Ukrainian troops are locked in a bitter battle for the town of Toretsk in the eastern region of Donetsk, which Russian troops entered last Friday.

A spokesperson for Luhansk Technical University said Russian troops were demolishing the town as they advanced.

“They erase the city with artillery. We have already seen it in other towns of Donbas. And after that, they storm in small groups. They are trying to find weak points in our defence with such small strikes,” Anastasia Bobovnikova said.

Such Russian tactics have been reported elsewhere too.

Ivan Petrychak, spokesman for the Ukrainian 24th Mechanised Brigade, said Russian forces were conducting small-scale assaults in the Chasiv Yar area, 23km (14 miles) north of Toretsk, to infiltrate poorly guarded positions and use them to attack Ukrainian units from close quarters.

Aerial images of Toretsk in Ukrainian media showed windowless apartment blocks blackened by fire and half-collapsed high-rise buildings.

Bobovnikova said Russian forces were prioritising the area, conducting 15 assaults on Saturday alone. She accused the Russian forces of breaking the rules of war.

“I must note that the enemy uses insidious tactics. He disguises himself in civilian clothes. Therefore, our defenders need to think twice – is it an enemy before us or is it a peaceful resident?”

Russian losses grow as war intensifies

“The enemy is constantly adding manpower to the forward positions,” Bobovnikova said, estimating Russian casualties at 200 a day.

The US Department of Defense said a new intelligence assessment puts Russian casualties throughout the war at 600,000, quoting an unnamed defence official.

The official said the past month has been the bloodiest of the war for the Russians.

This could be because since the summer, Russia has resumed large, mechanised, platoon-sized attacks.

The head of Ukraine’s National Guard, Ruslan Muzychuk, said Russia was rushing to seize land before rain muddies the terrain and makes it impossible for heavy armoured vehicles to operate.

“Now the enemy is trying to use armoured vehicles more often. This is primarily due to weather conditions,” Muzychuk said.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, DC-based think tank, said Russian forces have conducted at least four large mechanised assaults since July.

The latest took place on Sunday, 50km (30 miles) to the southwest of Toretsk, when Russian troops gunned for the town of Kurakhove.

Ukraine said it repelled the assault, destroying or disabling seven of 25 infantry fighting vehicles and two out of five tanks.

The town lies west of Avdiivka, a city Russia seized in February and from which it has advanced 40km (25 miles).

Here, two Russian salients have begun to surround a cluster of villages (Kurakhivka, Hirnyk, Zoriabne, Oleksandropil, Vovchenka and Ismailivka) as they drive west towards Kurakhove.

This has been the most intensively contested area of the front, the Ukrainian military’s General Staff said on Sunday with 19 assaults having taken place there since Saturday out of a total of 80 assaults across the front.

“The enemy outnumbers us many times. It also has a larger amount of equipment, artillery,” Bobovnikova said.

Drone warfare

In addition, Russia has mastery of the air and has used it to drop about 900 glide bombs a week – large bombs fitted with wings to send them farther and give them greater accuracy. Weighing up to 3 tonnes, they have decimated Ukrainian defences.

Ukraine has been countering this superior Russian firepower using attack drones along with secondary drones to film their effectiveness.

One showed a Ukrainian drone operator blowing up a Russian BMP infantry fighting vehicle “from the inside”.

Another showed the destruction of a Russian Grad anti-aircraft missile system.

Ukraine is invested heavily in drones and intends to produce 2 million of them this year.

Ukraine is also using larger drones it has built to strike facilities inside Russia.

On October 9, it destroyed a warehouse in the border region of Krasnodar Krai storing 400 Russian Shahed kamikaze drones – about as many as Russia flies into Ukraine every week, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

The following day, the Security Service of Ukraine said its drone operators struck an ammunition warehouse at the Khanskaya airbase in the Republic of Adygea in the North Caucasus.

The base also housed training aircraft and helicopters, it said.

Warring sides lean on allies

Ukraine’s allies last week announced aid to reinforce its war effort.

Norway said it would invest $90m in Ukraine’s defence industry. Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Norway said they were allocating $1.5bn in defence goods by the end of the year, including air defence systems.

France said it will deliver Mirage fighter jets next year and last week specified these would number 12 to 20. The Czech Republic’s defence minister said Ukraine could expect half a million artillery shells by Christmas through an initiative it launched to locate 155mm ordnance around the world.

But Russia also has its friends.

Thousands of North Korean soldiers were training inside Russia and observing Russian operations in Ukraine, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, quoting South Korean and Ukrainian officials.

Ukrainian outlets Suspilne and Liga said North Korea was forming a 3,000-man battalion to fight a Ukrainian counterinvasion in the border region of Kursk, freeing up Russian personnel to continue attacking Ukraine.

Russia and North Korea entered into a strategic partnership in June, which includes a mutual defence clause. North Korean military personnel were first reported to be in Ukraine on October 3 when a Ukrainian missile strike in Donetsk killed six of them.

The head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, Andriy Kovalenko, said two days later that a small number of North Korean soldiers were in Donetsk improving the “poor quality” of North Korean artillery ammunition.

Russia may also have a Western ally in Elon Musk’s Starlink, a satellite-based internet provider whose terminals Ukrainian officials last week said have helped improve the accuracy and speed of Russian artillery.

Ukrainian officials believed Starlink may have been the key to Russia’s recapture of Vuhledar this month, a town on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia border that Ukraine had reclaimed in a counteroffensive last year.

Moscow slams Zelenskyy’s ‘victory’ plan

Zelenskyy revealed key elements of his plan to win the war next year after submitting it to Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada.

The plan was first shown to US President Joe Biden in September.

It would involve inducting Ukraine into NATO immediately, allowing NATO allies to equip Ukrainian battalions and operate on Ukrainian soil, and allowing Ukraine to use NATO long-range missiles to hit airfields deep inside Russia from which Russian planes take off with glide bombs.

Russia has warned of “dire consequences” if NATO allows the use of its missiles deep inside the country, and Leonid Slutsky, the chairman of Russia’s parliamentary committee on international affairs, described the Ukrainian president’s victory plan as a deadly trap.

“Zelensky’s ‘victory plan,’ presented in the Verkhovna Rada, is a not-so-subtle attempt to bait the West into a direct military standoff with Russia, with the risk of turning into a global war,” Slutsky wrote on his Telegram channel.