Russia has made gains in Ukraine’s Donetsk region before President Vladimir Putin’s high-stakes meeting with his United States counterpart Donald Trump in Alaska, raising fears that it may have increased its leverage amid talks aimed at ending the war.
In advance of Friday’s summit in Anchorage, Moscow’s army pounded away at Ukraine’s industrial heartland, attempting to seize the flashpoint town of Pokrovsk, a key highway and rail junction in eastern Donetsk, after repeated attempts to breach its defensive line during the week.
As Putin and Trump prepared to meet, battlefield analysis site DeepState said that Pokrovsk was partially encircled. In recent days, Russian forces had reportedly seized the village of Yablunivka and the settlement of Oleksandrohrad – both in Donetsk.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has rejected Putin’s demands that Kyiv withdraw from the remaining 30 percent of Donetsk that it still controls, played down the Russian advances, saying on X that his forces were “countering” and “increasing the pressure” on the “occupier”.
“The Russian army continues to suffer significant losses in its attempts to secure more favourable political positions for the Russian leadership at the meeting in Alaska. We understand this plan and are informing our partners about the real situation,” he said.
Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford said that “small groups of Russian forces” had “pushed through gaps in Ukrainian defensive lines in that area, taking around 10 kilometres [6.2 miles] of territory”.
Russia illegally annexed Donetsk in 2022, along with Luhansk, both of which form the eastern Donbas region, Kherson and Zaporizhia areas.
Attacks traded in run-up to summit
In other fighting on Friday, Russia launched a ballistic missile into Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, killing one and wounding at least one other person, according to regional governor Serhiy Lysak.
The city of Dnipro is a logistics hub for Ukrainian forces, and the Dnipropetrovsk region borders the combat zone and is regularly shelled by Russian forces.
Also on Friday, Ukraine’s military said it had struck the Syzran oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region, one of the biggest in oil company Rosneft’s network, in an overnight attack.
Samara’s regional governor said a drone attack caused a fire at an unspecified “industrial enterprise” in his region, but that it had been put out quickly.
The Ukrainian military also said it struck the Caspian port of Olya in Russia’s Astrakhan region on Thursday, hitting a ship that had been transporting drone parts and ammunition from Iran to Russia.
Facing regular Russian missile and drone attacks, Ukraine has directed the majority of its deep strikes against Russian oil refineries and unspecified “storage facilities” this year, according to new General Staff data published on Friday.
The Ukrainian military did not confirm if it used drones, as usual, for its latest two long-range attacks. It says its deep strike campaign aims to degrade Russia’s capacity to wage the full-scale war it launched in February 2022.
Some 535 Russian drones and missiles rained on Ukraine during the week of August 7-13. Ukraine intercepted just under two-thirds of them, and Moscow’s forces launched eight missiles against Ukraine, five of which got through its defences.
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