Civilians, evacuated from the Pokrovsk frontline, gather at the temporary stay centre in Pavlohrad, Ukraine in February. Photo / Getty Images
In August of last year, Russia appeared to be on the verge of capturing the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.
Moscow’s troops advanced to about 12km from the city limits, and inhabitants hurriedly evacuated.
Estimates varied of how long Pokrovsk could hold out - from a few weeks to a few months - but the city’s fate appeared to be sealed.
Fast-forward 14 months, and Ukrainian forces are still tenaciously clinging to this key logistics hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
That’s despite Russian claims that the city’s fall is imminent and that thousands of Kyiv’s troops are encircled and soon to be taken prisoner.
The Ukrainians’ hold, however, is looking increasingly tenuous.
Small groups of Russian soldiers have infiltrated the city, and fierce street battles are taking place as the defenders try to track them down and force them out.
Nevertheless, the very fact that Ukrainian troops remain in the city after all this time has frustrated Russia’s plans, Kyiv says.
“We’re holding the city for now. It’s stable chaos in there,” said a Ukrainian major, whose brigade was “stationed in and around the Pokrovsk front”, adding that there were no plans to retreat.
The officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to talk publicly, said that somewhere between “200 to 250” Russian forces “had accumulated on the south side” of the city.
“The current combat situation is street fighting.”
Ukrainian special forces and assault units had arrived to bolster defences and “clean out” the Russian troops, he added.
Speaking to journalists on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that “as soon as they crawl out” from their hiding places, or “as soon as there is fire from one point or another”, the Russian forces “are found and destroyed”.
He added that Pokrovsk has become Moscow’s main military objective and that Russia was pulling resources from other areas of the front line to try to take it.
If Pokrovsk fell, it would be the largest city to be taken by Russian forces since the bloody battle for Bakhmut in May 2023 - the last major Russian victory in the grinding war.
“People are trying to compare it to Bakhmut, but these are different situations,” said the major defending the city.
“Here, there aren’t as many of them, and most of them are just hiding somewhere in basements.”
Pokrovsk is a key link in the chain of fortress cities keeping Russia from conquering the entire Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, one of its main objectives in the war.
Russia has made Ukraine giving up the rest of Donetsk a condition of any ceasefire.
Ukraine’s Air Assault Forces 7th Corps, which is fighting in Pokrovsk, said in a Telegram post on Tuesday that “there is currently no full control over any of the districts of Pokrovsk”.
“The defenders of Pokrovsk are actively resisting the occupiers in the city,” it said, adding that their numbers were “reinforced with new units, including assault troops, artillery, UAV crews, and other components of the defence forces.”
Russian officials painted a vastly different picture - one in which Moscow’s forces are on the cusp of a major rout of Ukraine’s military.
On Monday, General Valery Gerasimov, the Russian armed forces’ chief of staff, told President Vladimir Putin that the Kremlin’s forces had encircled close to 5500 Ukrainian troops in the Pokrovsk direction and another 5000 near Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region to the north.
However, in its daily round-up of the conflict in Ukraine, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said that these claims were probably false.
“ISW has not observed evidence to support Gerasimov’s claims,” the report said, adding that although Russian troops were “making gains near and within Pokrovsk” and the nearby town of Myrnohrad, these probably “do not portend the imminent collapse of Ukrainian defences in the area”.
On Tuesday, ISW said that the front line there was “fluid and interspersed” and that “both Ukrainian and Russian forces continue to advance in the Pokrovsk direction”.
Russian military bloggers also cast doubt on Gerasimov’s assertions. “Once again, the information reported does not correspond to the reality on the ground,” Romanov Light, a blogger with a wide readership, wrote on Telegram on Tuesday.
Military Informer, another such Telegram account that is believed to have close ties with the Russian military, wrote that “it is extremely unlikely that a group of several thousand Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers is still stationed inside” the area around Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad.
“The current reality is that battles are fought by small infantry groups, both in defence and in attack.”
Russia’s claims of significant frontline gains have more to do with the battle in the information sphere, observers say.
“Putin’s and Gerasimov’s claims of battlefield victories are part of the ongoing Kremlin cognitive warfare effort to falsely portray a Russian victory as inevitable, such that Ukraine and the West should concede to Russia’s demands now,” ISW wrote.
Zelenskyy, in his remarks to journalists, said Russia lacked “a result that they can sell to the Americans”.
“They show them maps with Pokrovsk already captured, tell them how they stand in the [Dnipro] region, how they captured 90% of eastern Ukraine. This is just a lie,” he said.
But if Pokrovsk falls, it will be a serious setback, as the city is a junction for road and railway lines and would bring Russian forces closer to the major Donetsk cities of Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka.
Ukraine has had more than a year to prepare for this possibility.
Supplying those fighting in Pokrovsk was currently a challenge, the military said.
“Aerial and ground drones are used to deliver necessary supplies,” the 7th Corps said in its Telegram post - a phenomenon increasingly observed along the war’s front lines.
“The problem is mainly with logistics,” said the major in Pokrovsk. “Getting our personnel in and out, evacuations, drones, ammunition, because the same problem with FPVs persists. We need to get fuel in, ammunition, gear - that has become difficult.”
First-person-view drones carrying explosives have become one of the most dangerous weapons in the current fighting.
The major said his troops were not worried about encirclement. “They’ve tried to encircle us twice, and it hasn’t worked out,” he said.
- Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report.
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