Putin’s forces are desperate for a prize eastern city and Ukraine will fight street to street to keep them out
The city of Pokrovsk, regarded as the key to controlling Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, has been the prize Vladimir Putin’s troops have sought for months – one for which Moscow has already sacrificed thousands of its troops.
Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, seizing the entire Donetsk region, which has seen the most prolonged and bloodiest battles in Europe since the Second World War, has been the Kremlin’s oft-declared top priority.
Pokrovsk has stuck obstinately in Putin’s craw and in recent months, massive resources have been concentrated to try to break Ukrainian defences. Moscow’s forces have mounted often suicidal infantry assaults, without regard for casualties.
A senior military source of The Independent confirmed that elements of at least three experienced brigades, including the Azov and Kara-Dah brigades, had been deployed to stiffen the Ukrainian forces around Pokrovsk which, he said, are outnumbered 10 to one by their enemy in some places.
The source, a colonel connected to the Ukrainian general staff, said heavy battles are raging close to Pokrovsk along a line of small towns like Myrnohrad, Novohrodivka, Seldovo, Ukrainsk and Hirnyak to the southeast of Pokrovsk and Kurakhove and Vuhledar to the south.
Heavy equipment is being used to dig a crescent of defences – trenches and other fortifications – that will weave through or between those towns and villages. He said mines, some sown by drones, would disrupt Russia’s “human-wave” assaults.
The Ukrainian General Staff said on Monday that the fiercest battles are around the small town of Kurakhove, where Russian ground and air forces have launched scores of attacks each day for the past week, using their, now-routine, human wave tactics of sending men, sometimes backed by tanks and armoured personnel carriers. Most civilians have evacuated from the area but one person was killed in Kurakhove on Sunday by Russian artillery.
Ukraine is determined to hold onto the area for as long as possible and the fighting will likely turn into another prolonged siege involving grinding close-quarter battles, street by street and house by house, as was the case in Bakhmut, where the Russians eventually conquered a pile of rubble.
The commander in chief of Ukraine’s military, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, has said that defences around Pokrovsk have been reinforced with several reserve brigades and the Russian advance had been slowed.
“Ukrainian forces are preparing for street battles. The Russians are certainly not going to be able to get Pokrovsk imminently and we will be able to prevent them entering for weeks or months and hopefully until winter where they will not be able to advance further,” The Independent’s colonel source says.
The Russians taking Pokrovsk would split Ukraine’s defensive line in the region and vastly complicate supplying its forces in the eastern part of Donetsk. In turn, that would jeopardise Kyiv’s ability to cling onto its remaining strongholds there such as Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Kostyantynivka, Chasiv Yar and Toretsk.
Losing Pokrovsk would also open up a path westwards to Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region for the Russians.
Even then, being in Pokrovsk does not mean the Russians will be able to use the road and rail routes passing through the town as they will be within reach of Ukrainian artillery. The most direct route from Ukrainian-controlled territory is already too dangerous for civilian vehicles as traffic is visible to Russian drones and within reach of its artillery and mortars. The roles would be reversed for Russian vehicles trying to reach a Pokrovsk in Moscow’s hands.
The Independent entered Pokrovsk from the north, via the town of Dobropillya. The effect of the intensified Russian encroachment was dramatic and obvious to see, not only in the streets with few pedestrians but in the closed supermarkets, stores, street markets, restaurants and cafes that had been busy when The Independent last visited Pokrovsk in the spring.
The sounds of explosions are constant, not just in the direction of the Ukrainian defensive lines but within the town itself where a huge number of residential and commercial buildings have been destroyed.
Billboards with the word “evacuation” in huge letters and a telephone number at once advise where to seek assistance and remind remaining residents that the government wants civilians to quit the city. Some 38,000 of Pokrovsk’s pre-war population of 60,000 remain, according to the city’s military administration.
Police cars cruise through the largely empty streets using loudhailers to urge remaining residents to leave and repeat that telephone number. The town still has electricity and gas but the tap water is too contaminated to drink.
Some people are determined to defy the seemingly inevitable by trying to maintain normal routines for as long as possible. A few small grocery shops are operating and at one, cafe soldiers sit at outside tables sipping coffee as explosions boom out.
Irena Paulina, 66, says she is not going to leave Pokrovsk for now as she has to care for her 83-year-old mother who is too frail to travel. She is pushing a bicycle with supplies including apples and bread along her road past houses that were recently destroyed by Russian bombs.