MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia’s defence ministry said on Thursday that its forces had advanced in the battered Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk and were fighting house-to-house battles in a bid to eject Ukrainian forces from the city.
Moscow says taking Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” by Russian media, would give it a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donetsk region – Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Russia wants to take the whole of the Donbas region, which comprises Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk provinces. Ukraine still controls about 10% of Donbas – an area of about 5,000 square km (1,930 square miles).
Russia has been threatening Pokrovsk for more than a year, using a pincer movement to attempt to encircle it and threaten supply lines, rather than the deadly frontal assaults it employed to capture the city of Bakhmut in 2023.
Kyiv has acknowledged that the situation in Pokrovsk has become difficult in recent days but says its troops are still fighting there and denies they are surrounded.
“Assault groups of the 2nd Army continued to destroy the encircled formations of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the eastern part of the central district and in the western industrial zone,” Russia’s defence ministry said.
Russia said it had captured 64 buildings in the city, once home to 60,000 people, over the past 24 hours and repelled Ukrainian attacks from Hryshyne to the west.
Russian forces are just a few km away from closing their pincer movement around Pokrovsk and neighbouring Myrnohrad and are also closing in on Ukrainian forces in Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region.
Yuri Podolyaka, one of Russia’s top war bloggers, said Russia had tactical control of Pokrovsk but that in Myrnohrad Ukrainian forces had blocked themselves behind heavy defences. Ukrainian forces were also seeking to attack from the north-west.
ATTACKING THE FORTRESS BELT
The Donbas was the crucible of the conflict which began in 2014 after a pro-Russian president was toppled in Kyiv and Russia annexed Crimea. Russian-backed Donbas separatists fought Ukraine’s armed forces until Russia’s 2022 invasion, after which Moscow claimed to have annexed the area.
Ukraine spent years before the 2022 invasion reinforcing a “fortress belt” including Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka.
“If Pokrovsk falls so does Myrnohrad, and the pocket closes,” Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, said on X.
“The city holds operational value. Its loss widens the Russian axis of advance in Donetsk west of the Kramatorsk conglomeration of towns, but it does not open those cities to be quickly taken.”
Russia’s military says it now controls more than 19% of Ukraine, or some 116,000 square km (44,800 square miles). Pro-Ukrainian maps show that Russia has taken more than 3,400 square km of Ukrainian territory so far this year, having controlled around 18% of Ukraine at the end of 2023.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Mark Trevelyan, Peter Graff)
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