Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Friday that Ukrainian troops face fierce battles in the eastern city of Pokrovsk. Russia has been declaring capture of villages that act as logistics centers near the town almost every day.
Ukraine’s top commander Oleksandr Syrskyi spoke at his night video address and said the situation around Pokrovsk was the current focus of the war, with Russia invading Ukraine in February 2022.
“All operational directions are covered, with special attention to Pokrovsk. It gets the most attention,” Zelenskyy said.
He said Ukrainian troops also “continue to operate” in the border areas of northern Sumi, where Russian troops have gained a foothold in recent weeks.
In another report from the Telegram messaging app, Syrskyi described Pokrovsk and five other departments as one of the most difficult theaters along the 1,000 km.
“The Russian Federation is trying the highest price for ‘summer attack’,” Syrskyi wrote.
Russia’s focus for several months
Russian troops have been trying to shut down Pokrovsk for months. Roads and railway hubs with a population of about 60,000 before the war have almost evacuated. Serhii Dobriak, head of the city’s military administration, said less than 1,500 residents were left.
Syrskyi reported in May that troops in Kiev stabilized the situation around the town, which is also home to Ukraine’s only factory producing coal from the country’s steel industry.
Russia is using upgraded weapons to launch a continuous attack on Ukraine. These drones are designed to cause greater damage and even harder to shoot down. Briar Stewart of CBC explained.
Russia’s defense ministry announced on Thursday that it had occupied two villages on both sides of Pokrovsk – Zvirove in the west and Novoekonomichne in the east. Earlier this week, Moscow announced that it had “liberated” the third village near the city of Novitoletsk.
Ukrainian officials do not acknowledge that the villages have changed hands. The Ukrainian military’s general staff said in a report at night that two of them (Zvirove and Novoekonomichne) were areas where Russian troops were trying to infiltrate Ukrainian defenses.
In the Sumi region, Russian troops are trying to identify what Russian leader Vladimir Putin calls a “buffer zone”, and Ukraine’s popular military blog Deepstate said Kiev troops have recaptured a previously lost village.
Deepstate relies on open source reports to track the presence of Russian troops. Ukrainian troops restored control of the village of Kindrativka. Neither official comments were made.
