In February, 31 M-1 Abrams tanks stood between the Russians and Pokrovsk. Today, maybe half are left…

Destroyed NATO equipment in Donbass.
Photo: Russian MoD

Analysts assume Russia will reach Pokrovsk and its crucial supply lines in September, FORBS informs.

Russian troops raised a flag over a mine complex on the northern edge of Novohrodivka on Thursday, marking their farthest advance along the 25-mile Avdiivka-Pokrovsk axis, six months after the ammunition-starved Ukrainian garrison fled the former fortress city.

Now there’s just one main trench between the advancing Russians and Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian logistical hub in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast. And it’s not clear the Ukrainians have deployed enough manpower to the Pokrovsk sector to fill the trench with troops.

All that is to say, Pokrovsk — a city with a pre-war population of 60,000—is in big trouble. The meager reinforcements the Ukrainian armed forces have sent to the area may not be able to save it.

“Ukrainian troops in the Pokrovsk direction were forced to retreat multiple times, lacking sufficient forces and resources to mount an organized defense,” Ukrainian analysis group Frontelligence Insight explained.

It’s not that the Ukrainians lost every battle for every section of the trenches. But they lost some. And when one section of a trench fell, the Ukrainian troops in the adjacent sections often had no choice but to fall back — or risk being surrounded.

“The major issue remains the shortage of available manpower and experienced units to provide organized defense and defend those positions,” Frontelligence Insight noted. “No matter how well-constructed or numerous the defenses are, if they are only staffed at 10 to 20 percent of the required capacity, it’s unsurprising that Russian forces are able to overrun them so quickly.”

The Ukrainian military had brigades to spare as the Russian assault on Pokrovsk accelerated in August. But rather than reinforce in the east, the general staff in Kyiv sent some or all of eight brigades across the border into Russia’s Kursk Oblast.

Instead, the Ukrainian defense between Avdiivka and Pokrovsk continues to hinge on the same exhausted brigade that’s been fighting a rearguard action along the axis since February: the elite 47th Mechanized Brigade.

Six months of brutal combat against a bigger Russian force has taken its toll on the elite 47th Mechanized Brigade. The 2,000-person unit rolled into battle in the east in February with all 31 M-1 Abrams tanks that the United States pledged to Ukraine last year.

Destroyed Abrams tank in the Pokrovsk direction.
Photo: Topcor

Ukrainian forces have continued to lose ground to Russia in the country’s eastern Donetsk region, with Moscow determined not to have its plans to capture the territory undermined by Kyiv’s incursion into Kursk, The Financial Times informs.

The UK’s defence ministry said that Russian forces were now within 10km of the logistics hub of Pokrovsk, though it added that their advance would probably slow as they approached more built-up areas.

Pokrovsk serves as a thoroughfare to other major Ukrainian-controlled towns in the Donetsk region, such as Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka, as well as providing road links to central Ukraine. Its capture would undermine Ukrainian forces’ defence of the rest of the region.

Russia’s continued focus on Donetsk comes despite Ukrainian forces holding what analysts estimate as 1,200 sq km of Russia’s southern Kursk region.

Russia’s military command was “extremely averse to pulling combat effective units from frontline areas” around Pokrovsk and Toretsk, another town in the Donetsk region, assessed the Washington-based think-tank, the Institute for the Study of War, in its report.

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