Russia’s conquests in Ukraine this year are equivalent to a Swedish municipality

Russia today controls a little more than 18 percent of Ukraine’s surface. None of the illegally annexed Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions are fully occupied by the Russians.

This according to Deep state map which daily, using open sources, updates a map of which areas are controlled by whom. The group is on Ukraine’s side in the war, but has on several occasions given a picture of the situation that differed from the Ukrainian military’s description.

The war in Ukraine

Russia’s Ministry of Defense itself stated at the beginning of April that it had taken 400 square kilometers of Ukraine during the year, a little more than a month before opening a new front in the Kharkiv region.

Russian sight on the larger towns

Bloody battles are taking place with varying intensity along the approximately 1,000 kilometer long front line, roughly equivalent to the distance between Malmö and Sundsvall.

In February, the Ukrainian military withdrew from the important town of Avdijivka, but since then no towns of the same size have fallen. During the year, however, the Russians have pressed ever closer to the smaller but strategically important cities of Toretsk and Tjasiv Jar, on the outskirts of which fierce battles are now taking place.

Russia has also since the fall of Avdijivka captured a number of smaller towns on the way to the larger city of Pokrovsk, identified as a possible future conquest target. However, the Russian advance in the northern parts of the Kharkiv region appears to have stopped.

No one knows how many soldiers have been killed and injured since the 2022 invasion, but reports suggest it could be upwards of a million.

Hear Oscar Jonsson about the situation at the front in the clip above.