Since Ukraine pulled elite units from Donbas for its incursion into Kursk, the Russia advance has accelerated. “I’ve never seen such speed [in a Russian advance],” the commander of a Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance unit fighting in the area told The Telegraph this week. “It is very rapid. And our problem is the same: we don’t have infantry; we don’t have enough artillery or shells. We don’t have enough drones.” “The Russian forces has deployed powerful electronic warfare units, so we sometimes have to launch 10, 12, 15 just to destroy one tank. If one of them was lucky enough to find the first EW vehicle, we could take out the rest.
“The situation is very complicated, and not in our favour. The most critical thing for us now is the large number of soldiers of the Russian Federation. They outnumber us I reckon by at least five to one.”
Over the past three weeks, the Russians have advanced at least five miles towards the city, moving along the cutting of a railway line that provides cover for their infantry.
By Tuesday, they had captured a third of Novohrodivka, a town astride that railway line. By Friday, Novohrodivka had fallen completely.
Battles are ongoing “on the left if you look from the enemy towards Pokrovsk” in an apparent attempt to bypass the suburb of Myrnohrad, where the urban environment might slow them down, the commander said.
“They are trying to break through this flank, basically along the track to the Pokrovsk, and they are succeeding and very successfully,” he added.
The Centre for Defense Strategies (CDS), a Ukrainian think tank, said in an assessment on Thursday that the Russians will probably reach the city by mid-September.
For Ukraine, that is not good news.
If Pokrovsk falls, it will seriously complicate logistics for Ukrainian troops around Toretsk, Chasiv Yar, and the “fortress” agglomeration of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and Kostiantynivka.
The Russians are also expanding their salient on the flanks. On Thursday, fighting was reported on the outskirts of Selydove, a town southeast of Pokrovsk.
To the east of the city, on the Ukrainian left, they have entered Krasnyu Yar and Hrodivka. Those moves threaten encirclement of large chunks of the Ukrainian front to the north, around Toretsk, and the south, around Kurakhove.
In other words, the Russians are poised to conquer a significant swathe of Donetsk region – one of their stated wars aims – dangerously jeopardize the remaining Ukrainian footholds and threaten an attack towards Dnipro.
This desperate situation appears to be a direct result of Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk in early August.
That operation, planned by Gen Oleksandr Syrsky and greenlit by Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, was meant to draw Russian troops away from this front.
Gen Syrsky, the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, admitted this week that the Russians had not taken the bait.
While they have moved thousands of troops from other parts of the line to Kursk, on the Pokrovsk front they have doubled down.
CDS warned that in the Pokrovsk sector Russia enjoys a 4:1 advantage in forces, resources, drones and artillery, and that it could be assumed the Russians would reach Pokrovsk by mid-September.
The Ukrainian withdrawal from Norohrodivka, it noted, “indicates a lack of sufficient resources for defense, even on advantageous lines”.
Whatever the outcome, Pokrovsk itself is shutting down, like an organism that knows death is near.
Everyone knows what comes next, because it has happened in so many towns before.
