Russian troops have pushed into the east Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk – and immediately begun the casual commission of war crimes with the murder of at least three civilians trying to flee the invaders.
In footage shared with The Independent, an elderly woman lies on the verge of a road by a level crossing, not far from the train tracks on the outskirts of the city, wounded, and still.
A few yards away a body lies on its back inert, dead. Nearby, another victim lies collapsed next to the bicycle they had loaded with supplies as the enemy approached, before desperately bumping the wheels over the rails. Slow and awkward he, or she, must have been an easy target for Vladimir Putin’s vanguard.
Another body, male, in blue jeans is sprawled on the tracks themselves while smoke curled from the ruins of a nearby civilian home. One ray of light in the grim scene is an unknown man rescuing the injured woman and carrying her out of range of Russia’s gunmen.
These images were captured by a Ukrainian drone over Pokrovsk, which has been a tactical priority for Russia for more than a year – thousands of soldiers on both sides have perished in the battle that will now become a house-to-house conflict as the city is reduced to rubble.
As news filtered back to Ukraine over the weekend that Donald Trump had, again, reportedly told president Volodymyr Zelensky that he should surrender the Donetsk province as part of a ceasefire with the Kremlin, Putin’s forces launched more missiles at civilian targets across the country.
Pokrovsk is in Donetsk. Like Kharkiv, which was hit with a new guided missile last night, it had a Russian speaking majority. So did Mariupol in the south and Bakhmut further north and Avdiivka just down the road.
Now, there’s nothing left of Bakhmut or Avdiivka. More than 350,000 people fled the Russians in Mariupol and, according to human rights watch, at least 8,000 civilians were killed there when Russia launched its campaign to “rescue” Russian speaking people from Ukraine’s government.
Trump and Zelensky met last Friday, with the Ukrainian president hoping to secure the agreement of the US to sell its Tomahawk cruise missiles.
There was no decision either way from the American president, but multiple media reports described the meeting as “tense”, that Trump frequently swore and that he told Zelensky his country risks being destroyed.
It does not. Russia is making small incremental gains at gigantic costs. The British Ministry of Defence, which backs Ukraine, has estimated it would take Putin four more years and cost two million men to capture the four Ukrainian provinces it already partly occupies in the east of the country.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has been reaching deep into Russian territory to attack Putin’s logistic and energy infrastructure. It wants Tomahawk cruise missiles with a range of about 1,000 miles (1,600km) to increase pressure on Putin.
The heads of Germany’s intelligence agencies recently warned that Russia was already involved in a hybrid war against Europe and could escalate further in the next five years. Germany produces the Taurus missile, which unlike Tomahawk, is capable of ground penetration attacks.
Norway and Italy produce similarly capable missiles, but so far none of these countries, who claim they see Russia as a military threat, have agreed to supply them to Ukraine.
This week Zelensky will no doubt renew his pleas for more European help as it is, again, clear that the US is echoing Russian talking points in its meetings with Ukraine.
He is expected to join the European Coalition of the Willing for more talks in the near future, led by Sir Keir Starmer.
He said that Kyiv was preparing contracts to buy 25 Patriot air defence systems over the coming years and hoped Europe would prioritise the supply of the weapons.
Trump and Putin are expecting to meet in Budapest, Hungary, in the next two weeks as guests of Victor Orban, who has a largely pro-Putin agenda.
Several European countries have expressed dismay at the idea of Putin, who has been indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, setting foot inside the European Union.
