Last week, Russia captured 196 square kilometers of Ukraine, reports Media Agency.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia captured 196.1 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in the week from Oct. 20 to Oct. 27, making it the fastest weekly Russian offensive this year, according to Russian media group Agency, which analyzed Ukrainian maps from open sources.

The two-and-a-half-year war in Ukraine is entering what Russian officials say is its most dangerous phase yet as Russian troops advance and the West ponders how the war will end.

Russian troops, ordered into Ukraine by President Vladimir Putin in February 2022, advanced in September at their fastest pace since March 2022, according to open-source data, even as Ukraine seized part of Russia’s Kursk region.

“The Russian army has not had such a rapid weekly offensive, at least since the beginning of this year,” the Agency, which Russia considers a “foreign agent,” reported in its Telegram channel.

It says that in order to reach this conclusion, they used raw data from open source intelligence analysts of Ukraine’s Deep State.

The agency reports that last week the Russian army occupied 95 square kilometers near the city of Ugledar and 63 square kilometers near the city of Pokrovsk. Both are located in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.

The agency said Ukraine’s defenses in Donbass had been weakened by Kyiv’s decision to send troops into Russia’s Kursk region, as Russia had not transferred troops from Donbass to Kursk.

The advance by Moscow’s forces, which control just under a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, underscored Russia’s vast numerical superiority in manpower and equipment as Ukraine asks for more weapons from the Western allies that support it.

Russia controls Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, about 80% of the Donbass (the coal and metallurgical zone that includes the Donetsk and Luhansk regions) and more than 70% of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.

(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge)