Russian forces have advanced into the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, Moscow has said, as it hunts for its most significant territorial gain in nearly two years.
Around 100,000 Russian troops are circling Pokrovsk, a city that Russia has been trying to capture for over a year, located in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region that Vladimir Putin has long sought full Russian control over.
Kyiv’s military says it is pushing back forcefully, but battlefield maps show Russian forces are edging forward. A military analyst has warned that Ukraine will soon be forced to make a decision on whether to pull troops from Myrnohrad, a nearby town close to being encircled by Russian forces.
The following are the key facts about Pokrovsk, which Russians call by its Soviet-era name of Krasnoarmeysk, and the long battle for its control, which began in earnest in mid-2024.
Pokrovsk is a road and rail hub in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region with a pre-war population of some 60,000 people. Most people have now fled, all children have been evacuated and few civilians remain amid its pulverised apartment buildings and cratered roads.
The city lies on a key road which has been used by the Ukrainian military to supply other embattled outposts.
Ukraine’s only mine producing coking coal – used in its once vast steel industry – is around six miles (10 km) west of Pokrovsk. A technical university in Pokrovsk, the region’s largest and oldest, now stands abandoned, damaged by shelling.
Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst with Finnish open source intelligence organisation Black Bird Group, says Pokrovsk does not hold the strategic importance it once did, due to fierce fighting and significant destruction in the town.
“Currently it’s a battlefield full of destroyed buildings. So the role of Pokrovsk is that Ukraine tries to hold on to the city so that they can keep the corridor to Myrnohrad open, to delay the Russian advance as much as possible,” he said.
Russia wants to take the whole of the Donbas region, which comprises the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces. Ukraine still controls about 10 per cent of Donbas – an area of about 5,000 square km (1,930 square miles) in western Donetsk.
President Vladimir Putin says Donbas is now legally part of Russia. Kyiv and most Western nations reject Moscow’s seizure of the territory as an illegal land grab.
Capturing Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” by Russian media, and Kostiantynivka to its northeast which Russian forces are also trying to envelop, would give Moscow its most important single territorial gain inside Ukraine since it took the ruined city of Avdiivka in early 2024.
It would also would give Moscow a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in Donetsk – Kramatorsk and Slovyansk.
But advancing towards these cities would be “really costly and will take months and months, at least, at the current rate of advance,” Mr Kasetehelmi said.
