Ukrainian soldiers told The i Paper that the situation in Pokrovsk is “critical” and that Russian forces were closing in
Pokrovsk is now at the epicentre of Ukraine’s fight against Vladimir Putin’s invasion, with a third of all frontline clashes happening in the city.
Fighting has been ongoing there for more than a year, but a Ukrainian soldier told The i Paper that the situation was now “critical” and that it was only a “matter of time” before the Russians took Pokrovsk.
“Morale is very low but everyone is holding on and repelling the enemy,” said the man, who The i Paper is keeping anonymous for security reasons.
The soldier shared video footage he’d taken, including the burned body of a Ukrainian soldier with only a military-issue boot left to identify it as human. On either side of the muddy tracks, which passed through a Ukrainian forest, blackened and hollowed out armoured vehicles could be seen – a result of the intense fighting.
These are the surroundings of the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, which is seen as a critical battleground for both sides.
The soldier said Russians were close to the city but it had not yet fallen, with around 4km (2.5 miles) left before Ukrainian forces were surrounded.
Another Ukrainian soldier said the army would throw its full weight into the battle, but that he was certain Russia would eventually take the city and estimated this would happen within the month.
Pokrovsk is seen as a key strategic site and logistics hub in Ukraine’s Donetsk region due to its elevated position and railway. Once home to 60,000 people, it has been largely emptied of civilians.
Russian victory in the city would take Putin a step closer to controlling the entirety of the east of Ukraine.
The area was visited by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky this week, where he met soldiers in the Dobropillya sector, around 20km (12 miles) north of Pokrovsk.
Ukraine’s strategy has been to try to increase pressure across the Dobropillya front to “force the enemy to disperse its forces and make it impossible to concentrate their main efforts in the Pokrovsk area”, said Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskiy.
Kyiv claims that Russia has amassed 170,000 troops on Pokrovsk’s outskirts but denied that Ukrainian forces were encircled.
Marina Miron, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, said the loss of Pokrovsk would be “catastrophic” for Ukraine.
“Since 2014 there are a number of places which form the Ukrainian fortress belt in the Donbas, and this is one of the key locations,” she said.
Miron added: “According to Ukrainian reports, there are no lines of defense behind Pokrovsk, so once you break through, you can go through the fields and advance quite easily… I don’t think that the whole Donbas will fall if Pokrovsk falls, but it will enable the Russian forces to develop their offensive operations towards other places.”
The logistical gains from taking Pokrovsk would also be significant, allowing Russians to cut off Ukrainian forces while supplying their own offensive operations.
Pokrovsk also has a coal mine which could be strategically useful. “Another reason why it would be important for the Russians to take and painful for the Ukrainians to lose,” Miron said.
“If you don’t have logistics, you can forget about military operations,” she added. “This is why we’re seeing Russians going after such locations, where they can cut off logistics for the Ukrainian forces.”
Sam Cranny-Evans, an associate fellow at defence thinktank RUSI, said that cutting Ukrainian troops off from their supplies and reinforcements was a common tactic, and that “Ukrainian advances or positions rarely hold out for long when this kind of pressure is applied”.
“Russia often prefers to destroy a city with immense firepower from the outside,” he said. “This will tend to include an attempt to encircle or isolate a city or town so that Russia can arrange its firepower and cut the logistics routes. The intensity of the bombardment from the air and artillery then generally increases.”
Cranny-Evans said that if defenders can counter this “they may hold out for a long time, but we can see that in Avdiivka and Mariupol, it eventually overwhelmed Ukraine’s defenders, and led to widespread destruction”.
Ukraine is using drones in particular in its attempt to pressurise Russian forces, and this is delaying Russia’s attempts to take Pokrovsk, Cranny-Evans said.
Ukrainian troops in the city say that while they are pessimistic about their chances, they will not give up on Pokrovsk, or the larger conflict.
“We want the war to end,” one told The i Paper. “I don’t know what they want.”
