Not a word of what the Russian defence ministry says is credible. Its claims that Russian troops have surrounded Ukrainian forces in Pokrovsk, Kostyantynivka and Kupiansk, in eastern Ukraine, are agitprop.
But Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement from the front line that his country’s fighters are “under pressure” is something of an understatement.
Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, told the New York Post that Russia was concentrating some 150,000 troops on a drive to capture the town. which is much prized by Russia.
Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Russian troops may have successfully infiltrated the three tactically important towns.
Kupiansk is on Russia’s route towards Kharkiv. The other two control the eastern and southern routes to the last remaining Ukrainian redoubts in Donetsk – Kramatorsk and Slaviansk.
Vladimir Putin has thrown a massive effort into the fight for Donetsk, which Moscow has already illegally “annexed”.
They have paid a gigantic price in blood for tiny territorial gains. At the rate Russia is advancing intelligence sources estimate that it could take Moscow more than 100 years to capture Ukraine. Russia is estimated to have lost 1.5 million killed and injured since 2022 but Putin’s latest efforts have taken on a new urgency.
Yet, Pokrovsk falls eventually, there will be nothing left of this former garrison town.
Just as there is nothing left of nearby Bakhmut or Avdiivka, which fell almost two years ago in what was the last significant Russian gain in this grinding war.
These Russian-speaking towns, like Mariupol before them, are the scenes of atrocities against Russian-speaking civilians committed by a Russian army deployed, the Russian leader says, to protect Russian-speaking people from Ukrainian abuses.
Moscow says Ukrainian troops are now trapped in three “cauldrons”. It is offering the troops “encircled” there the opportunity to surrender. They are not encircled. They do not need to, and will not, surrender.
Russia has stretched Ukraine’s ability to defend a front line that’s about 1,300km long. It has launched feint attacks from Zaporizhzhia in the south to Sumy in the far north. But its main effort has been Putin’s passion to take all of Donetsk before any kind of a future ceasefire “freezes” the front lines.
In the new field of drone warfare, Russia has moved as quickly to adapt as Ukraine’s techno-savvy volunteers. Kyiv’s forces up and down that front line speak with fearful admiration of the Rubicon unit of Moscow’s forces, who are highly trained specialist drone operators.
“We can tell when they’re in our area because their skills go up. They train people well and when they leave, they leave those skills behind,” said Grey, a lieutenant in a Ukrainian frontline drone unit close to Zaporizhzhia.
