Ukraine’s key logistical hub of Pokrovsk falls to Russian forces
Ukraine’s key logistic hub of Pokrovsk has fallen to the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) after more than a year of fighting, marking a major strategic defeat for Kyiv.
Russian forces have entered the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, one of the fiercest flashpoints along the front line, and are now carrying out search and destroy operations, but have not yet dug in, Anna Fratsyvir of The Kyiv Independent reports.
If Russia consolidates its control of the city it would be a major strategic victory for the AFR and heighten concerns about Kyiv’s ability to hold strategic ground in Donetsk Oblast in the face of the growing momentum of Russia’s summer offensive.
The Ukrainian battlefield monitoring channel DeepState and frontline troops cited by The Kyiv Independent report that Russian troops breached the city from the direction of Zvirove in recent days, exploiting weakened infantry positions and what was described as “inaccurate situational reporting.” The incursion prompted an emergency Ukrainian military response to contain the breach and prevent “the situation from spiralling into disaster,” DeepState said.
The breach of the city's borders by the AFR comes only days after a frontline report by The Kyiv Independent’s Francis Farrell said the city was on the verge of being overrun by Russian troops.
The one time industrial city lies 67km northwest of Russian-occupied Donetsk and was described by Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as “the hottest spot along the entire 1,200-kilometre front line.”
While it remains unclear whether Russian troops and how well established Russian positions are within the city limits the fact that they have entered the city after a year of trying bodes badly for Kyiv.
An Ukrainian drone unit operating in the area told The Kyiv Independent that AFR forces were in the city and that Ukrainian troops were trying to organise a defence. Reports posted on social media suggest that intense street fighting is underway.
“Russian units attempted to entrench themselves and gain control over Defenders of Ukraine street,” DeepState said. “Some of them have been killed, others are still being hunted. The search and destruction of these groups is still ongoing.”
Ukraine’s military has yet to issue an official update on the situation in Pokrovsk following the latest incursion.
The battle for control of Pokrovsk in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region has been raging for more than a year. A large coalmining town, the city also lies at the nexus of a major rail and road network that are crucial for supplying Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) all along the eastern front with Russia’s forces.
The fight intensified significantly in early 2024 as the AFR targeted the city as strategically important and threw huge resources at it. Over 1,000 Russian soldiers have died a day, according to the Ukrainian Defence Ministry reports, although other analysts have put the death toll at a third of that.
Russian forces launched their attack on Pokrovsk as part of a broader offensive in Donetsk Oblast in spring 2024, following strategic gains around Avdiivka and Bakhmut, both of which were similarly won after protected campaigns and the great loss of life.
Similar to today, the fall of Avdiivka in February last year came after the US ran out of money for Ukraine and left the skies open to a massive Russian barrage that made the capture of the city easier. Since taking office in January US President Donald Trump has likewise cut Ukraine off from new funding and weapons supplies. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a devastating missile barrage in May and the missile war has only intensified since then to record levels.
The fighting for Pokrovsk has been intense, including artillery bombardment, drone strikes, and trench warfare. It lies at a critical junction for the supply and reinforcement of Ukrainian positions along the entire eastern front.
Pokrovsk sits on a major railway line and an interconnected road network that links frontline positions with rear logistics bases in Dnipropetrovsk and central Ukraine. This makes it one of the few functioning railheads still within range to supply Ukrainian troops in the Donetsk direction.
In recent months Pokrovsk has been used by Ukrainian forces to rotate units, repair equipment, and replenish supplies, particularly ammunition and fuel. It acts as a buffer between active front-line sectors and deeper rear areas.It also provides access to key logistics corridors running northward toward Dobropillia and Pavlohrad, and westward toward Dnipro, a major logistics and command centre for Ukraine’s eastern military operations.
If the AFR consolidate control of Pokrovsk, it would hamper Kyiv’s ability to supply forces in Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhzhia as well as complicate troop movements throughout eastern Ukraine.
Pokrovsk is also the last major settlement in Eastern Ukraine before reaching the Dnipro river that cuts the country in half. In theory Russian forces could rapidly advance up to the banks of the Dnipro thanks to the lack of defensive positions for the AFU to occupy.
Ukraine’s military death tolls underestimated, Russia recruits sufficient to cover its frontline losses
Ukraine’s official military casualty figures in the war with Russia may be vastly understated, according to a report published by the French newspaper Le Monde on Monday. Russia’s death toll is much higher, but official figures show the Kremlin’s voluntary recruitment drive is replenishing the ranks faster than its soldiers are being killed.
Death tolls in the four-year old war are state secrets on both sides of the conflict and analysts have been reduced to using proxies to estimate the true toll and official estimates from Defence Ministries are almost certainly massaged up or down. However, even these estimates are stark.
Since the start of the conflict over three years ago a total of 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed and another 380,000 wounded, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told CBS News in February.
