Ukraine has denied that Russian troops have taken full control of the small eastern city of Pokrovsk – a defence hub in Donetsk region during nearly four years of all-out war – and accused Moscow of misrepresenting the battlefield situation to pressurise Kyiv during an urgent US push for a peace deal.
Russian commanders told president Vladimir Putin on Monday that his invasion force had finally captured Pokrovsk after months of intense fighting, and he congratulated them as he prepared to welcome US envoys to the Kremlin on Tuesday for talks on draft proposals for a potential peace plan.
Mr Putin heard that “mopping up” operations were now taking place in Pokrovsk and the surrounding area, and that some 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers were trapped in the neighbouring mining town of Myrnohrad.
From the start of Moscow’s armed aggression against Ukraine in 2014, Putin has tried to exert maximum pressure on the battlefield at important stages in negotiations, and in March this year he announced that thousands of Ukrainian troops were surrounded in the Russian border region of Kursk – a false claim that Donald Trump parroted and never corrected.
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“Search and assault operations and the elimination of the enemy in urban areas continue in Pokrovsk,” Ukraine’s military said on Tuesday, claiming that pictures of Russian troops planting a flag near the city centre were part of a “propaganda” mission.
“Despite unfavourable weather conditions, our units continue aerial reconnaissance, targeting, and strikes against enemy groups. In Myrnohrad, Ukrainian units are holding defensive lines and eliminating the enemy on the approaches to the city,” Kyiv’s military added, noting that “additional logistics routes to Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad are being organised to ensure the uninterrupted supply of everything necessary to our units.”
Ukraine’s general staff said footage of Russian soldiers raising their flag in Pokrovsk – which led the Russian news on Monday evening – was “merely another Kremlin attempt to ... influence participants in international negotiations.”
However, even if Ukraine is still fighting a rearguard action in and around Pokrovsk, analysts say it is only a matter of time before the area falls to Russia’s much bigger invasion force.
Ukraine does not have enough soldiers to prevent infiltration all the way along a front line that stretches for 1,200km, and the cloudy, misty weather of early winter has hampered the work of drone teams that Kyiv’s military uses to cover gaps in the line.
Kyiv’s outnumbered forces are also insufficient to mount a counterattack around Pokrovsk, and analysts have said for many weeks that Ukraine should focus on extracting as many troops as possible from the area and strengthening its defences around the two medium-sized cities that it still controls in Donetsk region – Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.
Several regional roads converge in Pokrovsk, and if Russia managed to establish firm control over the area it would facilitate a push towards Kramatorsk, 70km to the north, and potentially towards Pavlohrad, a small city in Dnipropetrovsk region that is 100km to the west.
Putin says Russia is determined to take full control of Donetsk region, and that if Ukraine refuses to hand over Slovyansk and Kramatorsk as part of negotiations, then his military will fight on until the heavily fortified cities fall, regardless of the cost to his forces and to the 250,000 or so civilians who still live in Kyiv-held parts of the province.
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War says that at its current rate of advance, it would take Russia nearly two more years to seize the rest of the Donetsk region; Putin hopes Trump’s impatient push for a peace deal will deliver the prize much sooner.
