Russia’s advances on Ukraine last month amounted to the size of Singapore and was its largest territorial gain since the first weeks of the conflict, new analysis shows.
Research conducted by Agence France-Presse (AFP), using data from the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), found that the Russian army seized more than 725 square kilometers (279.9 square miles) of land in Ukraine during November.
The area is larger than Singapore, which covers around 719 square kilometers (277.6 square miles).
This was more than Russia advanced in Ukraine during the month of October, which came to 610 square kilometers (235.5 square miles), according to the Romanian news site hotnews.ro.
Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
At the time, October had marked the greatest seizure of land by Russia in more than two and a half years, but last month’s total has now topped that record.
The most land Russia has claimed of Ukraine was in March 2022, following its invasion on February 24. Then, Russian forces seized 45,426 square kilometers of land, according to hotnews.ro.
The Russian army’s advances have gradually been increasing since the late spring, and have now accumulated to more than 3,500 square kilometers throughout 2024.
This was six times more than the gains made in the whole of 2023, hotnew.ro reported.
Since the beginning of the war, the total amount of land in Ukraine Russia has occupied covers 68,050 square kilometers, as of the end of last month.
Most of the Russian advances in Ukraine were in the Donetsk region, with the Ukrainian army now controlling less than a third of the area, according to hotnews.ro.
This is a drop from the Ukrainian military’s 40 percent hold of the area at the start of this year.
Newsweek has contacted the Russian and Ukrainian defense ministries for comment via email.
It is believed that Ukraine will continue to experience some tough months ahead as Russian forces continue to make gains over the winter, a military analyst previously told Newsweek.
Emil Kastehelmi, from the Finnish-based Black Bird Group, said, “The trend is very worrying, and there’s no reason to expect the situation to calm down in December either.”
However, while Russia is making territorial gains in Ukraine, it has also been experiencing major losses in military personnel.
Russian casualties hit more than 2,000 troops in a single day at the end of last month, according to data from Ukraine’s defense ministry. This was a record high and broke a previous record set only a few weeks before.
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