“The real death toll is likely much higher,” Le Monde reported based on Ukraine’s efforts to build military cemeteries. The state has two new national military memorial projects under construction in Kyiv and Lviv, as graveyards for fallen Ukrainian soldiers are nearing capacity. “Construction projects rising across Ukraine say more about the scale of the slaughter than statistics ever could,” Le Monde said, in comments widely shared in Russian media.
Ukraine’s manpower shortage
While the actual numbers remain cloaked in confusion, it is very clear that Ukraine is suffering from an acute manpower shortage, while Russia is not. No men aged 18 to 60 have been allowed to leave the country since February 2022 without special permission.
Russian President Vladimir Putin resorted to a partial mobilisation in September 2022 in the first year of the war, when the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) faced a temporary manpower shortage. The Kremlin has avoided a general mobilisation at all costs, aware that it could cause a major revolt. And the costs have been high; the Kremlin has been paying out an entire year’s salary or more as signed up fees for voluntary recruits, which takes up a third of the military budget by itself.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was forced to order a general mobilisation almost as soon as the war started. Now anger and resentment is rising at the aggressive press-ganging of military-age men into the army – a process known as ‘busification’. Ukraine’s social media is filled with videos of men being snatched from the street and bundled into minivans by recruitment officers, sometimes at gunpoint.
Those forced to fight are fleeing their positions in record numbers. Desertions from the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) is rampant. In the first six months of this year, Ukraine’s Prosecutor’s Office reported that it had opened 107,672 new criminal cases for desertion. Since 2022 some 230,804 such criminal cases have been instigated, suggesting that more soldiers have deserted the Ukrainian army than there are fighting men in today’s British, French and German armies combined, The Spectator reports.
And there is no respite for the members of the AFU. While Russia has sufficient men to be able to rotate them in and out of combat, Ukrainian soldiers serve continuously and are exhausted. A draft law proposed last year releasing military personnel from service after 36 months was squashed by the government for fear exacerbating the labour shortage. Small protests are regularly held by the families of soldiers calling not for the release of their men, but simply to give them a break from the front line occasionally.
Another new law making it possible for men aged 18-26, that are not subject to conscription, to volunteer for military service managed to attract a total of 500 recruits.
Russia fewer deaths, faster recruitment
The numbers of reported Russian dead from the war are clearly higher, but they also don’t add up. Ukraine’s supporters report the Russian death toll practically every day, usually citing the official estimates released by Ukraine’s Defence Ministry, as part of its media campaign to denigrate the AFR and boost support for Ukraine. Currently the numbers coming from the “meat grinder” that is the battle for Donbas sees at least a 1,000 Russian soldiers die a day according to these estimates.
However, other sober estimate put the number far lower. A verified list of dead Russian soldiers maintained by Mediazona and the BBC already exceeds 115,000 -- about 5,000 names are added each month, or 161 deaths per day from the whole of Ukraine, not 1,000.
The actual number of deaths is widely estimated at roughly double the Mediazona estimates, or around 300 dead a day. Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), for example, puts Russian fatalities at 250,000, the Moscow Times reports. However, due to the incomplete access to information, the real number could be far higher.
Nevertheless, these estimates are still a third of what the Ukrainian Defence Ministry is reporting, and they are low enough to allow Russia to sustain its fight indefinitely as it can replace all the casualties with fresh recruits.
Typically, three times more soldiers on the offensive die than those on the defensive, However, what few numbers have come out on the daily death toll of the AFU are roughly on the same order as the estimate of Russian deaths – and with its smaller population even if fewer Ukrainians are dying than Russians, it can still lose the war by running out of men before Russia does.
While the AFU has the drone advantage, Russia maintains an overwhelming artillery, missile and heavy glide bombs advantage, powerful weapons that can completely destroy Ukraine’s defensive positions.
Much clearer is the information on Putin’s ability to replenish his manpower by recruiting fresh volunteers to fight for Russia.
“Some analysts — including myself — recently thought Putin would be unable to find enough conscripts to cover losses this year and that by late 2025, forcing him to choose between a forced draft and a ceasefire,” said Sergei Shelin in an opinion piece in the Moscow Times. “Unfortunately, the data paints a different picture.”
Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi claimed Russia suffered 32,000 irreversible losses in June alone (100 deaths a day), but official Russian figures suggested Russia added 190,000 volunteer and contract soldiers in the first five months of 2025, or 38,000 per month (1,225 per day). Russia is recruiting more soldiers a month than it is losing on the frontline, even if you believe Syrskyi’s probably inflated number. Monthly inflows exceed losses by roughly 10,000, according to Shelin.
Putin says about 700,000 Russians are currently fighting in Ukraine. His goal is to increase the number of active servicemen to 1.5mn largely through volunteers that draw heavily on Russia’s poorest regions, while the AFU is forced to resort to conscription of the dwindling pool of men left in the country. Russia’s population is at least four-times bigger than that of Ukraine’s, and that calculation is before you count out the roughly six million men that have already fled the country after the war started.
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