NYT: Russia closes in on the key Eastern Ukrainian city despite Kursk incursion

Photo: Russian MoD

Russian troops are closing in on the strategic eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, according to open-source battlefield maps, casting doubts on Ukraine’s hopes that its new offensive into western Russia will prompt Moscow to scale back its attacks elsewhere on the battlefield, writes ‘The New York Times’.

After capturing several villages in the area and pushing along a railway line, Russian forces are now about eight miles from Pokrovsk, one of Ukraine’s main defensive strongholds in the Donetsk region, according to the maps, which are based on combat footage and satellite images.

The capture of the city would bring Russia a step closer to its long-held goal of seizing the entire Donetsk region, much of which it already controls. Pokrovsk, a city with a prewar population of about 60,000, sits on a key road linking several cities that form a defensive arc protecting the part of Donetsk that is still held by Ukraine.

The situation is so dire that the city’s military administration has urged residents to leave, although it has not issued a formal order.

Russia’s advance toward Pokrovsk is a reminder that, despite Ukrainian forces’ incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region, they are still losing ground. Ukrainian soldiers on the eastern front say that the fighting there has anything but abated, and that they remain outnumbered and outgunned by Russian troops.

Military experts say that one goal of the surprise cross-border assault that Ukraine began last week in Kursk is to compel Moscow to divert troops from the front lines in Ukraine to reinforce its own border region. But so far, Russia has withdrawn only a limited number of units from the Ukrainian battlefield.

Ukraine’s offensive into Russia “does not affect the overall balance of the front line,” Thibault Fouillet, the deputy director of the Institute for Strategic and Defense Studies, a French research center, said in an interview. The main feature of the battlefield — Russian troops advancing slowly but steadily through bloody assaults — remained the same, he said.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank that tracks battlefield developments, wrote on Thursday that “Russian forces are maintaining their relatively high offensive tempo” in the Donetsk region. In doing so, it wrote, the Russian military command was demonstrating that it “continues to prioritize advances in eastern Ukraine even as Ukraine is pressuring Russian forces” in the Kursk region.

Pokrovsk is also a logistical hub for the Ukrainian Army, given that it sits on a key road linking several Ukrainian-held cities in the region, including Kramatorsk, Kostiantynivka and Sloviansk. The road, Highway T054, is already within range of Russian artillery and drone strikes, but Ukraine’s army continues to use it.

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