"Terrible News"; The Russians are grinding – will Donetsk fall?

There is more and more information that the city of Selidovo has fallen under Russian control, although official Kyiv does not want to confirm this.

In the midst of a major offensive in Donetsk, Ukraine is facing a new threat - the soldiers of North Korea, who will soon arrive at the front, reports the Kyiv Independent, as Blic conveys.

"Last week was extremely difficult for the Ukrainians. The Russians managed to break through the Ukrainian defense in various areas," Emil Kastehelmi, an analyst of the Finnish group "Black Bird", told the Ukrainian newspaper.

Russia's long and grueling offensive in Ukraine's eastern Donbass region has accelerated dramatically in recent days, with Kastehelmi saying Moscow's forces have advanced "faster than anyone could have imagined."

"So we see really tough battles on the front lines," he pointed out.

Selidovo under Russian control?

On October 29, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that the town of Selidovo, located near the key logistics center of Pokrovsk, had been captured. Although Kyiv has not commented on these claims, experts and analysts have confirmed that the city has almost certainly fallen.

A map by the Deep State OSINT project based on data from October 28 showed that most of Selidovo is under Russian control, with one-third shown as a contested gray zone.

"The Russian army has not had such a fast weekly advance at least since the beginning of this year," according to a post on Telegram.

Following Ukraine's withdrawal from Vukhledar in early October, Russian forces have focused their efforts on the towns of Pokrovsk, Toretsk and Kurahov in the Donetsk region, where outnumbered Ukrainian soldiers are slowly losing territory to Russian pressure. The fall of Selidovo would be terrible news for Pokrovsk, which is only about 18 kilometers to the northwest.

"The city of Selidovo is now most likely completely lost. There might be a few Ukrainians in the western parts, but the city is basically lost. It is the biggest city that fell after Avdiyivka. And it fell in a few weeks," as Kastehelmi reports. According to him, one of the biggest dangers facing Ukrainian troops now is that the positions to which the soldiers are forced to withdraw are not as strongly fortified as the positions from which they are withdrawing.

Asked if he believed the situation could escalate, he said there was a "real danger of that". Russia currently occupies all of Luhansk Oblast and most of Donetsk Oblast except for major Ukrainian-controlled cities, including Pokrovsk, Kostyantinovka in the north, Kramatorsk and Slavyansk further north, and Chasiv Yar in the east. Russia would have to take an additional 10,000 square kilometers of territory to occupy all of Donbas.