Ukrainian troops say they have maintained defensive positions in the center of the embattled eastern city of Pokrovsk and blocked Russia from flooding the area with more soldiers.
Ukrainian assault groups have targeted Russian forces in the heart of the devastated city and cleared the area around the main train station, a teaching college and a central square of Russian soldiers, Ukraine's 7th Air Assault Corps said in a statement on Sunday.
"Our positions in the city center remain intact, small arms battles continue, and the enemy is unable to gain a foothold," the corps said in a post to messaging app Telegram.
Pokrovsk was dubbed a "fortress" settlement in the Donetsk region, key to Ukrainian lines in the east and connected to other cities forming the backbone of Ukraine's defense in the east. Russia kicked off a push to take Pokrovsk in the summer of 2024.
Russia, rather than attempting to laboriously power through the urban area of Pokrovsk, moved to encircle the city and cut off Ukrainian access to the settlement. Urban areas typically make for slower advances, and Moscow opted to skirt around the south of the town to advance toward the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk region.
Experts say the town is no longer a logistics hub for Ukrainian troops, but Russia would be able to more easily attack other Donetsk settlements if it captures Pokrovsk, itself likely to be a blow to Ukrainian morale.
The 7th Air Assault Corps said by pushing Russian forces from parts of central Pokrovsk, Ukrainian troops had stopped Moscow building up the number of soldiers inside the city and putting pressure on Ukrainian defenses in the north of Pokrovsk. Russia's troops sustain heavy casualties when they attempt to cross the railway lines bisecting the city from east to west, the corps said, claiming that Kyiv's troops had killed almost 400 Russian soldiers in Pokrovsk since the start of November.
Newsweek could not independently verify this. The Russian Defense Ministry has been contacted for comment via email.
Several of Russia's influential military bloggers claimed over the weekend Russia had seized the city and advanced north of Pokrovsk. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Moscow has amassed more than 150,000 for battles around the city.
The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank, which tracks daily changes to the front lines, said on Saturday that battles in Pokrovsk were "serious and dynamic" as Russia attempts to take the city and encircle Ukrainian troops in Myrnohrad, to the east. The think tank cited an account purportedly run by an active-duty Ukrainian soldier, who said on Friday Pokrovsk was "completely lost."
The ISW said in its Saturday analysis that Russian troops "will very likely complete the seizure of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad after a 21-month campaign, though the timing and operational implications of these seizures remain unclear at this time."
Popular Ukrainian war-tracking blog, DeepState, shows Russian control of southern and western Pokrovsk, stopping roughly around the teaching college and square referenced by the 7th Air Assault Corps.
With Pokrovsk under its control, Russia could more easily launch operations westward. The E-50 highway stretches west from the city, connecting to Pavlograd in Dnipropetrovsk. The highway then links to Dnipro, one of central Ukraine's major cities.
Russia annexed Crimea, the peninsula to the south of mainland Ukraine, in 2014. In September 2022, following its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, Russia claimed to have annexed the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of mainland Ukraine, plus the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. This claim is not internationally recognized, and Moscow does not fully control these regions.
Russia also controls limited chunks of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Ukrainian officials on Sunday met with European and U.S. officials in Geneva to discuss a 28-point peace plan pushed by Washington to end the almost four years of war. A condition of the widely leaked plan appears to be Ukrainian acceptance of Russian control of both Donetsk and Luhansk, Crimea, and parts of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
This would mean a Ukrainian withdrawal from settlements like Pokrovsk, despite Ukraine's military still holding a chunk of Donetsk. Kyiv has repeatedly said ceding land to Russia violates its constitution.
"Situated at a major road and rail intersection in Donetsk Oblast, Pokrovsk has functioned as a central artery for moving troops, equipment, and supplies to Ukrainian units deployed along the surrounding front," Natia Seskuria, associate international security fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told Sky News in an article published on Sunday.
Russian forces "have amassed a large number of troops to take this relatively small Ukrainian city," the chief of Ukraine's General Staff, Major General Andriy Hnatov, told German newspaper Die Zeit in an article published on Saturday. "So far, we continue to fight and try to eliminate the enemy forces that have managed to enter the city. There are about 400 of them."