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The Russian army is set to conquer the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine. Pokrovsk, a town of 60,000 people before the war, is surrounded by the Russian army which has appealed to Ukrainian soldiers to surrender or die under fire. For several days, Russian pressure had increased on the city and the Ukrainians were on the verge of giving in.
After more than a year of fighting for control of Pokrovsk, in eastern Ukraine, Russian forces appear poised to seize this key logistical node for the Ukrainian army, which has launched operations to push them back.
After many months of a slow advance on three sides towards Pokrovsk, the Russian army managed from September to infiltrate small detachments there from its southern slope, taking the defenses established by the Ukrainians from behind.
At the same time, Russian drones have gradually been able to strike all the routes providing supplies to the Ukrainian garrison, a scenario which had already forced kyiv to abandon the Russian border region of Kursk in February and March 2025.
Ukraine has sent reinforcements there, including special forces units, but these efforts “may not be enough,” noted American military expert Michael Kofman on X.
According to independent Russian media outlet Verstka, most of Pokrovsk is under Russian control, with up to a thousand Russian troops deployed there.
Friday November 7, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reported a “complicated” situation with “220 assaults on Pokrovsk in three days”. According to him, 314 Russian soldiers infiltrated there, supported by a group on the outskirts.
For former French general and strategist Olivier Kempf, their retreat in the Pokrovsk region could have serious consequences for the rest of the war.
“The most worrying thing is what is to the west, that is to say the two oblasts which separate the Dnieper river, which goes down from kyiv to the Black Sea. And there, you no longer have any relief, any significant urban area to which the Ukrainians could cling. And so, the Russians will have a sort of freedom of maneuver between continuing to press towards the north, towards Kramatorsk, and then possibly advancing on the western plain towards Dnipro, to take a lot of ground,” he explains to the press.
The capture of Pokrovsk would constitute the most important Russian victory in Ukraine since the capture of the strongholds of Vougledar in October 2024 and Avdiïvka in February 2024. Their fall had allowed the Russian army to accelerate its advance in the east, although it took “21 months to cover the 39 kilometers which separate Avdiïvka from Pokrovsk”, notes the Institute for the Study of War, whose headquarters is in Washington.
Some also fear that the general staff will delay ordering the retreat if the city is lost. According to the military mapping website DeepState, close to the Ukrainian army, there now only exists – on paper – a narrow corridor less than three kilometers wide, which would allow a possible Ukrainian withdrawal from the area. “Ukraine could well repeat a costly mistake at Pokrovsk (…), a reluctance to carry out a controlled and militarily justified withdrawal from a threatened salient when the situation is no longer favorable to the defender,” noted military expert Emil Kastehelmi on X.