(MENAFN- Live Mint) Ukraine is fighting a rearguard action to prevent Russia gaining its biggest victory in almost two years, an advance that also demonstrates the battlefield challenges facing Vladimir Putin's army.

More than 300 Russian soldiers have entered the eastern city of Pokrovsk in an intense assault, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told reporters Friday.

Ukraine rushed elite special forces groups to the city earlier this week to support regular army units engaged in house-to-house combat against Russian troops. Military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov personally oversaw the operation, according to a Telegram post from the Main Intelligence Directorate, an indicator of the urgency of the situation.

The fall of the embattled city in Ukraine's Donetsk region would represent the most significant prize for Putin since his military took Avdiivka in February last year. Yet the distance between the two cities is just 30 kilometers, underscoring the slow pace of Russia's advance at a massive cost in casualties.

With Russia's summer offensive drawing to a close and the approaching winter likely to freeze most of the front line for a fourth year, a win in Pokrovsk would be more of a psychological than strategic gain for Russia after months of grinding assaults. The Russian president remains far from achieving his overall war aims as the manpower losses continue to spiral.

Russia has been attempting to seize Pokrovsk for more than a year, and fighting intensified since July. Beyond it stand other heavily fortified major cities in the Donetsk region that remain under Ukraine's control, including Slovyansk and Kramatorsk.

Putin has demanded a Ukrainian withdrawal from the whole of Donetsk region under any agreement for Russia to halt its invasion. He has declared Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions to be“forever” part of Russia even as his forces have never fully occupied any of them.

US President Donald Trump has urged both sides to accept a ceasefire along existing battle lines to allow for talks on a peace deal, something Zelenskiy accepted but Putin has so far refused. Trump abandoned a planned second summit with Putin, this time in Budapest, after US officials concluded Russia wasn't ready to make substantive changes to its maximalist demands.

“It is very important for Russia to do their best to seize Pokrovsk,” Zelenskiy said.“They need to show success to revive that narrative that they are able to seize the entire Donbas and by that prompt Trump to make a deal between him and Putin.”

Zelenskiy is hard-pressed on both sides. Unlike Putin, who's largely shown indifference to mounting troop losses, he can't afford to hold ground at any cost in lives without risking a public backlash. Yet ceding territory to Russia too easily would hand the Kremlin a propaganda victory that it would use to undermine support among Ukraine's allies, on whom Kyiv relies for arms and financial support.

Russian military bloggers on Telegram also reported heavy street battles involving small groups of troops fighting to seize control of individual buildings in Pokrovsk. Their claims can't be independently verified.

Ukrainian army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said he visited troops in Donetsk region in a Nov. 3 Telegram post. His forces were seeking to relieve Russian pressure on Pokrovsk by forcing them to divert troops to defend against assaults in nearby Dobropillia, he said.

Overall, Russia captured 3,386 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory in the first 10 months of 2025, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data from the DeepState mapping service that cooperates with Ukraine's Defense Ministry. That's 54% more than in the same period of 2024, when Russia took 2,194 sq km.

Still, it represents just 3% of the entire territory in eastern and southern Ukraine that Putin has laid claim to, and just 0.6% of the whole of the country that Russia initially sought to conquer when it began the 2022 full-scale invasion.

The fighting for Pokrovsk is so intense because whoever controls the city gains an elevated position for launching drones deeper into opposing territory, said Artem Pribylnov, spokesman for Ukraine's 155th separate mechanized brigade that's defending the city alongside other units.

Pokrovsk is a rail hub that Russia would likely restore to help resupply its forces more quickly from deeper within occupied territory, Pribylnov said. Similar considerations are driving Russian efforts to seize Kupyansk, Lyman and Kostyantynivka, all important local rail hubs, he said.

The fighting has devastated Pokrovsk, once an important coal mining center with more than 60,000 people that had declined by August to only about 1,300 residents, according to local authorities.

Russia is unlikely to gain a decisive strategic advantage from capturing Pokrovsk because it lacks sufficient additional reserves of troops to make a major breakthrough that would disrupt Ukrainian defenses, according to Mykola Bielieskov, a researcher at Kyiv's National Institute for Security Studies.

For Ukrainian leaders, though, the loss of the city may have“negative strategic consequences for future negotiations and for the perception of Ukraine's chances of success,” he said.

Russia's operation in Pokrovsk illustrates its recent military tactics; relentless pressure backed by swarms of attack drones and a willingness to absorb heavy losses in order to gain more ground.

“Over the past year, the war has changed drastically,” Pavlo Palisa, a former top military commander who's now deputy head of Zelenskiy's presidential office, said Tuesday on the X platform.

“There are practically no stable positions, no one can survive in open space under drones, and delivering supplies or evacuating people feels like a special operation in itself,” he said.

With assistance from Julius Domoney, Volodymyr Verbianyi and Alex Kokcharov.

©2025 Bloomberg L.P.

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