Ukraine: waves of Russian drones and record advances by Moscow’s troops

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Russia again launched attack drones in Ukraine overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday. Air alerts were declared in the Sumy, Chernihiv, Poltava and Kharkiv regions.

Russia launched 188 drones targeting 17 regions of Ukraine during the night beforesaid the Ukrainian Air Force mardi. This is the record number of drones launched by Russia in a single attack.

“Nearly two hundred Russian drones against Ukraine in one day is almost two hundred proof that Russian ambitions are totally detached from any idea of ​​real peace,” declared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in his daily speech. mardi.

According to Zelensky, while most of the drones had been shot down or neutralized, the artillery fire had damaged apartment buildings and critical infrastructure such as the national power grid.

Record Russian advances since the start of the invasion

Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine at the fastest pace since the early days of the 2022 invasion, seizing an area half the size of London in the past month, analysts and researchers said on Tuesday. war bloggers, cited by Reuters.

Russian troops swept across swaths of Ukraine in early 2022 before being pushed back to the east and south. The 1,000 km front line has barely moved for two years, until the latest, smaller advances, which began in July.

The war is entering what some Russian and Western officials say could be its most dangerous phase : Russia would use North Korean troops in Ukraine and Kyiv would now use missiles supplied by the West to retaliate inside Russia.

The Russian army captured almost 235 km² in Ukraine over the past weeka weekly record for 2024.

Russian forces had seized 600 km2 in November, adds the independent Russian site Agentstvo, citing data from the Ukrainian DeepState, which studies combat sequences and provides maps of the front line.

On Tuesday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced the capture by its forces of another village, Kopanky, in the Kharkiv region, another hotbed of Russian military activity north of the main theater of fighting in the Donetsk region. .

Ukraine's Third Separate Assault Brigade, in a message on Telegram on Monday, said it had cleared the village of Russian soldiers.

Ukrainian media quoted Nazar Voloshin, a spokesman for the Khortytsya group of troops, as saying that kyiv's forces had repelled a Russian advance on the Kupiansk logistics center, also in the Kharkiv region. This is the second time this month that the Ukrainian army says it has repelled an attack on Kupiansk.

Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst with the Finnish group Black Bird, said Russian forces had taken control of a area estimated at 667 km² this month, citing data that he said could include lagged October gains.

According to the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War, the speed of advance of the Russian army since the fall of 2024 has, in fact, increased notably recently compared to its speed of advance in 2023 and during the remains in 2024, but recent Western media reports comparing recent Russian gains to those at the start of Russia's full-scale invasion fail to note the gradual and tactical nature of Russia's recent advances.

ISW: Russia rejects the possibility of “freezing” the front line

In the same note, the ISW quotes the director of Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Naryshkin. According to him, the Kremlin would be ready to negotiate, but has categorically rejected any “freezing” of the front line or the creation of demilitarized zones. According to him, the only way to achieve peace is to “eliminate” the reasons that “forced” Russia to launch a massive invasion.

Naryshkin said that “eliminating” the reasons that “prompted” Russia to launch its full-scale invasion of Ukraine is the only way to guarantee peace, demonstrating that Russia continues to demand without compromise the total surrender of Ukraine.

The Kremlin has repeatedly demanded that Ukraine relinquish areas of the four Ukrainian regions that it illegally annexed and that Russian forces do not currently occupy. ISW also recently predicted that the Russian military command is likely planning how to advance into the southeastern-most part of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast – which is, notably, not one of the four illegally annexed oblasts – to support Russia's long-standing goal of seizing the entire Donetsk Oblast (Donbass).

Kyiv removes 100,000 faulty mortar shells after failures

Ukraine's Defense Ministry is investigating faulty mortar shells after at least 100,000 Ukrainian-made 120mm shells had to be removed from the front line.

According to the private Ukrainian television channel 1+1 cited by The Guardian, soldiers began to declare in early November that the shells did not explode, remained stuck in the launcher or fell off target.

The Ministry of Defense confirmed it had stopped using them on the front line “until the causes of the malfunction are determined” and seized some of the supply.

Initial findings point to loads of poor quality powder or violations of storage requirements, the ministry said. The Ukrainian news site Dzerkalo Tyjnia (The mirror of the week) and war journalist Yuriy Boutousov shared the figure of 100,000, the latter denouncing “criminal negligence”.

Biden asks Congress for $24 billion more for Ukraine

US President Joe Biden has asked Congress for an additional $24 billion to help Ukraine and provide it with weapons, according to Politico, citing a document obtained by journalists.

According to the publication, cited by other media, $16 billion will be used to replenish the stock of American weapons that Ukraine has. Another $8 billion is expected to be allocated to the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), under which the Pentagon contracts with manufacturers rather than supplying equipment and weapons directly from its warehouses.

Two congressional aides confirmed details of the proposal to the publication. Congress received it on Monday, they said, but, according to Politico, the chances of approval of the request by Congress are “slim”.