Russia is concentrating its firepower and troops on the small, battered city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, apparently pushing its forces close to capturing what has become a gateway to the war’s most fiercely contested region.
After more than a year of fighting, Pokrovsk, a railroad hub in the Donetsk region, has been turned largely into rubble, its prewar population of 60,000 now reduced to fewer than 1,300 residents. Ukrainian soldiers defending the city report intense combat. Nearly one-third of all the battles along the front line, which stretches almost 750 miles, are in Pokrovsk, and half of Russia’s attacks with deadly glide bombs are focused on the city, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday. Those numbers could not be independently confirmed.
While Ukrainian leaders claim that their forces are clawing back neighborhoods, Russian troops appear to have taken control of the southwestern edge of Pokrovsk in the last few days, according to a battlefield map by DeepState, a group with ties to the Ukrainian military. Russian troops have also secured two slim columns in the city’s center and up its western side, based on the map, which shows most of the rest of Pokrovsk as a contested gray zone.
“The enemy is continuing to build up forces in the city,” DeepState said on social media Tuesday night, adding that Pokrovsk was “gradually being absorbed.”
The city would be the largest in Ukraine to fall since Bakhmut in May 2023. It is seen as the last major obstacle preventing Russian troops from approaching Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the only large cities still under Ukrainian control in Donetsk, a region that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has long coveted.
Taking Pokrovsk could aid the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is on the march on the battlefield and that the war will get only worse for Ukraine if it does not concede to Moscow’s onerous demands to end the conflict. Mr. Putin has ignored President Trump’s calls for a cease-fire as the Kremlin has pushed ahead with its invasion.
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