The commander of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk military group has been replaced following Russian advances in the region, a military official confirmed on Saturday.
General Oleksandr Tarnavskiy will now lead the operational and tactical group, taking over from General Oleksandr Lutsenko.
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This change comes after Lutsenko faced significant criticism for his failure to prevent recent Russian advances toward the key city of Pokrovsk.
Russian forces have been reported just three kilometres (1.9 miles) from the city, according to Ukrainian mapping service DeepState.
Pokrovsk has seen some of the fiercest battles on the eastern front for months, as Russia pushes to capture the city.
Located about 11 miles from Ukraine’s Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, Pokrovsk is a strategic target for Moscow.
The city’s fall to Russian forces would mark a major setback for Ukraine and worsen its struggles to regain momentum as Russian troops intensify pressure along the eastern front.
Losing Pokrovsk would also fuel concerns about Ukraine’s military, especially with the looming risk that military aid from the United States could diminish if Donald Trump wins the presidency, potentially leaving Ukraine more vulnerable as the war enters its fourth year.
In other developments, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday that Moscow had begun deploying a “significant” number of North Korean soldiers to bolster its efforts to push Ukraine’s forces out of Russia’s Kursk region.
Ukraine had launched an incursion into Kursk in August and still controls some settlements there.
“Today, there is already preliminary evidence that the Russians have begun to use soldiers from North Korea in assaults – a significant number of them,” Zelensky said.
“The Russians include them in combined units and use them in operations in the Kursk region,” Zelensky said, adding there had already been “noticeable” losses among these soldiers.
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