Ukraine says its troops still holding out in Pokrovsk as Moscow says pincer closing

KYIV/MOSCOW (Reuters) -Ukraine's top military commander said on Saturday his troops were still holding out in the embattled eastern city of Pokrovsk, which Moscow said its forces were at last enclosing in a pincer movement after more than a year of fighting.

Russia has been trying to capture Pokrovsk, dubbed "the gateway to Donetsk", since mid-2024 in its campaign to control the entirety of Donetsk, a Ukrainian province it claims to have annexed. The city, home to 70,000 people before the war, has been all but completely destroyed and depopulated.

Capturing Pokrovsk would be the most important Russian territorial gain inside Ukraine since Moscow took the ruined city of Avdiivka in early 2024 after one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

Since then, Russia has made steady but slow gains in intense fighting along the 1,000 km (600 mile) front line, believed to have killed tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides. Kyiv says the costly fighting is largely stalemated and its territorial losses are marginal; Moscow says it is still making important gains.

'WE ARE HOLDING POKROVSK' COMMANDER SAYS

"We are holding Pokrovsk," Ukraine's army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Facebook. "A comprehensive operation to destroy and dislodge enemy forces from Pokrovsk is ongoing."

Russian officials say control of Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka to its northeast would allow Moscow to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in Donetsk - Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

They have described increasing advances in the Pokrovsk area in recent days. Reuters has not been able to verify the battlefield accounts because access is restricted on both sides.

Deepstate, a Ukrainian map of the front line made by compiling data from open-source images, shows Russian troops in full control of a small southern part of the city, with most of the rest of it still depicted as a grey zone, fully controlled by neither force.

The Russian Defence Ministry's Zvezda news outlet said on Saturday that Ukrainian troops were beginning to lay down arms inside Pokrovsk, and released a video of two men it said were Ukrainian soldiers who had surrendered. Reuters could not verify the video or determine where or when it was filmed.

Kyiv said this week it had landed a helicopter with a team of special forces in Pokrovsk in a mission to halt the Russian advance. Russia's Defence Ministry said on Saturday its troops had killed all 11 members of that Ukrainian special forces team.

A Ukrainian military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, denied that the special forces had been killed and said the operation was continuing.

Russia also said its troops had pushed back an attempt by a Ukrainian unit to break out of Hryshyne, northwest of Pokrovsk. Battles in that area are significant, as they could indicate Russian forces are close to cutting off Ukrainian supply lines to Pokrovsk.

Ukraine's military said the situation in Pokrovsk "remains difficult and dynamic" but the army had "managed to improve its tactical position in several quarters of the city".

Russia wants to take the whole of the Donbas region, which comprises Luhansk and Donetsk provinces. Ukraine still controls about 10% of Donbas - an area of about 5,000 square km (1,930 square miles) in western Donetsk.

(Reporting by Reuters in Moscow and Yuliia Dysa in KyivEditing by Guy Faulconbridge, Gleb Bryanski, Peter Graff)