,” the newspaper wrote.

Asked about the report, Peskov told reporters: “These are absolutely irresponsible arguments of people who have a poor understanding of reality and who do not feel a shred of responsibility when making such statements. We also note that all of these statements are anonymous.”

Earlier, senior Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said that if the West supplied nuclear weapons to Ukraine then Moscow could consider such a transfer to be tantamount to an attack on Russia, providing grounds for a nuclear response.

Ukraine inherited nuclear weapons from the Soviet Union after its 1991 collapse, but gave them up under a 1994 agreement, the Budapest Memorandum, in return for security assurances from Russia, the United States and Britain.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last month that as Ukraine had handed over the nuclear weapons, joining Nato was the only way it could deter Russia. DM

Categories:

Tags:

DM is much better if you are signed in...

World