Russia at the gates: How Ukraine defended a strategic city for months

By Anastasiia Malenko, Maria Tsvetkova and Manuel Ausloos

DONETSK REGION (Reuters) -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 has 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.

Reuters spoke to more than a dozen sources including Ukrainian soldiers and relatives of Russian soldiers missing in action around the city, and made two trips to the area over four months to examine the shifting tactics in the key theatre of the eastern 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 goes by call sign Vogak and 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 of the 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 kilometres (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 Zelenskiy said the entry of small groups of Russian troops into Pokrovsk was insignificant and that they were "all destroyed" by Ukraine's soldiers. 

Russia’s Defence Ministry did not respond to detailed requests for comment for this story.

AT WHAT COST?

Serhii Filimonov, commander of a Ukrainian military battalion called “Da Vinci Wolves,” which operates around Pokrovsk, saw first-hand 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,” Filimonov told Reuters in an interview in April, citing debriefs of Russian soldiers captured by his men.

Filimonov said groups of attackers were given a phone with a location pinned on a map, and told to head towards it. If the first group was killed, another one was sent to replace them, he said, citing the debriefs. Reuters was unable to independently verify his account.

The Russians operated in raiding parties of around a half a dozen, often advancing on foot because large vehicles are an easy target for drone pilots, Filimonov and Trehubov said.

Some left their vehicles as far as nine miles (15 km) from the front line and walked the rest of the way to be less visible to drone operators, Filimonov said. Others have taken to motorbikes to outpace the aircraft, piloted by Ukrainian soldiers often wearing virtual reality-style goggles attached to a drone’s camera, offering a first-person view of the route and target, Trehubov said.

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.

More than a million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, almost a quarter of those since the start of this year, according to British military intelligence estimates.

Reuters could not verify these numbers.

Neither Ukraine nor Russia gives official data on their own personnel losses.

ILL-TRAINED

Towards the end of last year, Moscow’s commanders deployed soldiers with very little training, including convicts or injured men, according to conversations with five relatives of Russian soldiers. The relatives did not want their identity or the soldiers' identities published for fear of reprisals.

The army struggled to account for who was missing or dead, the relatives said.

One soldier was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front despite having an injury to his leg sustained on previous missions, according to a relative.

“He could barely walk,” the relative said. He went missing on March 9, when his vehicle was hit.

The relative said a member of his unit, to whom she had spoken, had heard him over the radio after the strike, saying he had been badly wounded. He was listed as absent without leave, she said, though she believes he is dead or taken prisoner.

Another soldier, recruited from a Russian penal colony on December 18, was given a week of training and on December 26 was sent on a combat mission on the Pokrovsk front, according to a relative.

The relative said he had not been heard from since. Shortly before the mission, the soldier rang relatives to ask them to send 50,000 roubles ($600) so he could buy a walkie-talkie. She said the soldier was officially listed at the end of December as having gone absent without leave, but she believed he was dead.

A third soldier, a 21-year-old father of two from western Siberia, signed a contract with the army in 2024 after he was promised a non-combat role far from Ukrainian frontlines and signing-on bonuses of 1 million roubles, or $12,000, according to his relative.

But instead, he was sent to Ukraine and in late December, he was ordered on a raid near the village of Vovkove, on the Pokrovsk front.

In January, he was designated as absent without leave. At the end of April his family was notified he had been killed in action on December 27, according to the relative and letters from the military seen by Reuters.

His relative said the family received 5 million roubles and a monthly pension as compensation for his death.

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. 

Drapatyi, who previously stopped a Russian offensive on the second city of Kharkiv, 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.

The overall Russian advance over the whole frontline doubled from 226 square kilometres in April to around 538 square kilometres in May, according to open-source analyst Pasi Paroinen with the Finnish “Black Bird Group”.

DeepState estimated that Ukraine had its biggest territorial losses of 2025 in June. More than a quarter of the 556 square kilometres taken by Russia in June were on the Pokrovsk front, DeepState estimated.

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.

($1 = 79.4000 roubles)

(Reporting by Manuel Ausloos in the Donetsk region, Anastasiia Malenko in Kyiv and Maria Tsvetkova in New York; Editing by Christian Lowe and Frank Jack Daniel)