Russia on the verge of symbolic victory, but at a high cost

Russia is close to securing control of the city of Pokrovsk, a victory that is considered symbolic but is being achieved at great cost to Russia. The city has lost its strategic importance but remains important for Putin's propaganda.

Russian forces are on the verge of securing the capture of the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, in a symbolic victory that President Vladimir Putin has pursued for 21 months at great cost.

Fighting inside the city has intensified in recent days, as Russian troops successfully moved in. The fall of Pokrovsk – whose strategic value has already faded greatly, but would represent the biggest victory for Moscow since 2023 – now seems inevitable, according to the ground.

Kiev, however, has denied Russian claims that Ukrainian forces in Pokrovsk are already surrounded. On Wednesday, Ukrainian authorities said they were conducting operations to stop the Russian advance. However, Ukrainian soldiers on the ground described a more grim reality.

"The situation is difficult, with all kinds of fighting going on, exchanges of fire in urban areas and all kinds of shelling," a battalion commander told CNN on condition of anonymity. "We are almost surrounded, but we are used to it."

Another told CNN that the Russian military is pressing ahead with large numbers of soldiers. "The intensity of their movements is so great that the Ukrainian drone operators cannot keep up. The Russians move in groups of three, counting on the fact that two will be destroyed, but one will reach the city and leave a trace. About 100 such groups pass every day," said a soldier in the drone unit.

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The claim that Russia is willing to sacrifice two soldiers so that one can advance seems strange, but it is consistent with monitoring by international researchers who have reported high Russian casualties around Pokrovsk. However, taking control of the city is now considered unlikely to make much difference on the ground. This is because the battle for Pokrovsk is no longer a fight for a strategically important logistics center. On the contrary, it has now become a symbolic battle.

"From a battlefield perspective, it doesn't make sense," said George Barros, who leads the Russian Geospatial Intelligence team at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank.

Pokrovsk is seen as a key city for Ukraine, mainly due to its railway connections. It is located at the intersection of several major roads, leading to Donetsk and Kostyantynivka to the east and Dnipro and Zaporizhia to the west.

"It was important because it was a supply line that supported Ukrainian logistics, but then it spread out and supported other Ukrainian tactical positions in smaller villages and fields around Pokrovsk," he said.

However, this changed once Russia began to besiege Pokrovsk during the summer.

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Frequent drone and artillery attacks on key highways and rail lines forced Kiev to find other ways to divert its supply lines away from Pokrovske. This was considered a major success for Russia. The city was also forced to close the last coking coal mine in Ukraine.

"From that perspective, it didn't do any operational work for the Russians, because they had already achieved the main objective they needed earlier," Barros told CNN.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier this week that Russia had massed around 170 troops in the region for the Pokrovsk offensive.

If Pokrovsk is successfully captured, it would be the largest city Russia has captured since Bakhmut in May 2023. While 60 people lived there before the war, most have fled since the occupation in 2022. According to Ukrainian authorities, there are only about 1200 civilians in the city.

"Strategically, from a political and informational perspective, Pokrovsk is very important because Vladimir Putin has made dozens of domestic and international statements about its capture. He is conducting a strategic campaign that aims to present Russia's military victory on the battlefield as inevitable," Barros declared.

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Putin has made it clear that his goal is the complete capture of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, as well as Kherson and Zaporizhia in the south. Taking Pokrovsk would allow Russia to shift its focus elsewhere – primarily to the string of industrial centers that form the backbone of Ukrainian defense in the region.

A soldier from the Ukrainian 129th Brigade currently near Kostyantynivka told CNN that the expectations on the ground are that “once the Russians finish with Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad, the pressure on Kostyantynivka will increase and they will move towards Druzhkivka.” According to him, the battalion does not have the number of soldiers it should have and is constantly suffering losses.