Russia gaining ground in Ukraine at fastest rate since invasion
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Alex Dibble and James Hansen. Over the past week, Russia has made unprecedented gains in Ukraine at a rate quicker than at any time since the start of its invasion.

Russian troops have entered a key frontline town in the Donetsk region, seizing more than 90 square miles. And over the last month, they've gained an area half the size of London. Krakow's been a target for months, and this week Russian forces finally entered. The town, which hasn't yet fallen to Russia, is strategically important because of its location, 90 miles east of the city of Zaporizhia and 20 miles south of the logistics hub of Pokrovsk.

The Times' foreign correspondent Mark Bennett has been writing about this. Mark, what explains the speed of Russia's advances in recent weeks? It's been going on for a while. I mean, it's been no secret that Ukraine's had manpower problems for a long time now. Even last year, the average age of a Ukrainian soldier was 45. And lots of the people who volunteered to fight at the beginning of the war are dead, injured, or just basically exhausted and can't really fight anymore.

And they've had trouble recruiting new soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of men fled the country, of course, as well. And Russia...

with a vastly larger population, and Putin's total disregard for human life, just seems prepared to keep going as long as it takes with as many losses as required to crush Ukraine. Unfortunately, at the moment, Ukraine's finding it difficult to hold the front line. Mark, there's been a lot of focus on the town of Pokrovsk, which Russia has been trying to capture for months. Why is it of so much significance? Well,

But across a fairly decent sized town, actually. And it's, it's a logistics hub as a, as a railway link there. And, um, it's kind of, kind of the gateway to the, to the rest of the Donetsk region. So if Russia takes it, it can push on to Kramatorsk. And, um,

possibly Slavyansk and other larger towns, cities, stroke cities that Putin wants to take, that Putin claims as Russia's. So it's, I mean, it would be another success for Russia and it would make it easier for their forces to expand their advances.

We're obviously less than two months away from the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the potential for some kind of peace negotiation. Is that part of the reason why Russia is keen, it seems, to make such rapid advances right now, to put itself in as strong a position as possible for any potential negotiations?

Yeah, I mean, obviously, it will be to Russia's advantage to have seized more Ukrainian land if Putin, Trump, Zelensky, or whoever from the three countries sit down to negotiate and enter the war. But I mean, I think the general kind of, as one Ukrainian platoon commander called it, kind of crumbling of the front line is just the kind of almost inevitable result of Russia

Ukraine's difficulties in getting enough men literally to man the front lines. And Russia has just been pressing and pressing and pressing and determined to seize all of Ukraine if it can, as much as possible. We can take it as we want, but the message coming from Moscow right now is they're not really interested in a ceasefire. They're not really interested in negotiations per se. I mean, they're not willing to soften or adjust their demands necessarily.

And which, well, Putin's top allies, again, Sergei Naryshkin, who's the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, said today that Russia has no interest, is categorically opposed to freezing the conflict as it is. The only way, again, he said, that Russia would withdraw its troops would be if Ukraine agrees to surrender four of its regions, including Donetsk, in the south and the east of the country, Crimea, Ukraine.

which it's held since 2014, and renounce any ambitions to join NATO. Oh, and the West has to scrap all its economic sanctions against Russia as well. So there's the demands. Putin made them in June.

And there's been no sign at all that Russia is prepared to negotiate or change those demands or lower those demands in any way, irrespective of what Trump thinks. And Mark, your piece on this mentions how Ukraine's forces, which have occupied part of the Kursk region of Russia since August, of course, are also being pushed back there now. Is that also the result of the same problem, just a fundamental lack of manpower at the minute? Yeah.

Yeah, it seems so. I mean, Russia has vastly more resources than Ukraine in terms of potential recruits to its army. And on top of that now, of course, it's been backed by tens of, well, it's been backed by thousands of North Korean troops who are thought to have been deployed to the Kursk region.

And Zelensky has warned that North Korea could eventually deploy 100,000 soldiers to help Russia in the war, which obviously adds a new kind of ominous and frightening dimension to the conflict between the two neighboring former Soviet states. And we have North Korea involved. Iran is already involved.

Russia has said pretty much basically now that it's at war with America and Britain. So things seem to be escalating quite quickly. Mark, thank you. That's The Times' foreign correspondent, Mark Bennett. Despite the recent Russian advances, some analysts believe the long-term outlook for Moscow is far more challenging. George Barros is head of the Russia team at the Institute for the Study of War. He's been telling Frontline, Times Radio's interview series, available on YouTube, which we're partnered with here on The World in 10...

that Russia is starting to experience serious supply issues, which may explain the urgency of their offensive operations in Ukraine. There is an increasing amount of coverage for the Russian supply issues. I think part of it is just that it's a very sophisticated assessment and it has a lot of caveats.

