Russian forces appear to be on the brink of finally seizing the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a symbolic victory that President Vladimir Putin has been pursuing for 21 months at an increasingly heavy cost.
Fighting inside the city has intensified in the past few days, after Russian troops successfully infiltrated it. The fall of Pokrovsk – the strategic value of which has already been greatly diminished, but which would nevertheless represent the biggest win for Moscow since 2023 – now seems almost inevitable, according to those on the ground.
While Kyiv denied Russian claims that Ukrainian forces in Pokrovsk have already been surrounded, saying on Wednesday that active operations stopping the Russian advance were still ongoing, Ukrainian soldiers on the ground have described an increasingly grim reality.
“The situation is difficult, with all types of fighting going on, firefights in urban areas, and shelling with all types of weapons,” one battalion commander told CNN, speaking on the condition of anonymity for security reasons.
“We are almost surrounded, but we are used to it,” he said. Another soldier, who also asked for his name to be withheld for safety reasons, told CNN the Russian military continues to press forward with large numbers of men.
“The intensity of their movements is so great that (Ukrainian) drone operators simply cannot keep up with the pace. The Russians often move in groups of three, counting on the fact that two will be destroyed, but one will still reach the city and gain a foothold there. About a hundred such groups can pass through in a day,” a soldier from the Ukrainian Peaky Blinders drone unit told CNN.
Symbolic battle
The claim that Russia is willing to sacrifice two soldiers in order to get one through might seem perplexing – but it tallies up with observations made by international researchers who have noted a very high number of Russian casualties around Pokrovsk, even though taking over the city won’t make much difference on the ground.
That’s because the battle for Pokrovsk is no longer a fight for a strategically important logistics hub. Instead, it has now morphed into a symbolic battle.
“From (a) battlefield perspective, it doesn’t make sense,” said George Barros, who leads the Russia and Geospatial Intelligence teams at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank.
Pokrovsk was long seen as a key city for the Ukrainians, because of its road and rail connections. It sits on a junction of several major roads, leading to Donetsk and Kostyantynivka in the east and Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia to the west.
“It was operationally significant because it was a supply line that supported the Ukrainian logistics, which then fanned out and supported the other Ukrainian tactical positions in smaller villages and in the field around Pokrovsk,” he said.
However, that changed once Russia began encircling Pokrovsk over the summer.
Frequent drone and artillery attacks on the key highway and rail line have forced Kyiv to find alternative supply routes, shifting the hub function away from Pokrovsk – a major success for the Russians. The city also hosted Ukraine’s last operating coking coal mine, but it was forced to shut down early this year.
“From this point further, it doesn’t actually operationally do anything for the Russians, because they already achieved the main effect that they needed to a while ago,” Barros told CNN.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this week that Russia had amassed some 170,000 troops in the region to bolster the Pokrovsk offensive.
It is clear that, while Pokrovsk has been mostly ruined and its strategic value has all but disappeared, it has become a symbol. And in a war that has largely stalled, symbols like this matter.
Pokrovsk would be the largest city Russia has seized since Bakhmut in May 2023. While some 60,000 lived in Pokrovsk before the war, the majority have left since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. According to Ukrainian authorities, some 1,200 civilians remain in the city.
Some of those left have missed the window of opportunity to flee – Ukrainian authorities have said evacuations are currently impossible – but others might be waiting for the Russian troops to arrive. The Russian Ministry of Defense has already shared a video it said showed evacuations of Pokrovsk residents to the Russian side.
“Strategically, from the political and informational perspective, Pokrovsk is very important, because Vladimir Putin has gone out of his way numerous times to make public national and international statements about the seizure,” Barros said.
“He is conducting a strategic information campaign which seeks to present Russia’s military victory on the battlefield as inevitable,” he added.
‘No order to withdraw’
Putin has made it clear his goal is to take over of the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south.
Taking over Pokrovsk would allow Russia to shift its focus elsewhere – namely towards the string of industrial cities to its northeast that form the backbone of Ukrainian defenses in the region.
One soldier from Ukraine’s 129th Brigade who is currently deployed near Kostyantynivka told CNN the expectation on the ground is that “as soon as the Russians deal with Pokrovsk and (the neighboring town of) Myrnohrad, the pressure on Kostyantynivka will increase and they will move towards Druzhkivka.”
He said his battalion doesn’t have the number of soldiers it should have and is running low on armored vehicles.
The soldier said that the main concern of troops in the area is that the Ukrainian leadership will try to hold onto what remains of Pokrovsk for as long as possible because abandoning the city would be seen as a major failure.
“There has been no order to withdraw although everyone already understands that the fall of Pokrovsk is inevitable. Pokrovsk was held for a very long time, a very long time. But the forces were exhausted, and reinforcements were not sent in time,” he said.
He said withdrawal will become much more dangerous the longer the Ukrainians hesitate, repeating previous painful experiences for Kyiv’s forces. The battles of Bakhmut in 2023 and Avdiivka in 2024 were both marked by delayed withdrawals, which led to high casualty rates among Ukrainian personnel.
“We will have to squeeze through the bottleneck, and you surely understand the high level of losses that such an exit from the encirclement will entail,” he said.
