Russia deploys 170,000 troops in battle for Pokrovsk

Russia has deployed 170,000 troops to Donetsk to bolster resources in the battle for Pokrovsk, Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday.

The city, in eastern Ukraine, has been under siege for more than a year, with forces keeping Moscow’s troops at bay despite fears that it could soon fall.

Vladimir Putin has stepped up his attacks in the past month, targeting supply lines and sending increasing numbers of drones into battle.

Mr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said: “The situation in Pokrovsk is difficult,” while also rejecting recent Russian claims that the devastated city was surrounded after more than a year of fighting.

He acknowledged that some Russian units had infiltrated Pokrovsk, but insisted Ukrainian defenders were weeding them out.

“There are Russians in Pokrovsk,” the president told a media briefing in Kyiv. “They are being destroyed, gradually destroyed, because, well, we need to preserve our personnel.”

In previous sieges, Ukraine has pulled back from the front lines to avoid losing troops. Ukrainian forces are desperately short-handed against Russia’s bigger army.

Putin recently claimed that Russian forces were making significant advances on the battlefield, though their progress has been slow and costly in troops and armour.

The Russian leader is trying to persuade the US that Ukraine cannot hold out against Russian military superiority.

He has also stressed what he says is Russia’s improving nuclear capability as he refuses to budge from what he says are his country’s legitimate war aims.

Ukraine has been fighting back by hitting targets inside Russia to disrupt military logistics and make Russian civilians feel the effects of war.

Since the beginning of the year, Ukraine has conducted more than 160 successful long-range strikes on Russia’s oil extraction and refining facilities, Vasyl Maliuk, the head of Ukraine’s Security Service, said.

In September and October, Ukraine conducted 20 strikes on oil facilities, Mr Maliuk added.

He claimed the strikes had brought a 20 per cent drop in oil products on Russia’s domestic market and temporarily halted the operation of 37 per cent of Russia’s oil refining capacity. The claims could not be independently verified.

“Clearly, we are not resting on our achievements. There are many fresh perspectives and new approaches in this work,” said Mr Maliuk. “These include new equipment, new combat units and new methods and means of communication.”

He said that, over this year, Ukraine had destroyed nearly half of Russia’s sophisticated Pantsir air defence systems, which have stopped Ukrainian long-range drones.

He also noted that last year Ukrainian forces destroyed one of Russia’s advanced new hypersonic missiles, which can fly at 10 times the speed of sound, striking it on the ground at a military base inside Russia.

The Oreshnik missile, touted at the end of last year by Putin as invulnerable to air defence systems and a game-changing weapon, was hit at the Kapustin Yar military firing range near the Caspian Sea in south-western Russia, roughly 300 miles from the border, Ukraine claims.

A year ago, the missile, with a dummy warhead, was used in an attack on the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Ukrainian soldiers rest amid fighting near Dobropillia, Donetsk - Anatolii Stepanov/Reuters

Meanwhile, Russian drones struck apartment blocks in the north-eastern city of Sumy overnight, injuring 11 people, four of them children, and also hit the southern Odesa region’s energy infrastructure, authorities said Friday.

The war has this year been deadlier for civilians than 2024, with a 30 per cent rise in casualties so far, Matthias Schmale, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, said.

Russia’s almost daily aerial attacks on Ukrainian energy production and distribution facilities are especially worrying because the winter is forecast to be much colder than last year, Mr Schmale said at a briefing in Geneva.

Ukrainian cities have centralised public infrastructure to run water, sewage and heating systems, and the UN fears that denying those services to people in high-rise buildings in cities near the front line “could turn into a major crisis”.

“Destroying energy production and distribution capacity as winter starts clearly impacts the civilian population and is a form of terror,” he said.

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