This week, Russia continued to make gains in eastern Ukraine. DeepState, a Ukrainian OSINT project, corroborated that Russian forces had captured Selydove in Donetsk region and several nearby villages. The Russian army advanced 478 square kilometers into Ukrainian territory in October, a record since March 2022 in the first weeks of the war, according to an AFP analysis of data from the Institute for the Study of War. Throughout the week, Russia continued to strike Ukrainian cities and towns far behind the front lines with missiles and drones.
NATO chief confirmed that North Korean troops have been sent to help Russia in its war against Ukraine and said some have already been deployed in Russia’s Kursk region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said late in the week he expects North Korean troops to enter combat against Ukraine in the coming days.
Russia pounded Kharkiv with glide bombs, causing destruction to multiple civilian sites. A Russian glide bomb attack on Kharkiv on Monday evening damaged the Derzhprom building, a constructivist landmark from the 1920s placed on UNESCO’s World Heritage tentative list. A subsequent attack overnight into Tuesday killed four people and damaged an apartment building and private homes in the Osnovyanskyi district of Kharkiv. A Russian glide bomb strike on a residential building in Kharkiv on Wednesday evening killed three, including two teenage boys, and injured 36 others.
Ukraine and the EU agreed that Ukraine will increase its electricity import capacity from the Europe by a quarter ahead of the winter. Ukraine has presented a roadmap to reopening its airspace during the war. In its enlargement reports released this week, the EU has acknowledged Ukraine’s progress toward meeting membership criteria, including that on minority rights, and hopes to open talks on fundamentals in 2025.
Putin uninterested in negotiated peace, his goal is to destroy Ukrainian statehood, ISW says. Russian leader Vladimir Putin continues to communicate that he is uninterested in a negotiated ceasefire and is committed to achieving his goal of destroying Ukrainian statehood, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said in a report on Thursday.
“A negotiated ceasefire on current lines and under current circumstances will only benefit Russia and will afford the Kremlin time to further radicalize and militarize Russian society against Ukraine and the Russian military time to rest and reconstitute, likely before conducting a future attack on Ukraine,” ISW said.
