By Dan Peleschuk
KYIV, Feb 9 (Reuters) – Russian forces are trying to press forward around the city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv’s military said on Monday, hoping to conclude a months-long campaign to seize the strategic hub as Moscow seeks to capture the whole of the Donetsk region.
Ukraine has struggled to halt slow Russian advances around Pokrovsk and elsewhere along the 1,200-km (746-mile) front line while it comes under U.S. pressure to reach a peace deal to end the four-year war in ongoing talks.
Kyiv’s General Staff said on Monday its forces still held the northern part of Pokrovsk, a city with a pre-war population of 60,000, and were also defending the smaller city of Myrnohrad nearby.
Pokrovsk, a railway nexus, has been the site of fierce fighting since last year. Its fall would mark Russia’s biggest battlefield victory since it seized the eastern city of Avdiivka in early 2024.
Moscow claimed late last year to have captured Pokrovsk, which Kyiv denied.
Analysts say Russia has captured only about 1.3% of Ukrainian territory since early 2023, though its aerial bombardments have inflicted heavy damage on the national power network in recent months.
Ukraine’s 7th Rapid Response Corps, which oversees defences in the area, said Russia was “pressing in the Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad area” by exploiting “insufficient” Ukrainian air defences, using guided bombs and controlling heights and flanks with their greater manpower.
Ukrainian open-source researchers DeepState said Russian infantry was moving into the northern part of Pokrovsk and attempting to push further toward the nearby village of Hryshyne.
The group, whose map showed nearly all of Pokrovsk and much of Myrnohrad to be under Russian control, described the current fighting as “the last battles” for the two cities.
‘A MATTER OF YEARS’
Nearly four years after its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, Russia occupies almost a fifth of Ukraine’s territory, including the Crimean Peninsula and parts of eastern Ukraine occupied before the war.
Russia is demanding that Ukraine relinquish the remaining 20% of the industrialised Donetsk region that it has been unable to conquer, something Kyiv refuses to do.
Moscow has pledged to keep fighting until it achieves its war aims and says the issue of territory is of “fundamental importance” to ongoing peace talks brokered by the United States.
Polls show that a majority of Ukrainians say it would be unacceptable to cede the rest of Donetsk, which includes the heavily defended, so-called “fortress cities” of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, in exchange for peace.
“[E]ven under these conditions, the capture of the entire Donetsk region remains a matter of years for Russia,” the 7th Rapid Response Corps said on X.
“Fighting for the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk agglomeration could last up to three years and come at the cost of massive losses for the invading forces.”
(Additional reporting by Anna Pruchnicka; Writing by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Gareth Jones)
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