Putin is preparing to declare victory and conquer the strategic city of Pokrovsk

MoscowThe Russian army is about to conquer Ukraine's largest city since 2023. Pokrovsk (in Donetsk)Pokrovsk, a city with a population of around 60,000 before the war, is a major railway hub. Kyiv's troops are trying to hold out, but military analysts say Moscow's victory is only a matter of time. However, this long-awaited success for Vladimir Putin will have cost him nearly sixteen months of attacks, thousands of deaths, and while it will pave the way to the last Ukrainian strongholds in the region, it will still leave him far from the minimum objective of controlling all of Donbas.

Pokrovsk was an important railway hub that served the Kyiv army for supplying the eastern front. The Ukrainians turned it into a key defensive stronghold in mid-2024, when the Russian army began its offensive against the city. After a year and a half of bombing, the municipality has lost almost all its logistical value; only about a thousand residents remain, and, like most of the towns occupied by the Kremlin's soldiers, it is practically in ruins. Its strategic importance lies in the fact that it would allow Putin to tighten his grip on the two major cities of Donetsk under Ukrainian administration: Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

However, above all, it is a political trophy. The Russian president needs to score a propaganda victory after months of stalemate and minimal progress.He also wants to demonstrate to Donald Trump that he has the initiative on the battlefield and that, therefore, it is pointless to continue arming Ukraine, since his army has the upper hand. Furthermore, he also hopes to inflict a moral blow on Kyiv, which would suffer its most significant defeat of 2025 and see how not even the city's Ukrainian name, Pokrovsk, dedicated to the protection of the Virgin Mary, would have helped his troops maintain control. Putin is already referring to it as Krasnoarmeisk, the toponym honoring the Red Army by which the town was known until 2016.

A City of Shadows

Currently, it is estimated that between 300 and 500 Russian soldiers are scattered throughout Pokrovsk. Over the past few days, they have taken advantage of the fog, which is hindering drone operations, to enter the city from the south. While the siege intensified during the summer, it wasn't until October that the Ukrainian army detected that Russian troops had penetrated almost every district of the municipality. Because Kiiv defends the area primarily with drones due to a lack of personnelMoscow has had to match (and succeed in matching) the experience of the Ukrainian pilots and has resorted to infiltration tactics, that is, sending groups of one to three infantrymen to slip through enemy lines in the hope of not being detected by the aircraft. Most are killed, but those who survive, once inside the urban area, seek refuge and fortify themselves until reinforcements arrive.

Military experts like Ian Matvieyev emphasize that the fighting has nothing to do with the last great urban battle, that of BakhmutBetween 2022 and 2023, Russian battalions, led by mercenaries from the Wagner Group, fought fiercely house to house. "You hardly see any soldiers on the streets of Pokrovsk; there are no flames, and you barely hear the sound of machine guns," he explains. Both sides have their headquarters ten kilometers from the nearest buildings; drones control their entrances, and you have to risk your life to get in. "Inside, only the shadows of the two armies stationed on the outskirts fight. There are fewer soldiers in the city than civilians. Three people can storm a street right in front of a dozen elderly people who refused to leave their homes."

Lately, the Russian advance has subsided and the situation has stabilized, but Matvieyev believes this "deceptive" scenario favors the Kremlin, which has more men, while Ukrainian troops are only able to fortify their positions with no possibility of counterattack. Moscow's objective is to encircle the city from the northeast, where the only road still under Kyiv's control is located. Putin has spent weeks playing on the Ukrainian soldiers' fear of being surrounded and has encouraged them to surrender to avoid a massacre. At this point, the real risk for them is not in Pokrovsk, but in Mirnograd, a border city in the northeast, which had a population of about 40,000 before the war. There, it would be easier for the Russians to encircle the Ukrainian soldiers if they do not retreat westward first, although, for the moment, they are not concentrating their efforts there.

Why won't Ukraine surrender?

This danger has led some voices in Kyiv to call on Volodymyr Zelensky to evacuate his troops, seeing that defeat is inevitable. "They must leave while it is still possible," warned former Deputy Defense Minister Vitalii Deinega. But the Ukrainian General Staff's view is different. Shaun Pinner, a British soldier who fought in the Ukrainian ranks during the Battle of Mariupolo, recently expressed it this way: "For Ukraine, the logic of this war has never changed, even though many foreign experts don't understand the reality or the tactics: make Russia pay dearly for every meter and force them to accept results."

Be that as it may, the inability of Ukrainian troops to expel the Russian soldiers who have infiltrated the country piecemeal reveals the serious personnel problem in Kiiv And it shows that the Kremlin's recruitment rate remains steady, allowing it to send a thousand new men every day to almost certain death. Some of them arrive in Pokrovsk handcuffed and forced at gunpoint to participate in assault operations. Survivors complain in videos online, their nerves shattered: "Why do they deceive us with lies and send us into the meat grinder?"

Defense sources state in the newspaperRBK-UkrainePutin is demanding that the city fall before December 15th to prevent snow from further hindering the advance. However, according to the American Institute for the Study of War, it is "highly likely" that Russian forces will take longer to achieve this and suffer more casualties than if they concentrated more units. Analysts believe that Russian commanders prefer the extremely high rate of losses to the possibility of leaving another point on the front undefended, from which the Ukrainians could successfully counterattack.

In any case, most experts do not consider the fall of Pokrovsk to be decisive for the course of the war if the Ukrainian withdrawal is not chaotic. Russia advances very slowly and invests months and thousands of lives to conquer relatively small cities. Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, which are more than twice the size of Pokrovsk, are still very distant targets that could take Putin years to conquer.