Major loss of territory

Analysis shows: Ukraine is threatened with collapse

A commander watches drone images on his screen.(Bild: AFP/Florent VERGNES)

An investigation shows how bad things really are in Ukraine: According to a data analysis by the AFP news agency, in November the Russian army recorded its biggest territorial gains since March 2022. A trend that had already been announced.

According to the AFP analysis based on data from the US-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the Russian armed forces conquered 725 square kilometers of territory last month. To put this into perspective, this is roughly equivalent to the area of Singapore. 

According to the report, the Russian army achieved almost 90 percent of these territorial gains in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, where it gradually advanced towards the strategically important city of Pokrovsk. The Ukrainian army now only controls less than a third of the Donetsk region - at the beginning of the year it still controlled more than 40 percent. The Russian army is now only less than five kilometers away from Pokrovsk.

The last time the Russian army achieved greater territorial gains than in November was in March 2022, in the weeks following the start of the war of aggression in Ukraine. At that time, Russia had occupied more than 45,400 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory - and had come close to the capital Kiev.

Ukrainian defenses are crumbling
According to the ISW data, the Russian armed forces had already achieved the largest territorial gains in two and a half years last October with 610 square kilometers conquered at the time. In total, the invasion forces have advanced by 3,500 square kilometers since the beginning of the year. The territorial gains are therefore already six times greater than in the whole of 2023.

Since the start of its war of aggression in February 2022, Russia has occupied a total of 68,050 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory by the end of November 2024. Including the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which was annexed in 2014, and the territories in the Donbas occupied by pro-Russian separatists before 2022, Russia currently controls 18.4 percent of Ukraine's territory.

Kiev now wants to negotiate
According to a report by the Japanese news agency Kyodo News, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi has meanwhile admitted that his country could only regain part of the territories occupied by Russia through diplomatic means. He admitted in an interview that it would be difficult for his country to fully recapture the occupied territories militarily. "Our army is not strong enough for this. That's true," the agency quoted Selensky as saying.

"We have to find diplomatic solutions." However, such steps could only be considered "if we know that we are strong enough". With a view to Donald Trump's return to the White House, he said that the US President-elect and his staff would examine the Ukrainian government's "plan for victory". They knew that it was aimed at putting Ukraine in a "strong position" so that diplomacy could take place.