For the past month, Kyiv’s surprise cross-border incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region has dominated news headlines.
Simultaneously, however, Russian forces have accelerated their advance in the east, recently capturing several villages in Donetsk (which, along with Luhansk, comprises the Donbas region).
Russian forces now appear poised to capture the strategic town of Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian logistics hub often described in the Russian media as the “gateway to Donetsk.”
“Its strategic importance lies in the fact that it is the most important procurement and transportation hub for Ukrainian forces in Donbas,” Ferit Temur, a Turkish political analyst, told The Epoch Times.
Home to a major railway station, Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk in Russian) sits at the intersection of several supply routes linking it to other contested towns in the region, including Toretsk, Chasiv Yar, and Kostiantynivka.
“When Russian troops take Pokrovsk, Ukrainian forces fighting near Toretsk and Chasiv Yar will face serious supply problems,” Temur, an expert in Russian and Eurasian affairs, said.
“The T-0504 highway [linking Pokrovsk to Konstantinovka] is also important in this regard,” he added. “Pokrovsk is also the last major city and a serious frontier before the border with [Ukraine’s] Dnipropetrovsk region.”
Like many towns in the Donbas region, Pokrovsk also has significant industrial value.
A coal mine located west of the town is Ukraine’s primary source of coking coal, which the country’s industrial sector relies on to manufacture steel.
But perhaps most importantly, the fall of Pokrovsk would bring Moscow one step closer to exerting control over all of Donbas—a longstanding Russian objective.
“The Russian army assigns strategic importance to Pokrovsk with the aim of expanding its military occupation in eastern and southern Ukraine, breaking the resistance of the Ukrainian army, and securing a stronger position in potential negotiations,” Temur said.
In 2022, Russia invaded—and effectively annexed—broad swathes of Donetsk and Luhansk, along with much of Ukraine’s southeastern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Kyiv, for its part, has vowed to continue fighting for the recovery of all four regions—with the support of its Western allies—despite numerically superior Russian forces.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said control of the entire Donbas region remained a “primary objective” for Moscow.
Pincer Movements
On Sept. 9, Russia’s defense ministry announced that its forces had captured the village of Memryk, which sits roughly 15 miles southeast of Pokrovsk.The following day, the ministry claimed that four more villages in the vicinity—Krasnohorivka, Hryhorivka, Vodiane, and Halytsynivka—had also fallen to Russian forces.
According to Denis Pushilin, head of the Moscow-recognized Donetsk People’s Republic, advancing Russian forces have found complex systems of reinforced trenches—and other fortifications—in the recently captured villages.
“There are indications everywhere in the liberated settlements that the enemy took a long time to entrench itself,” he told Russia’s TASS news agency on Sept. 12.
Residential areas, Pushilin said, are “covered in a system of trench passages; there are a lot of concrete-reinforced shelters.”
Pushilin, who recently visited several captured villages, added: “But this does not stop our boys.”
The Epoch Times could not independently verify the Russian claims, which have yet to be confirmed by officials in Kyiv.
Nevertheless, the reports strongly suggest that Russian forces are indeed closing in on Pokrovsk, where much of the town’s pre-war population—roughly 60,000 people—has reportedly already left.
On Sept. 12, Vadym Filashkin, Donetsk’s Kyiv-appointed regional governor, said the town’s water supply had been cut due to intense fighting in the area.
He also urged remaining residents to leave Pokrovsk in the face of Russia’s relentless advance.
“The situation is difficult, and it won’t get better soon,” Filashkin wrote on the Telegram messaging platform. “So I again call on you to evacuate!”
According to local authorities, Pokrovsk’s electricity supply has also been cut, along with gas used for cooking and heating homes.
“The Russians don’t seem to have let up on their assault on Pokrovsk,” Tim Ripley, a prominent British defense analyst, told The Epoch Times.
Asked how long he believed Ukrainian forces could hold out in the town, he said: “It’s probably a matter of a couple of weeks.”
Ripley is the editor of Defense Eye, a UK-based news service devoted to security issues, and the author of “Little Green Men: The Inside Story of Russia’s New Military Power.”
According to him, Russian forces in Donbas are using a time-tested strategy by which enemy troops are outflanked before being corralled into inescapable “cauldrons.”
Russian forces, Ripley said, “are conducting a series of encirclement operations to force the Ukrainians to pull back or risk being encircled. This is progressively chopping up [Ukrainian] brigades in a systematic way.”
“The Russians have been doing this for most of the year, so you see these retreats just before the pincers close,” he explained.
Kursk Fails to Turn Tide
Kyiv had initially hoped that its offensive in Kursk, now in its second month, would force Moscow to divert troops and equipment from the battle-scarred eastern front.Such a scenario, however, has largely failed to materialize.
This week, Sergey Shoigu, head of Russia’s Security Council (and a former defense minister), said Russia’s ongoing advance in Donetsk had only accelerated since Aug. 6, when Kyiv launched its brazen cross-border offensive.
In televised comments, Shoigu further asserted that Russian forces had managed to capture 390 square miles of territory in Donbas over the same period.
According to Temur, Kyiv’s foundering offensive in Kursk has only served to confirm Pokrovsk’s strategic importance.
The town’s strategic value, Temur said, “is evidenced by the fact that they [Ukraine] decided to attack in Kursk to draw the attention of Russian troops away from Pokrovsk, which they failed to do in the end.”
Making matters worse for Ukraine, Russia this week launched a major counter-offensive in Kursk with the aim of expelling the invaders from Russian territory.
On Sept. 11, Moscow claimed that its troops had managed to wrest at least 10 settlements near the border in Kursk from Ukrainian forces.
“The Russians have contained the Kursk offensive,” Ripley asserted, adding that Moscow’s latest counter-offensive “seems to be gaining momentum.”
“But the issue in Kursk isn’t whether the Russians can retake the place,” he said. “It’s how many troops and tanks and vehicles the Ukrainians lose before they have to withdraw.”
Given Ukraine’s dire manpower shortage, Kyiv will also have to consider casualty figures when deciding its next move in Pokrovsk, according to Ripley.
“I don’t think the actual loss of the town is as important as how many troops the Ukrainians lose [defending it],” he said.
“If they retreat quickly,” he added, “more of their troops will escape.”