There's great open source analysts that are doing research that are imaging Russia's main storage areas where they have the bone yards from the Soviet era tanks, armor personnel carriers, and how over time, over the last three years, you can watch them slowly empty out.

And all the current estimates of these open air storage areas indicates that at the current loss rates, the Russians are going to be running very low, if not be out of their Soviet era inherited equipment by late 2025, early 2026. That's not just my opinion. CSIS and RUSI and other organizations have made similar analyses as well. So this is sort of the analytical consensus at the time.

Of course, there's the caveats. It assumes that the Russians don't magically get an offset from the Chinese or other partners who might be able to provide a lot of vehicles quickly. It assumes that the Russian defense industrial base isn't able to rapidly increase its current serial production of new vehicles. But there's no reason to necessarily assess that'll be the case given the limitations. But it's sort of like we all believe or we all have this little idea that the Russian military is sort of like,

The Russians are constantly just going to come back with hordes and loads of more stuff. That's just a myth. Actually, Russia's resources are finite. They're burning through a tremendous amount. And I actually think that the intensified campaigns that we see the Russians conducting now are in large part in order to shape the information space and make us think that the Russians can sustain this current tempo indefinitely, when in fact they cannot.

There's a whole very interesting conversation we could have about the Russian economy, too, and their forced generation problem. I mean, the Russian economy seems to be sort of imploding in real time as we talk now as well.

Meanwhile, George Barros also says that Russia's continued failure to capture Pokrovsk, despite delays in Western military aid to Ukraine, also speaks to the underlying weakness of Russia's position. What it tells us is that we can learn a little bit about the Russian operational art and how the Russian command staff and their theatre commanders are learning.

The Russians stated objective for their fall campaign cycle in 2024 was the seizure of Prokrosk. They got FDF cut back in April. Since then, they've been driving to Prokrosk, and that was their explicit objective.

The Russians, however, have since then hit very stiff resistance on the immediate outskirts of Prokhorovsk. They managed to seize many of the fields and the villages. They advanced about 30 kilometers from Avivka up to the vicinity of Prokhorovsk, but since then, they have not been able to advance. And starting in the fall, the Russian command actually stopped conducting these sort of headbutt frontal assaults directly into Prokhorovsk, but then they started to attack the flanks south of Prokhorovsk, and they expand their penetration, expand their salient.

And what the Russian command was doing was they were finding opportunities by looking for these weak spots in the Ukrainian line. They exploited Ukrainian unit rotations, they found weak spots in the line and they reinforced it. And the way I like to think about the Russian military here is they sort of think like water, sort of like how water tries to find the path of least resistance when it's thrown on a bunch of rocks or something. When it hits a hard object, sometimes they just slog through. But in this case, they actually decided to not slog through and they decided to find other paths through which they can develop some advances as well.

And the Russians have advanced. They found some weak spots in the line and they have seized more territory south of Prokhorovsk.

But I think what's been lost in all of this is, yes, the Russians have seized these fields and this territory. And on the map, it looks quite big, but none of this is strategic territory. And actually, the achievement of blunting a major Russian offensive and denying the Russians their preferred objective for this season is actually a successive defense. Yes, the Ukrainians have lost ground in other places, but for a prepared pitch battle where the Ukrainians could anticipate the main Russian effort and blunt it, that's

That's good. That's George Barros from the Institute for the Study of War. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow. We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients.

Mike Allwood is a dairy farmer from Cheshire who supplies organic milk to McDonald's in the UK for its teas, coffees and porridge through Arla.

We're involved in a network which has been set up by Arla to look at the possibilities for farming regeneratively. One of the things we're doing here is moving our cattle and giving them a fresh piece of grass every day to help regenerate the soil. We're very lucky that we've had a long-term relationship with McDonald's and I think often people don't realise how seriously McDonald's take their relationships with farmers.

Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website. We all have dreams. Dream home renovations. Dream vacations. Or sending our kids to their dream colleges.

But finding straightforward ways to turn those dreams into realistic goals, that's where things get tricky. Merrill understands that. That's why, with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. And having the bull at your back helps your whole financial life move with you.

So when your plans change, Merrill is with you every step of the way. Go to ml.com slash bullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, registered broker-dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC.