October Bloodiest Month for Russian Army, but Kremlin’s Donbas Offensive Rolls On

The Russian army in October likely suffered its bloodiest month of the entire war. Nevertheless, a grinding Kremlin offensive in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region hasn’t stopped, and on Tuesday took more Ukrainian soil.

Kremlin-controlled media claimed infantry assaults had captured the Donbas village of Yasna Polyana in an outflanking operation that worsened Ukrainian hopes of hanging on to the key industrial and power hub town of Kurakhove to the east.

Video published by Russia’s Defense Ministry showed jubilant soldiers waving to a friendly drone after erecting a flag in a newly captured building in the village. The independent military information tracking group DeepState confirmed the Ukrainian loss.

Kyiv Post review of the video geolocated the flag-raising images to the southwestern outskirts of Yasna Polyana, but wasn’t able to determine which side controlled the rest of the village.

Ukraine’s Army General Staff (AGS) in a Tuesday evening situation estimate confirmed Russian assaults were concentrated in the Donbas region, with the more than two thirds of attacks across the entire fighting front – 106 in total – recording on the approaches to the flashpoint towns of Kurakhove and Pokrovsk.

The AGS statement said that Russian forces had been repelled at most locations and did not comment on Russian claims about Yasna Polyana’s capture. Some battles were still in progress, the AGS statement said.

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The Ukrainian military regularly reports that Russian forces are resorting to ‘meat assaults,’ sending wounded or poorly trained fighters into battle as cannon fodder.

The local news group Kurakhovo Bez Paniki said that Russian troops overnight Tuesday-Wednesday also had advanced and grabbed a foothold in the village Berestky, to the northwest of Kurakhove, and taken control of a key leading to tactically important bridges crossing the Kurakhivske Reservoir.

Kurakhove, an industrial town with a pre-war population of 18,000, is home to a giant, Soviet-era power production station capable of delivering electricity to much of southeast Ukraine. Along with the neighboring town of Pokrovsk, a critical rail hub and coal-mining center, Kurakhove has been a long-term objective for Russia’s Donbas offensive launched in August.

For the most part, Russian commanders have gained ground with repeated, short-range infantry attacks aiming to advance a few hundred meters and dig in, so that similar attacks might be repeated in following days and months.

According to Ukrainian and some independent sources, Russian forces attacking in the Donbas sector have suffered eviscerating losses against Ukrainian defenses fighting back with attack drone swarms that hunt down individual Russian soldiers and vehicles.

The Ukrainian army in official Russian loss estimates made public on Nov. 4 said that Russian soldier casualties were the Kremlin’s worst, for the entire war, with an estimated 41,980 service personnel killed or wounded in Oct. 2024.

Army spokesmen have said the numbers are based largely on vetted drone video recorded by Ukrainian pilots flying strikes against Russian soldiers and vehicles. Independent news agencies have access to only a small percentage of the images and the Ukrainian army claim is unconfirmed.

The independent Iceland-based military researcher Ragnar Gudmundsson in a Tuesday report said that his research showed that October, by other indicators, had very likely been one of the bloodiest months for the Russian military of the entire war, with dramatic spikes of losses of combat vehicles, and frequency of combat engagements over the month. Combat intensity in early November was still high but seemed to have fallen off somewhat from October peaks, he said.

According to open-source reports, Russian forces in October scored their single-month ground gains since March 2022, capturing some 538 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, and about 86 square kilometers of ground captured by Ukrainian forces invading Russia’s Kursk region.

Likewise, independent trackers of Russian military equipment confirmed to have been destroyed in combat have reported in early November some of the heaviest Kremlin combat vehicle casualties of the war so far. The battle information group War Mapper said that open-source images compiled in October showed the Russian military lost at least 430 combat vehicles during the month, almost all of which were knocked out or burned, of which 213 were in Ukraine’s Donbas region. There is strong evidence Russian commanders are committing fewer tanks to combat, that analysis said.

“One thing that stands out immediately last month is the MBT (main battle tank)-to-IFV (infantry fighting vehicle) ratio. October 2024 took the ratio farther away from the long-term observed 1:2 average. Recent months saw it in the 1:3 ballpark. It’s 1:3.5 now,” the report said in part.