Russian breakthrough near Pokrovsk raises risk of encirclement of Ukrainian forces at a key Donbas stronghold

Russian forces likely breached Ukrainian defenses northeast of Pokrovsk in one of their largest advances in months, threatening to encircle the strategic city by cutting critical supply routes, according to independent analysts and open-source researchers. Maps from DeepState, Ukraine’s prominent open-source mapping project, depict a roughly 9-kilometer (about 6-mile) salient extending toward the Dobropillia–Kramatorsk highway. Independent analysts caution that visual confirmation of the most expansive claims remains lacking.

The advance threatens to split Ukrainian defenses in the Donetsk region and potentially trap a large number of troops in a pocket around Pokrovsk, which has been Ukraine’s most heavily fortified position in the area. Russian military Z-bloggers have begun speculating about Pokrovsk’s encirclement. Among others, Boris Rozhin and Yuri Kotenok have argued that a further advance to Hrushyne and south toward Kotlyne and Udachne “could cause the front to collapse.”

In a thread on X, Carnegie Endowment senior fellow Michael Kofman warned that Russia’s advance near Dobropillia reflects the broader challenges facing Ukrainian defenses: “This advance is another indicator that drone units, while critical to the defense, can’t fully compensate for observed challenges, or stabilize the front on their own.” A day earlier, OSINT analyst Pasi Paroinen wrote that the Ukrainian military will likely be forced to deploy scarce reinforcements to the area, which “in turn will open further possibilities for the Russians to exploit elsewhere.”

Russian forces have seized more than 144 square kilometers (about 56 square miles) of Ukrainian territory in the past week, marking an advance nearly 1.5 times faster than in the previous three weeks, according to analysis by journalists at Agentstvo using data from the Ukrainian OSINT project DeepState.