Ukraine slowed Russian advance towards Pokrovsk by deploying experienced units, laying minefields and other defensive barriers, while harassing Russian forces with large numbers of drones, says a military official; Russia is adapting its tactics and mounting a renewed offensive, making gains.
For months, Ukraine has picked off Russian soldiers by the thousand around the frontline city of Pokrovsk, using small drones armed with bombs to tie down a numerically superior force.
Now, though, Russian troops are creeping forward in a summer offensive that has probed weak spots in Ukraine’s defences and last week saw some Russian soldiers enter the city for the first time, according to footage on Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels and geolocated by Reuters.
Ukrainian soldiers’ success in stopping their enemy from taking Pokrovsk since last year has long thwarted one of Moscow’s central military goals, although the city itself is heavily damaged and all but a few hundred of the 60,000-strong population have fled.
Pokrovsk sits atop large coking coal reserves and, until Russian forces moved closer, was important to Ukraine’s military supply lines in the country’s east.
Most active front
The Pokrovsk front is the most active in the war, with 111,000 Russian soldiers amassed there for the summer offensive, Ukrainian top military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi has said.
Russia’s forces initially aimed to seize Pokrovsk early last year, first with frontal assaults and later trying to encircle the city, which Russia calls by the Soviet-era name Krasnoarmeysk, or Red Army town.
Ukraine slowed the advance this spring by deploying experienced units, laying minefields and other defensive barriers, while harassing Russian forces with large numbers of drones, said Viktor Trehubov, spokesperson for the military administration that covers Pokrovsk.
“They didn’t stop trying to advance, but we were repelling them well,” said an artillery unit soldier who serves on the Pokrovsk front.
Since then, Moscow’s forces have picked up the pace, adapting and expanding the use of drones in their own arsenal.
Russia has built on the lessons used in pushing Ukrainian forces out of its Kursk region, where it first scaled the use of fibre-optic cable drones that cannot be stopped by the electronic jammers both sides used to confuse regular radio-controlled drones, analyst Michael Kofman said.
The spools of hair-like cable give them enough range that Russia can threaten Ukraine’s forces and logistics 25 kilometres behind the front line. Russia has more fibre-optic drones than Ukraine, giving them an advantage, said Roman Pohorilyi, the founder of Ukrainian open-source research group DeepState.
The advances accelerated after Russia took control of a highway in May that connects Pokrovsk to Kostiantynivka, another of Ukraine’s ‘fortress cities’ in the east, a map generated by DeepState shows.
One of the main roads to the city is covered by nets to protect vehicles from Russian drone strikes. Serhii Dobriak, the head of the local military administration, last week said it was increasingly hard to deliver food to the city and that grocery stores would have to close in the coming days.
While faster than before, Russia’s territorial gains remain minor, with only 5,000 square km (1,930 square miles) of Ukraine taken since the start of last year, less than 1% of the country’s overall territory, according to a June report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
In total, Russia has occupied around a fifth of Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the entry of small groups of Russian troops into Pokrovsk was insignificant and that they were “all destroyed” by Ukraine’s soldiers.
At what cost?
Serhii Filimonov, commander of a Ukrainian military battalion called “Da Vinci Wolves,” which operates around Pokrovsk, saw firsthand how Russia’s glacial advance on the city over the past year cost it heavily in killed and injured soldiers in the first half of 2025.
Russian soldiers tried to advance by stealth but were hounded by Ukrainian soldiers flying small quadcopter drones mounted with cameras and explosives, he said.
“Every prisoner says drones are the thing they are most afraid of, the thing that constantly kills them, and the things they see when they sleep, the nightmares they have,” Mr. Filimonov had said in April, citing debriefs of Russian soldiers captured by his men.
The Ukrainian resistance in and around Pokrovsk has blocked Russia’s ambition of taking the remaining parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, one of President Vladimir Putin’s principal war aims.
Although its significance to Ukraine as a military supply centre has already faded, Kyiv-based military analyst Serhii Kuzan said Pokrovsk’s fall could free up Russian troops and open the door to more Russian advances in the region.
Russia adapts
The overall commander of Ukraine’s land forces, Major-General Mykhaylo Drapatyi, was given the additional direct responsibility for the part of the front that includes Pokrovsk in January, after another town fell.
Mr. Drapatyi brought “a fresh vision” to the battle, helping mount counter-attacks to disrupt Russian advances and threaten its local logistics, DeepState’s Pohorilyi said.
However, Russia’s adaptation and new technology, such as the fibre-optic drones have shifted the balance.
What soldiers call the drone “kill zone” stretches several kilometres either side of the front line. That creates challenges to sustaining logistical supply chains for both armies. Any vehicle bringing forward fresh supplies of men, ammunition, food and water can be targeted.
DeepState estimated that Ukraine had its biggest territorial losses of 2025 in June.
More than a quarter of the 556 square km taken by Russia in June were on the Pokrovsk front, DeepState estimated.
Mr. Filimonov’s Da Vinci Wolves fight on, defending the city against Russia’s latest recruits.
“Russia finds new victims, which it throws into the furnace,” he said.
