New satellite images show how Pokrovsk, a key strategic city in Ukraine currently witnessing the fiercest fighting in the war with Russia, has been largely reduced to ruins.
On Thursday, Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had advanced in the battered city and were engaged in house-to-house battles as part of Vladimir Putin’s desperate push to capture his first meaningful urban centre in over a year.
Satellite images taken on Monday showed the deadliest sector of fighting between both sides shrouded in smoke and battered by months of fierce fighting.
The imagery, captured by the Vantor data intelligence firm, shows white smoke from houses set ablaze in residential areas in Pokrovsk and downed trees around the arterial roads of the war-hit city.
Dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk”, capturing Pokrovsk will give Russia a territorial platform to penetrate further north inside Ukraine’s defensive lines, opening up the pathway to the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the region, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
At present, Ukraine is in control of about 10 per cent of Donbas – comprising both Donetsk and Luhansk – or an area of about 5,000 sq km.
Russian forces have been trying to capture Pokrovsk for more than a year. If they succeed, it would be Moscow’s first big win on the battlefield since the capture of Avdiivka early last year.
Russia has opted for a pincer movement to attempt to encircle Pokrovsk and cut off its supply lines, rather than the blunt frontal assaults it employed to capture the city of Bakhmut in 2023.
The Russian defence ministry has prematurely announced the capture of large swathes of territory in Pokrovsk, but their claims have been swiftly rejected by Ukrainian military officials.
Kyiv has acknowledged that the situation has become difficult in recent days but says its troops are still fighting there and denies they are surrounded.
President Volodymyr Zelensky rejected the claims from Moscow and visited the embattled region in person, interacting with troops earlier this week.
He posted photos of meetings with Ukrainian armed forces personnel at a command post in the Dobropillya sector, which lies just 20km north of Pokrovsk.
Russia says it has captured 64 buildings in the city, once home to 60,000 people, over the past 24 hours and repelled Ukrainian attacks from Hryshyne to the west.
“If Pokrovsk falls, so does Myrnohrad [city in Donetsk], and the pocket closes,” Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, said on X/Twitter.
“The city holds operational value. Its loss widens the Russian axis of advance in Donetsk west of the Kramatorsk conglomeration of towns, but it does not open those cities to be quickly taken,” he said.
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