Russia Close to Its Biggest Capture of a Ukrainian City Since 2023

Russia is concentrating its firepower and troops on the small, battered city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, apparently pushing its forces close to capturing what has become a gateway to the war’s most fiercely contested region.

After more than a year of fighting, Pokrovsk, a railroad hub in the Donetsk region, has been turned largely into rubble, its prewar population of 60,000 now reduced to fewer than 1,300 residents. Ukrainian soldiers defending the city report intense combat. Nearly one-third of all the battles along the front line, which stretches almost 750 miles, are in Pokrovsk, and half of Russia’s attacks with deadly glide bombs are focused on the city, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday. Those numbers could not be independently confirmed.

While Ukrainian leaders claim that their forces are clawing back neighborhoods, Russian troops appear to have taken control of the southwestern edge of Pokrovsk in the last few days, according to a battlefield map by DeepState, a group with ties to the Ukrainian military. Russian troops have also secured two slim columns in the city’s center and up its western side, based on the map, which shows most of the rest of Pokrovsk as a contested gray zone.

“The enemy is continuing to build up forces in the city,” DeepState said on social media Tuesday night, adding that Pokrovsk was “gradually being absorbed.”

The city would be the largest in Ukraine to fall since Bakhmut in May 2023. It is seen as the last major obstacle preventing Russian troops from approaching Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the only large cities still under Ukrainian control in Donetsk, a region that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has long coveted.

Taking Pokrovsk could aid the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is on the march on the battlefield and that the war will get only worse for Ukraine if it does not concede to Moscow’s onerous demands to end the conflict. Mr. Putin has ignored President Trump’s calls for a cease-fire as the Kremlin has pushed ahead with its invasion.

Ukraine is fighting to retain Pokrovsk in part to counter that narrative, especially as it seeks more support from a fickle Trump administration. Ukrainian officials insist that special units are clearing Russians out of the city. Mr. Zelensky visited troops nearby on Tuesday and handed out awards. In a speech on Wednesday night, he said that “in Pokrovsk, we continue to destroy the occupier.”

Beyond the geopolitical messaging, the military significance of losing Pokrovsk may be relatively small for Ukraine. Russia’s incremental advances have come at an immense cost. While Ukraine wants to hold on to Pokrovsk, military commanders argue that the large losses it is inflicting on the Kremlin’s troops there will hurt the Russian war effort more broadly.

Mr. Putin has made clear since he started to foment a shadow war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 that he wanted all of Donetsk and the neighboring Luhansk region. He has not succeeded even after launching, in February 2022, the deadliest war in Europe since World War II. A Russian summer offensive this year, aimed at capturing all of Donetsk, ended with limited gains.

Combat in Ukraine has turned into a slog through cement paste. In open areas along the battlefront, drones make it too deadly to move in a zone up to 15 miles wide, referred to as the “kill zone.” It’s rare to see tanks or any other heavy equipment there. Ukrainian troops hide in burrows and blasted-out buildings, and sleep under Kevlar blankets. Russian forces dart from spot to spot in groups as small as two or three.

“The enemy will continue to move forward bit by bit,” said Lt. Col. Arsen Dmytryk, the first deputy commander and chief of First Corps Azov.

Still, what is happening in Pokrovsk highlights a major problem for Ukraine: It does not have enough soldiers. The front line has turned in part into a game of Whac-a-Mole, where Ukraine moves battalions or brigades to counter Russian incursions, and the Russians then take advantage of any gap in the line.

Mr. Zelensky said late last month that Ukrainian forces were outnumbered eight to one in the area around Pokrovsk. As Russian forces encroach on the city, DeepState, the mapping group, warned that the neighboring town of Myrnohrad, to the east, could be cut off from Ukrainian troops.

“We are still continuing to fight in the Myrnohrad area,” said Volodymyr, 26, a company commander of an air assault brigade who used only his first name in keeping with military protocol. “If Pokrovsk fell, then we would have a collapse too.”

Pokrovsk is less than 50 miles from Kramatorsk, with Sloviansk just to the north. Those fortress cities are also under a new threat. They can now be reached by Russian attack drones, a development that in other cities has made driving to the store or riding a bike potentially fatal for civilians.

Iryna Bondarenko, 24, said she planned to leave Sloviansk as soon as she could, in part because of the attack drones. “When you hear one, it first buzzes and buzzes, and then immediately goes right into you or into some car. It’s very frightening,” said Ms. Bondarenko, the mother of a 3-year-old. “It flies close, and that’s it.”

As the war has settled into a deadly grind for Russia, it has been sending small teams of men — even just one or two — on foot to try to sneak past Ukrainian lines, hiding in forests or grass.

But if enough of these small groups can gather in a town or city, they try to attack. In early August, Russians made a surprise incursion near the town of Dobropillia, about 13 miles north of Pokrovsk. They managed to push about eight and a half miles north in two long columns that resembled rabbit ears.

The goal appeared to be to encircle Pokrovsk and cut off Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, right as Mr. Trump was trying to broker a peace deal in the war.

Ukraine moved some of its best fighting units near Dobropillia and severed the rabbit ears. But those reinforcements came from places like Pokrovsk and Kupiansk, in the northeast. Small Russian groups then started moving into those cities, finding the gaps, according to Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts.

“One of the key precipitating factors that led to the deterioration of the situation in Pokrovsk was Russia’s advance east of Dobropillia in August,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who recently visited the frontline.

By late September, the territory outside Pokrovsk was a wasteland of charred vehicles and buildings. Drones crept through the ruins of the city and peeked into basements, searching for targets.

A Ukrainian National Guard platoon commander who goes by the call sign Consul described a battle that played out over different floors of the same building. “Our guys were on the first floor and the Russians on the second, and nobody knew about the other,” he said. “It’s just crazy.”

Some soldiers and military analysts said they feared that Ukraine would wait too long to admit defeat and retreat, as in past battles in the Kursk region of Russia or in towns like Avdiivka in Donetsk.

A senior lieutenant and drone platoon commander named Yevhen, 32, said he worried that troops could be sacrificed for political reasons. He used only his first name under military protocol.

“The Russians are certainly losing a lot, but we are losing too, and we cannot afford it,” he said.

Olha Konovalova, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.