The war between Russia and Ukraine is escalating. The neighbors this weekend launched their largest drone attacks against each other since the start of the war nearly three years ago.
Russia last week began a fresh effort to oust Ukrainian forces from its Kursk region after amassing more than 50,000 troops, including some 10,000 soldiers from North Korea.
And Russian troops, while advancing steadily in Ukraine’s east, are incurring record numbers of dead and injured, according to the British military’s top commander.
The surge in fighting comes as President-elect Donald Trump is promising to end the war but has yet to say how. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he is ready for peace talks but only if his earlier demands for Ukraine to submit to Russia’s control are met. His army is gaining momentum across the front line thanks to its greater size and quantity of weapons.
Ukraine is holding on grimly at the front—and launching strikes deep into Russia. Ukrainians are worried that the incoming Trump administration’s desire to end the war could leave their country with the short end of any peace deal, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hopes Trump would leverage U.S. power to help its troubled ally.
“It’s only logical the two sides are trying to make whatever gains they can at the moment if there is a chance for any potential peace talks in the offing,” said Ruslan Pukhov, head of a Moscow-based defense think tank, the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.
“While Russia is trying to make gains on the ground, Ukraine’s best chance of response is through drone attacks.” In the early hours of Sunday, both sides launched record numbers of aerial drones against each other.
Russia said it shot down 84 Ukrainian craft deep in Russian territory, nearly half of them in the Moscow region. Three airports around the capital temporarily rerouted flights because of the wave of drones.
Zelensky, meanwhile, said Russia launched 145 Iranian attack drones across Ukraine. He said Russia had used more than 800 guided aerial bombs, 600 drones and 20 missiles against Ukraine last week.
On the front lines, particularly in Ukraine’s east, Russia is advancing slowly but steadily. Russian troops seized almost 200 square miles of Ukrainian territory last month, according to a Ukrainian war-monitoring group, DeepState, which said it was the largest monthly gain this year.
Meanwhile, some 10,000 North Korean soldiers have been deployed to Russia’s Kursk region to bolster Russian efforts to dislodge the Ukrainian troops who have occupied the territory since an August incursion across the border.
Ukrainian officials said last week that they had struck North Korean forces there for the first time, but that they weren’t yet involved in front-line fighting.
The U.S. is still assessing how integrated North Korean forces are into the Russian military, a U.S. official said, including what kind of weapons the North Korean soldiers have been provided and how closely they are working alongside their Russian counterparts.
The U.S. is also still determining the source of these soldiers from within the North Korean military and how much training they have received, the official said.
