At Pokrovsk, Ukraine Is Trading Russia's Desperation For Smoking Rubble

It's now been almost two months since the Russians were expected to take Pokrovsk. That is, actually take it, following the previous year and a half after they were first expected to do so. While some question the Ukrainian reasons for holding on to the shattered remains of the city, the strategy is as clear as it had been at Mariupol, Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Kursk, Chasiv Yar and all the other attritional battles of this war: bleed the Russians of men, equipment and time. 

Almost four years after the invasion, Russia has gained less than one percent of additional Ukrainian territory - and at the cost of almost 1.5 million killed and wounded. The Putin economy is a shambles, its military's ineffectiveness exposed and its leadership hanging on only because ending the war would almost certainly result in Putin's ouster and death. Even if the Russians eventually manage to take Pokrovsk, they will find themselves in the smoking rubble of a town on low ground surrounded by Ukrainian positions on high ground to the west, north and south, in other words, not a launch pad, but a trap. Putin desperately needs a victory to bolster his claims of power. But in this case, as in so many others, he should be careful what he wishes for. JL

Shaun Pinner reports in the Center for European Policy Analysis:

Pokrovsk is a place where Russia feels it must win, and where the Ukrainians are making them pay dearly for trying. Pokrovsk was a transport hub and an administrative center. Now it’s a shattered shell. What remains is not a city but a position: roads, supply routes, and terrain that shape the wider fight. It’s a pressure valve. A choke point. A grinding wheel. To Moscow, it’s a banner they need to raise for desperation-driven optics. (But) if Russia gets in, it will inherit rubble and flat open ground, a killing field for defenders in new positions to the west. It’s a trap. If he takes it, he gains only another graveyard. In a war like this, you trade the enemy’s ambition for their lifeblood. The capture of Pokrovsk, Ukraine’s 76th largest town, won’t change that. 

The walled farmhouse of Hougoumont in what is now Belgium was an obscure place before June 1815, when British and allied troops fought the French in a brutal day-long struggle for its possession. Even as the smoke from the Battle of Waterloo wreathed the buildings, its critical significance was clear to both armies. 

The Duke of Wellington, the British commander, later said: “The success of the battle turned upon the closing of the gates at Hougoumont.” 

On a map, it looked like nothing, just a courtyard, a few stone walls, and some outbuildings. Yet holding Hougoumont tied down huge numbers of Napoleon’s troops, disrupted his plan, bled and slowed his advance, and, crucially, forced him to feed more and more men into a fight he simply couldn’t win. 

It wasn’t Paris or a capital city that decided that day; it was a humble jumble of farm buildings. 

The Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a western Donetsk settlement and railway junction with a pre-war population of around 60,000 people, is now at the heart of Russian attempts to break the defending army. Like Hougoumont, it has become well-known through war. We can tease out some parallels with the Belgian settlement. 

Photo: Shaun Pinner in Pokrovsk. Credit: Photo courtesy of Shaun Pinner

Now, let me be clear: I don’t believe that if Pokrovsk were to fall (and Russian forces are inside the city), the war would suddenly flip in Russia’s favor overnight. This isn’t 1815, and there’s no single gate that decides the fate of nations in a day. But, short-term? Its loss would hit morale. It would give Russia a propaganda moment. It would let them parade “momentum” even as Putin’s army continues to bleed itself white. 

And that’s the point. 

Pokrovsk represents a place where Russia feels it must win, and where the Ukrainian armed forces are making them pay dearly for trying. 

It’s not a city now, not really. It’s a pressure valve. A choke point. A grinding wheel. To Moscow, it’s a banner they need to raise. To us, it’s extra time, and time is life in this war. 

Mariupol was the same story writ large. Back then in 2022, we were surrounded, shelled into silence, and every street became a decision: stay and make the Russians pay, or run and let them dictate the war’s tempo. We chose to stay. The city bought us time, not for sentiment, but because time is the one currency that can change a war.  

It was ugly, it was costly, and it worked: the longer we held on, the more Russia’s timetable frayed, the more their manpower stretched, and the more the world watched. Some argue that had we not held as long as we did, Kyiv might have fallen. 

The eastern city of Bakhmut provided another chapter in the same lesson. Even when the odds were overwhelming, when the sky was full of drones and the ground full of vehicles, the point was never merely to defend a name on a map. It was to turn the attacker’s momentum into a liability. Being encircled, starving, or outgunned changes the calculus: a town that refuses to fall on schedule forces your enemy into attrition, and that attrition is where strategy and politics meet.

 

I know what it feels like to be among the last standing in a pocket, to feel the pressure of numbers and the cold certainty that your job is not to hold ground for glory but to exhaust the enemy. For several weeks, even while cut off and facing overwhelming force, we kept that purpose in our heads: make them pay for every meter. 

Which brings us back to the farmhouse. Everything has been converging toward this point. For Ukraine, the logic of this war has never changed, despite many foreign pundits failing to understand the reality or the tactics: make Russia pay dearly for every meter and force them to bleed for ground. In Pokrovsk, that strategy is paying dividends. 

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Pokrovsk was a transport hub and an administrative center for its area. Now it’s a shattered shell. What remains is not a city but a position: roads, supply routes, and terrain that shape the wider fight.  

So the real question isn’t why Ukraine is defending Pokrovsk. It’s why Russia is throwing everything it has to take it? 

The answer lies in desperation-driven optics. Now, as always, Putin needs a trophy. Russian “victories” have been rare, limited, and paid for in truckloads of blood. Pokrovsk offers him something to point at on state TV: a talking point, a symbol, a narrative of progress before winter, with its mud and frost, locks the front in place. 

Look at the scale. Ukrainian commanders estimate that around 110,000 Russian troops are concentrated toward Pokrovsk. Russian daily losses here peak at up to 700–800. Ukraine faces manpower strain, too, with forces outnumbered roughly eight to one in this sector. And yet Russia still cannot break through quickly, cannot outmaneuver the Ukrainian engineers and artillery commanding the landscape, and cannot turn overwhelming numbers into a rapid advance.

 

This is not a three-day “special operation.” It’s industrial-era attrition. Putin isn’t winning ground; he’s spending lives. 

Politically, he’s cornered. His attempt to charm Donald Trump into pressuring Kyiv has failed. Sanctions continue to squeeze a Russian economy hobbled by sky-high interest rates and a distorted and militarized production-for-destruction industry. His fourth year of war has delivered mass graves, not triumph. 

If he had cared, he would have known this in advance. I saw the preparations around Pokrovsk myself: layered defenses, tank ditches, dragon’s teeth, deep mine belts, razor wire stretching to the horizon. Behind them: drones, artillery, armor, and infantry. If Russia gets in, it will inherit rubble and flat open ground, providing a perfect killing field for any defenders taking up new positions. That’s not a springboard; it’s a trap and potentially means Russia will have to go through the same grinding process once again.  

If Ukraine holds, Putin heads into winter empty-handed. If he takes it, he gains only another graveyard and shattered morale. 

We fight for survival. Russia fights for optics. That difference matters. 

So yes, we are still fighting for Pokrovsk. Because in a war like this, you don’t trade land for convenience. You trade the enemy’s ambition for their lifeblood. 

Putin is running out of men, time, and stories. 

The capture of Pokrovsk, Ukraine’s 76th largest town, won’t change that.