Russian troops grind towards Pokrovsk, take second Ukrainian town in a week

Russia has seized a second town in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donetsk within a week in a months-long offensive that shows no signs of abating with Ukraine’s general staff reporting more than 150 assaults a day across the front.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its troops captured Hrodivka, a town lying on its path to Pokrovsk, which Ukrainian generals say is a major target.

Russian forces entered Hrodivka in early September. Its capture came just five days after the fall of Vuhledar on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia border.

Russia’s air campaign has also been in full swing.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia dropped 800 glide bombs and sent almost 400 drones and 20 missiles into Ukraine last week.

“This daily aerial terror can be stopped. This requires the unity of partners and long-range [weapons],” Zelenskyy said.

Zelenskyy has asked his allies to allow Ukraine to use Western-supplied missiles to strike Russian airfields from which glide bombs are dispatched on board Tupolev-95 bombers.

Russia has warned of dire consequences should allies allow Ukraine to strike hundreds of kilometres inside Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov did so again on Tuesday.

“As soon as this decision is made, if it is made, we will know about it, and the scheme that [Russian President] Vladimir Putin mentioned, it will already be in effect,” Lavrov said.

Russia has also suffered setbacks.

The spokesman for Ukraine’s northern forces in Kharkiv, Vitaly Sarantsev, revealed on Sunday that a large mechanised assault at the beginning of last week in Vovchansk had resulted in more Russian dead than wounded.

“The enemy used a large number of personnel and a significant number of armoured vehicles that, under the cover of two tanks, tried to storm [our] positions,” Sarantsev said.

“They tried to advance to the [industrial] plant but were met by the fire of our artillery and the blows of our FPV [first-person view] drones,” he said.

“For the first time, the number of dead exceeded the number of wounded. This shows that the intensity of the battle was such that the enemy simply did not have time to withdraw their personnel or take the wounded – they all died during this assault.”

Ukraine said that in general, 40 percent of Russian losses in Kharkiv were “irreversible” – meaning dead or irrecoverably injured.

‘Significant’ Russian losses for marginal advances

Ukraine has pioneered the use of drones on the battlefield to destroy armoured vehicles and demonstrated the use of FPV Phoenix drones to drop munitions on three Russian field warehouses of ammunition in Luhansk and on armoured personnel carriers.

Experts have argued about Russia’s capacity to continue to absorb enormous losses of men and vehicles.

It has prosecuted offensives across Ukraine’s Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk and Zaporizhia regions since February as Ukraine has dropped onto a defensive posture.

“Russian forces have conducted several battalion-sized mechanised assaults in western Donetsk Oblast since July 2024, the majority of which resulted in significant armoured vehicle losses in exchange for marginal territorial advances,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

Russia has had its greatest success this year on the Pokrovsk front.

Since seizing Avdiivka in February, it has formed a salient 40km (25 miles) long towards Pokrovsk.

By one tally, it has lost five divisions of vehicles to achieve that.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank, estimated that Russia had lost 8,800 armoured vehicles and tanks in the first two years of the war and was rapidly using up Soviet stockpiles.

By Ukraine’s reckoning, Russia has been losing upwards of 30,000 personnel and 1,500 artillery systems a month since the summer.

On the long-range offensive

Ukraine has continued to be on the offensive in long-range strikes against Russian energy and defence targets.

Ukraine’s general staff said it had struck an oil depot in Feodosia in Russian-occupied Crimea. They said the Feodosia depot was the largest military oil storage in Crimea and was used to supply Russian forces across the front. An aide to the head of the Crimean occupation forces on Monday confirmed a fire at the Feodosia depot without explaining the cause.

The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region said 45 Ukrainian drones had attacked it on Tuesday, injuring two people.

Ukraine’s Border Service head, Andriy Demchenko, said Ukraine was continuing to fire on Russian gas production platforms in the Black Sea to prevent them from being used for gas extraction or military purposes.

Ukraine’s military intelligence and Border Service “constantly perform tasks in the waters of the Black Sea in order to control this territory and prevent the enemy from entering”, Demchanko said.

Scaling up weapons production

Zelenskyy said in his Monday evening address that he would request Western investment in drone and electronic warfare production in Ukraine at a meeting of the heads of government of Kyiv’s key allies on Saturday at the US airbase in Ramstein, Germany. But on Wednesday, the meeting was postponed after US President Joe Biden pulled out given the scale of Hurricane Milton.

Dutch Defence Minister Ruben Brekelmans said his country would invest 400 million euros ($439m) in the development of drones in Ukraine.

“This concerns all kinds of advanced drones that can be used for reconnaissance, defence and attack, particularly in the air but also on land and at sea,” Brekelmans said.

Brekelmans also revealed that Dutch F-16 fighter jets had arrived in Ukraine and all 24 pledged by the Netherlands would be delivered “in the coming months”.

The Financial Times reported on Saturday that during his visit to Washington last month, Zelenskyy proposed temporary land concessions in return for NATO membership for Ukraine and a negotiated end to the war.

This would involve recognising that Russia retains de facto control of the territories it has captured, but the conquests would not be recognised by Ukraine or its Western allies as legal, the report said.

The deal now would involve acceptance that the lands seized by Russia would have to be won back by negotiation in the future, according to the newspaper.

Zelenskyy said in his Saturday evening address that sovereignty would not be surrendered: “[Peace and security] is possible exclusively on the basis of international law and without any trading of sovereignty or trading of territories.” (Al Jazeera)