Russian forces have advanced into the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, Moscow has said, as it hunts for its most significant territorial gain in nearly two years.
Around 100,000 Russian troops are circling Pokrovsk, a city that Russia has been trying to capture for over a year, located in Ukraineâs eastern Donetsk region that Vladimir Putin has long sought full Russian control over.
Kyivâs military says it is pushing back forcefully, but battlefield maps show Russian forces are edging forward. A military analyst has warned that Ukraine will soon be forced to make a decision on whether to pull troops from Myrnohrad, a nearby town close to being encircled by Russian forces.
The following are the key facts about Pokrovsk, which Russians call by its Soviet-era name of Krasnoarmeysk, and the long battle for its control, which began in earnest in mid-2024.
Where is Pokrovsk?
Pokrovsk is a road and rail hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region with a pre-war population of some 60,000 people. Most people have now fled, all children have been evacuated and few civilians remain amid its pulverised apartment buildings and cratered roads.
The city lies on a key road which has been used by the Ukrainian military to supply other embattled outposts.
Map of Pokrovsk:
Ukraine’s only mine producing coking coal – used in its once vast steel industry – is around six miles (10 km) west of Pokrovsk. A technical university in Pokrovsk, the region’s largest and oldest, now stands abandoned, damaged by shelling.
Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst with Finnish open source intelligence organisation Black Bird Group, says Pokrovsk does not hold the strategic importance it once did, due to fierce fighting and significant destruction in the town.
âCurrently itâs a battlefield full of destroyed buildings. So the role of Pokrovsk is that Ukraine tries to hold on to the city so that they can keep the corridor to Myrnohrad open, to delay the Russian advance as much as possible,â he said.
Why does Russia want Pokrovsk?
Russia wants to take the whole of the Donbas region, which comprises the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces. Ukraine still controls about 10 per cent of Donbas – an area of about 5,000 square km (1,930 square miles) in western Donetsk.
President Vladimir Putin says Donbas is now legally part of Russia. Kyiv and most Western nations reject Moscow’s seizure of the territory as an illegal land grab.
Capturing Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” by Russian media, and Kostiantynivka to its northeast which Russian forces are also trying to envelop, would give Moscow its most important single territorial gain inside Ukraine since it took the ruined city of Avdiivka in early 2024.
It would also would give Moscow a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in Donetsk – Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.
But advancing towards these cities would be âreally costly and will take months and months, at least, at the current rate of advance,â Mr Kasetehelmi said.
âIn regional warfare, there can be events where gradual events become sudden, and then something actually changes rapidly. But I don’t see that that happening in the near future,â he added.
Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, says capturing Pokrovsk would hand Russia an important win for operational reasons, but would leave Russia a lot of work to do when it came to taking control of the rest of Donetsk.
Why has it taken so long?
Russia has been threatening Pokrovsk for more than a year, using a pincer movement to gradually encircle the city and threaten Ukrainian supply lines, sending small units and drones to disrupt Ukrainian logistics to their rear before sending in larger reinforcements.
Ukraine says Russia’s offensive has seen its forces sustain huge losses. Moscow says Ukraine is at risk of running out of men and that its own slower tactics are designed to minimise casualties.
An incursion into Russia’s Kursk region by Ukrainian forces last year, which Moscow fought back, slowed the Russian attack on Pokrovsk too.
What is happening now and what comes next?
Ukraine has rushed to strengthen positions in the city, but President Zelensky has accepted that âlogistics are difficultâ.
DeepState, a Ukrainian project that maps the front line based on verified open source images, shows Russian forces pushing into the city. The project says the situation âcontinues to deteriorate to the point that it may be too late to fixâ.
Russia’s top general, Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff, told Putin on Sunday that Russia had blocked a large number of Ukrainian soldiers in the area, but Kyiv and Western military analysts deny that its troops are fully encircled yet.
Mr Kastehelmi says that Ukraine has several options ahead of it – but warns that thousands of troops in the nearby town of Myrnohrad are close to being fully encircled, facing âdeath or captureâ as the Russians âmop up the cityâ.
In one scenario, Ukraine could commit more resources to defending both Pokrovsk and northern parts of the Russian pincer, in order to open up supply routes to Myrnohrad. Even if Pokrovsk is lost, Kyiv may still have some routes to supply Myrnohrad if they carry out successful counter attacks.
A more likely scenario, he says, is that the Russians will âslowly grind towards the northern parts of Pokrovskâ over the next few weeks, leaving Myrnohrad close to encirclement.
Kyiv will face the difficult decision of whether to pull its units from Myrnohrad, a decision he expects it to leave to the âlast possible minuteâ.
âThe decision should be made really quickly, because staying in Myrnohrad doesn’t serve any any sensible purpose at the moment,â he said.
âIf Ukraine manages to pull out and and spare the troops then it can continue rather effective defense, where they delay the Russian troops as much as possible,â he added.
âLosing Pokrovsk doesn’t really mean that the Ukrainians would begin to lose ground in a rapid manner.â
