Putin: Russia has captured nearly 5,000 square kilometres in Ukraine this year

(Patria) - Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russian forces have captured nearly 5,000 square kilometres in Ukraine in 2025 and that Moscow has retained full strategic initiative on the battlefield, Reuters reported.

Russian gains in 2025 would amount to nearly one percent of Ukraine's land area, with the country already controlling nearly twenty percent of the total territory.

Putin, speaking yesterday at a meeting with Russia's top military commanders on the occasion of his 73rd birthday, said that Ukrainian forces are retreating along all sectors of the front. He said that Kyiv is trying to strike deep into Russian territory, but that this will not help it change the situation in the war.

"At this moment, the Russian armed forces fully hold the strategic initiative," Putin said at a meeting in northwestern Russia near Russia's second-largest city, St. Petersburg.

"This year we have liberated nearly 5,000 square kilometres of territory - 4,900 and 212 settlements."

Ukrainian forces "are retreating along the entire line of combat contact, despite attempts at fierce resistance."

The Russian Defence Ministry on Tuesday reported the capture of two more villages along the front, which Ukraine's top commander says now stretches over 1,250 kilometres.

The Ukrainian military in August dismissed recent Russian offensives as a failure, with Russian forces failing to capture any major Ukrainian city this year.

Ukrainian reports say their troops have made progress in the Donetsk region, especially around Dobropillia, a town near the key logistical hub of Pokrovsk. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukrainian forces have regained positions in the border region of Sumy, where Russia had established a foothold.

Russian General Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, said at a meeting of top commanders that Russian forces "are advancing in practically all directions."

Ukrainian forces, he said, are focused on slowing the Russian advance.

Gerasimov, the main commander of Russia's war effort, said that the heaviest fighting is taking place in
Pokrovsk and areas towards Dnipropetrovsk. Russian troops are moving towards the key
towns of Siversk and Kostiantynivka on the main battlefield of the Donetsk region.

Gerasimov said they are clearing Ukrainian forces from the city of Kupiansk, which has been under Russian attack for months in northeastern Ukraine, and that they are advancing in Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk further south. They are also making progress in establishing buffer zones in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions in the north.

In his address at the meeting, Putin said that Russia's goals remained the same as when it launched its "special military operation" in February 2022, stating that the aim was the "demilitarisation and denazification" of its smaller neighbour.