As Russia advances and Trump retreats, China’s ascendancy is clear

While the world’s attention is drawn to US President Donald Trump’s tug of war with China over trade tariffs and technological embargoes, a new development in the Ukraine war is catching the eye of geopolitical observers.

Pokrovsk, a city in Donetsk Oblast, has emerged as the most critical flashpoint in Russia’s war on Ukraine. At the intersection of major supply highways and a key railway junction, it serves as a vital logistics hub for Ukrainian forces defending central and western Donetsk. Controlling it would give Russia a chokehold on the gateway to deeper Ukrainian defences in the region, sever their supporting lines and encircle large sections of their fighting units.

Accurate reports have become luxuries since the war broke out in February 2022, but from what has been made known, it appears at the time of writing that Pokrovsk is very likely to be Russia’s pivotal gain. What seems to be Moscow’s most sustained momentum since early 2024 is threatening to turn Pokrovsk into a “fortress belt” collapse point for the Ukrainians.

Capping the significance of the development, however, is its great power rivalry implication.

Trump seems frustrated by his lack of progress in achieving a ceasefire in Ukraine, as he had claimed he could and would. Stuck between Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seemingly malleable but actually persistent demand to address the “root cause” of the war and a defiant Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, buttressed by Europe and refusing to cede territory for a truce, Trump has lately begun to sound resigned, saying “let them fight it out”.

Placed in the context of great power relations between the United States, Russia and China, the situation can be viewed as analogous to the Korean war in the early 1950s. The key difference is that then, Chinese soldiers fought against the US-led UN army with the Soviet Union on the sidelines as China’s sponsor ally, but now, it is China that plays at detachment while maintaining friendly terms with a Russia fighting a war on Ukrainian soil against US-led Nato forces.

  

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