The Daily Populous Sunday November 2nd, 2025 evening edition
Authored by theguardian.com and submitted by EsperaDeus

Ukraine’s top military commander said 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. “We are holding Pokrovsk,” Ukraine’s army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Facebook on Saturday. “A comprehensive operation to destroy and dislodge enemy forces from Pokrovsk is ongoing.” Ukraine’s military said that it had improved its positions in some districts. Kyiv is raising the number of its assault troops in the area, the 7th Rapid Response Corps said on Facebook, adding that the situation remained “difficult and dynamic”. Capturing Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk”, would be the most important Russian territorial gain inside Ukraine since Moscow took the ruined city of Avdiivka in early 2024.

Russian troops thwarted an attempt by Ukrainian special forces to fly soldiers in via a helicopter into Pokrovsk, Russia’s defence ministry said on Saturday. All 11 Ukrainians aboard the helicopter were killed, the ministry said. Two Ukrainian military sources said on Saturday that Kyiv had landed special forces to fight in parts of Pokrovsk, as Moscow said its troops had surrounded Ukrainian contingents.

Data shows Russia fired more missiles at Ukraine in overnight attacks during October than in any month since at least the start of 2023. Russia’s army fired 270 missiles over October, up 46% on the previous month, according to an AFP analysis of daily data published by Ukraine’s air force. The strikes, which have targeted Ukraine’s fragile energy grid for the fourth winter running, have cut power to hundreds of thousands of people. It is part of what Kyiv and its backers say is a deliberate and cynical strategy to wear down Ukraine’s civilian population – a charge Russia denies.

A Russian strike set ablaze a shop in Ukraine’s southeastern Dnipropetrovsk region on Saturday, killing two people and injuring several others, the region’s acting governor said. Vladislav Haivanenko, writing on Telegram, said the shop was destroyed and seven dwellings were damaged in the attack in Samarivskyi district – just outside the region’s main city, Dnipro. Public broadcaster Suspilne said seven people were injured. Pictures posted online showed a large blaze amid piles of rubble. Ukraine’s emergency services said one person had been killed in an attack on the town of Marhanets, further south in Dnipropetrovsk region.

A Ukrainian drone attack damaged and set ablaze a tanker and infrastructure at a major oil terminal in Russia’s key Black Sea port of Tuapse overnight, authorities in the southern region of Krasnodar said on Sunday. “A fire broke out on the vessel. The crew were evacuated,” the administration said on the Telegram messaging app. The port is home to the Tuapse Black Sea oil terminal and a Rosneft-controlled oil refinery, which Ukraine has targeted with several drone strikes this year. It was not immediately known if the terminal was operating after the attack.

Russian energy company Gazprom’s average daily natural gas supplies to Europe via the TurkStream undersea pipeline rose 5% in October from the previous months, Reuters calculations showed on Saturday. Turkey is the only transit route left for Russian gas to Europe after Ukraine chose not to extend a five-year transit deal with Moscow when it expired on 1 January.

GlueSniffingCat on November 2nd, 2025 at 16:18 UTC »

They're holding on because they can't leave and they can't leave because senior command still believes the situation can be saved even though there's a military commander on the ground that gave an interview to hromadske that said anywhere between 1,000 and 1,500 are encircled and that quote "you can't go outside without getting shot" ironically he says the majority of fighting is being done far to the rear as russian troops have bypassed their fortified front line positions and have made no attempt to take them instead opting to just pin them down and wait while his mortar men and uav operators get quote "shot in the street"

antaran on November 2nd, 2025 at 13:13 UTC »

That's not a good thing. The Ukrainian High Command has shown over and over again that they cling too hard to their non-sensical "no step backward" agenda, and pull out way too late. Krynky, Bakhmut, Kursk, they stayed way too long and lost good troops in a bad situation.

Pokrovsk is lost, just look at the map. They should get out and defend at a better position.

IgnorantAndApathetic on November 2nd, 2025 at 12:19 UTC »

I hope they don't try to hold on too long like in Bakhmut or Sudzha