As Ukraine Saves Pokrovsk, Russia Punches Through Thinned Lines 50 Miles South
With more troops and vehicles, the Russians have the edge in southern Donetsk
A powerful Russian force, anchored by the Russian army’s biggest tank division, continues to advance in southern Donetsk Oblast and neighboring Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
The creeping occupation exposes Ukraine’s core strategic dilemma: there simply aren’t enough brigades to hold everywhere. Ukrainian commanders concentrated forces around Pokrovsk, 50 miles northeast, to block 150,000 Russian troops from reaching Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. That decision saved one front but opened another—and Russia’s largest tank division exploited the gap.
Shrugging off massive casualties that would cripple many other armies, the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces and its most important unit, the 90th Tank Division, is pushing west toward the region’s most defensible rivers and, beyond those natural obstacles, a series of Ukrainian fortifications between the current front line and the town of Pokrovske.
Beyond that strongpoint lies Zaporizhzhia Oblast—including Zaporizhzhia city with its pre-war population of 700,000.
“The situation is much worse for the Ukrainians than what’s shown on public maps, and even pro-Russian ones,” one analyst and mapper claimed.
According to mapper Playfra, Russian forces control Novohryhorivka at the border of Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts, as well as a trench system south of Novohryhorivka that was supposed to help slow the Russians—but is now serving as a staging base for the attacking Russians.
Most alarmingly for the outnumbered Ukrainian troops in the sector, the Russians are already in the village of Uspenivka, Playfra claimed. Capturing Uspenivka would put the Russians in a position to flank Ukrainian battalions dug in along the Yanchur River.
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