Image: Anadolu
The battle for the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk has been raging for more than a year. What is the situation there?
October 30, 2025, 8:02 p.mOctober 30, 2025, 8:02 p.m
In late summer 2024, Ukraine evacuated Pokrovsk, then a city with 60,000 inhabitants, from the advancing Russian troops. Since then, the fall of the now heavily destroyed mining town in the embattled Donetsk Oblast seemed imminent several times – but the Ukrainian defenders have managed each time to keep the city center and the supply routes under control.
Russian soldiers infiltrated Pokrovsk
But the Kremlin has been announcing for days that Pokrovsk is about to be taken over. Russian soldiers were able to hang the Russian flag on the most important access road to the besieged fortress city – this made it clear that the Ukrainian defenders were trapped. And the Ukrainian army had also reported that around 200 Russian soldiers had infiltrated through the defense lines into the city and established themselves there.
Pokrovsk is largely destroyed. Photo from April 2025.Image: AP
Ukrainian and Russian military bloggers unanimously report that more and more Russian soldiers are advancing from the south into the center. The Russians fought street battles with Ukrainian troops, wrote the military-friendly Ukrainian blog “DeepState”. According to the news portal, the Ukrainian supply routes are Ukrainskaya Pravda (UP) completely controlled by Russian drones that cannot be jammed electronically.
Pokrovsk already surrounded?
With around 11,000 men, the Russian army is trying to to advance northwest and north of the city and thus prevent the withdrawal of the Ukrainian defenders. The 7th Corps of the Ukrainian Army said on Facebook that this was intended to close a cauldron. A total of 27,000 soldiers, 100 tanks, 260 armored vehicles and 160 artillery systems are said to be deployed on the Russian side in this area.
The Russian army chief, General Valery Gerasimov, even claimed in a televised conversation with President Vladimir Putin that 31 Ukrainian battalions were already surrounded near Pokrovsk and Kupiansk. This statement However, even Russian military bloggers had their doubtswho usually play up every success. Dutch military expert Peter Wijninga commented on Gerasimov’s claim in the newspaper Het Parool as follows:
“Do the math: a battalion has about six hundred men. So that’s almost twenty thousand soldiers. Of course, they never all sit in a heap to be surrounded. If that were really the case, the entire area would be hermetically sealed. Gerasimov is talking nonsense – and Putin knows it.”
By the way, the Russian flag at the access road was quickly blown up by a Ukrainian drone. And there is still noise Kyiv Independent from the west a narrow Ukrainian corridor about three kilometers wide, through which supplies reach the center of Pokrovsk and from there on to the city of Myrnohrad, which together with Pokrovsk forms a large agglomeration. If Pokrovsk falls, the Myrnohrad bridgehead can hardly be held.
Reduced strategic importance
Pokrovsk is usually described as a key logistical hub for Ukraine, the fall of which would open the way west to the neighboring Dnipro region for the Russian army. But since the fighting for the city began more than a year ago, its strategic importance has changed. Ukrainian front-line troops are now supplied via other routes, often with drones.
Supplying Ukrainian soldiers using drones.Image: The Washington Post
Rations delivered by drone.Image: The Washington Post
In addition, the Ukrainian army has built a new defense line northwest of the city to further slow the advance of the Russians:
Ukraine will propably keep fighting in Pokrovsk as long as possible and then withdraw when they see the situation too risky, like they did in Kursk, for example
Retreating from Pokrovsk would not lead to breaktroughs, strong fortified defense lines are waiting some km’s behind. pic.twitter.com/RJ7t54iT3b
— Tomi (@TallbarFIN) October 28, 2025
The fall of the city is therefore unlikely to lead to a massive breakthrough by Russian forces to the west. Also the fall of Bakhmut in May 2023 did not enable the Russians to make further major gains in territory, as had previously been feared.
Slow advance
Instead, the Russian army has been advancing very slowly on the front in eastern Ukraine since autumn 2023 – and is buying the terrain gains with high losses. Around a fifth of Ukraine is under Russian occupation, including the Crimean peninsula, which was annexed in 2014. But this year, according to calculations by the US Institute for War Studies (ISW), Russian troops conquered just 0.6 percent of Ukraine’s land area. The Russian armed forces still control a much smaller area than before the Ukrainian counteroffensive in autumn 2022.
However, a Russian conquest of Pokrovsk would be a symbolic victory – as it was in Bakhmut. For Putin it would be the biggest military triumph in two years. The Kremlin would certainly exploit this for propaganda purposes and use it for its psychological warfare, which is also directed against Ukraine’s Western supporting states.
New way of warfare
After Ukrainian troops pushed Russian soldiers who had advanced there out of the city in July, new attacks took place in August. However, unlike before, these were no longer massive attacks in waves in which Russian soldiers were literally sacrificed as cannon fodder. Rather, it was now rather small units – sometimes even just duos – that tried to sneak between the Ukrainian defense posts, looked for weak points, caused confusion and withdrew again.
Ukrainian drone pilots.Image: AP
The Russian army has copied this type of warfare from Ukrainian commandos. The result of this, however, is that the war has increasingly become a battle between drones. Military expert Wijninga told “Het Parool” that most victims now fall from drones and no longer from artillery fire. “Everything that drives is now a destination,” says Wijninga. “Russian drones chase cars, even follow them on side roads, sometimes controlled by artificial intelligence.”
Drone warfare: “Everything that moves is now a target.”Image: The Washington Post
Accordingly, it is no longer so much about square meters of ground that the infantry is fighting for, but rather about “cubic meters of air,” the military expert states. “The lowest layer of air – up to 50 or 60 meters above the ground – is the new battle zone. Whoever is in charge there can operate freely with their drones. “Infantrymen not only have to control the terrain, but also the airspace above their heads.” The armies of the West would also have to learn this new way of thinking. «The drone has become the new group weapon for the infantry. That changes everything.”
Ukraine is increasingly relying on ground drones – and is even taking prisoners of war with them
Video: Watson/Lucas Zollinger