Russian troops have pushed into the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk – and immediately begun the casual commission of war crimes, with the murder of at least three civilians who were trying to flee the invaders.
In footage shared with The Independent, an elderly woman lies on the verge of a road by a level crossing not far from the railway tracks on the outskirts of the city. She is wounded, and still.
A few yards away, a body lies on its back – inert, dead. Nearby, another victim lies collapsed next to the bicycle they had loaded with supplies before desperately bumping the wheels over the rails as the enemy approached. Slow and awkward, he or she must have been an easy target for Vladimir Putin’s vanguard.
Another body, male, in blue jeans, is sprawled on the tracks themselves, while smoke curls from the ruins of a nearby home. One ray of light in the grim scene is an unknown man rescuing the injured woman and carrying her out of range of Russia’s gunmen.
These images were captured by a Ukrainian drone over Pokrovsk, which has been a tactical priority for Russia for more than a year – thousands of soldiers on both sides have perished in the battle that will now become a house-to-house conflict as the city is reduced to rubble.
As news filtered back to Ukraine over the weekend that Donald Trump had again reportedly told Volodymyr Zelensky that he should surrender the province of Donetsk as part of a ceasefire deal with the Kremlin, Putin’s forces launched more missiles at civilian targets across the country.
Pokrovsk is in Donetsk. Like Kharkiv, which was hit with a new guided missile on Sunday night, it was home to a mostly Russian-speaking population before the war. So was Mariupol in the south, Bakhmut further north, and Avdiivka, just down the road.
Now there’s nothing left of Bakhmut or Avdiivka. More than 350,000 people fled the Russians in Mariupol, and, according to Human Rights Watch, at least 8,000 civilians were killed there when Russia launched its campaign to “rescue” Russian-speaking people from Ukraine’s government.
Trump and Zelensky met last Friday, with the Ukrainian president hoping to secure the agreement of the US to sell its Tomahawk cruise missiles.
There was no decision either way from the US president, but multiple media reports described the meeting as “tense” – Trump apparently swore frequently and told Zelensky that Ukraine is at risk of being destroyed.
It is not. Russia is making small, incremental gains, at a gigantic cost. The UK Ministry of Defence, which backs Ukraine, has estimated it would take Russia four more years, and cost the lives of 2 million more men, to capture the four Ukrainian provinces it already partly occupies in the east of the country.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has been reaching deep into Russian territory to attack Putin’s logistics and energy infrastructure. It wants Tomahawk cruise missiles, which have a range of about 1,000 miles (1,600km), to increase the pressure on Putin.
The heads of Germany’s intelligence agencies recently warned that Russia was already involved in a hybrid war against Europe, which could escalate further in the next five years. Germany produces the Taurus missile, which, unlike the Tomahawk, is capable of ground-penetration attacks.
Norway and Italy produce similarly capable missiles, but so far none of these countries, who claim to see Russia as a military threat, has agreed to supply them to Ukraine.
This week, Zelensky will no doubt renew his pleas for more European help, as it again becomes clear that Trump is echoing Russian talking points in his meetings with the Ukrainian leader.
Zelensky is expected to join the European Coalition of the Willing for more talks in the near future, led by Keir Starmer. He said Kyiv was preparing contracts to buy 25 Patriot air-defence systems over the coming years, and that he hoped Europe would prioritise the supply of these weapons.
Trump and Putin are expecting to meet in Budapest, in Hungary, in the next two weeks as guests of Viktor Orban, who has a largely pro-Putin agenda. Several European countries have expressed dismay at the idea of Putin, who has been indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court, setting foot inside the European Union.
