Russia said its forces had pushed deeper into the eastern Ukrainian cities of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk on Tuesday, with one video showing Russian soldiers rolling into Pokrovsk on motorbikes and even on the roofs of battered cars and vans.
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Moscow has said that taking Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” by Russian media, would give it a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donetsk region: Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Russia has been threatening Pokrovsk for more than a year, using a pincer movement to attempt to encircle it and threaten supply lines, rather than the deadly frontal assaults it employed to capture the city of Bakhmut in 2023.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has described the situation around Pokrovsk as difficult and his top commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, acknowledged his army’s position in parts of southeastern Zaporizhzhia region had “significantly worsened”.
Russian war bloggers published a video on Tuesday showing what they said were Russian forces entering Pokrovsk along a road enveloped in fog, in what some Telegram users said looked like scenes from the 1979 action film Mad Max, which unfolds in a post-apocalyptic landscape.
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