Ukraine's defenses still hold, Karu added, speaking to ETV's "Ukraina stuudio" show.

Karu noted that there has been no major change on Ukraine's front line in Kursk, while Russia's main focus remains the Donbas.

He said: "They have captured many settlements there and taken over key junctions and towns."

"The key thing is that they have not been able to create a major breakthrough, so Ukraine's defenses are holding there," Karu went on.

While Russian attacks are the most intense in eastern Ukraine, they come at a high cost, he added.

"Where there are more losses, they [Russian forces] retreat; where there are more human resources, they push forward."

"The Russian army is highly reliant on mass, while they push their soldiers directly into the meat grinder of full-frontal assaults. As long as they have enough personnel, they will continue to press forward actively," he went on.

"The Ukrainians are employing their own tactics to eliminate as many Russian soldiers as possible. They are succeeding here, giving a cause for hope, as the volume of [Russian] losses is getting very high; one day it will reach every person in every Russian village," Karu continued.

Russian losses so far amount to 700,000, Ukraine reports.

Russia is also experiencing recruitment and conscription issues despite bounties offered and pledges that conscripts cannot be used away from Russian soil (though the part-occupied eastern Ukrainian oblasts have conveniently been declared "Russian soil").

He said. "That is a large number for Russia too. Recruiting new soldiers is not going very well either. When recruitment does not go well, it may be viable to provide less training to new soldiers, but this means that losses will be higher—a kind of vicious circle."

That Ukraine has held on to a chunk of Russian territory, namely parts of the Kursk oblast, since early August, also represents a significant blow on the domestic Kremlin front, not least given the boasts made about how quickly the Ukrainians would be pushed back over their own borders.

Karu said: "Initially, they vowed to drive out the Ukrainians immediately, later Putin rephrased it to be 'by October.' Now we are well into November, yet the Ukrainians are still holding, if not the entire area captured in the early days, most of it. There has been talk of a major Russian offensive in that area, but I believe that if they had enough capacity, they would have done so already and long ago, as it is such a sensitive domestic issue for them that part of Russia is occupied by Ukraine. /.../ The Ukrainians remain successful there, while the Russians are suffering heavy losses there as well," Karu went on.

As for the roughly 10,000 North Korean personnel Pyongyang has sent to the Ukraine front, their role cannot be very significant, Karu said, despite the Ukrainians reporting having had their first contact with the North Koreans.

He said: "10,000 may seem like a large figure to us, but I do not believe they can change anything significantly on the front line. They probably do not even speak Russian, which means they are very difficult to use in combat operations."

In addition to being exposed to standards of living, even in provincial Russia, which are considerably higher than those in North Korea, any North Korean troops captured by Ukraine may need to be interrogated using interpreters from the democratic nation of South Korea, which would likely bring the divide into even sharper relief.

An interactive map of the Ukraine fronts updated in real-time is here.

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