Putin says Russia has captured nearly 5,000 sq km in Ukraine this year

MOSCOW - Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Oct 7 that Russian forces have captured almost 5,000 sq km of land in Ukraine in 2025 and that Moscow retained complete strategic initiative on the battlefield.

Russia’s 2025 gains would amount to nearly 1 per cent of Ukraine’s land area, and the country controls nearly 20 per cent in total.

Mr Putin, addressing a meeting with Russian top military commanders on his 73rd birthday, said Ukrainian forces were retreating in all sectors of the front.

He said Kyiv was trying to strike deep into Russian territory, but that would not help it to change the situation in the more than 3½-year-old war.

“At this time, the Russian armed forces fully hold the strategic initiative,” Mr Putin told the meeting in north-western Russia near the country’s second-largest city of St Petersburg, according to a Kremlin transcript.

“This year, we have liberated nearly 5,000 sq km of territory – 4,900 – and 212 localities.”

Ukrainian forces, he said, “are retreating throughout the line of combat contact, despite attempts at fierce resistance”.

Russia’s Defence Ministry on Oct 7 reported the capture of two more villages along the front, which Ukraine’s top commander says now extends over 1,250km.

Ukraine’s military in August dismissed Russia’s recent offensives as a failure, with Moscow’s forces failing to capture a single major Ukrainian city in 2025.

Ukrainian accounts say Kyiv’s troops have made gains in the Donetsk region, particularly around Dobropillia, a town near the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has also said Ukrainian forces have regained ground in the border Sumy region,

where Russia has established a foothold.

Russian Army General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of Russia’s armed forces, told the meeting of top commanders that Russian forces were “advancing in practically all directions”.

Ukrainian forces, he said, were focused on slowing the Russian advance.

Gen Gerasimov, overall commander of Russia’s war effort, said Moscow’s troops were moving on the key cities of Siversk and Kostyantynivka in the main theatre of the Donetsk region.

He said they were clearing Ukrainian forces from the city of Kupiansk, under Russian attack for months in Ukraine’s north-east, and were moving forward in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions farther south.

They were also progressing in setting up buffer zones in Sumy and Kharkiv regions in the north.

In his remarks to the meeting, Mr Putin said Russia’s objectives remained the same as when he launched its “special military operation” in February 2022, saying it was aimed at “demilitarising and denazifying” its smaller neighbour. REUTERS