The Russian army, with tanks and drones, wants to break through to Donbass to secure a favorable agreement—and Ukraine is deploying the Azovs. In fact, Moscow has been mired in a war of attrition for years. But very serious news is coming from the field, for Kiev.

CHISINAU - Conquering as much Ukrainian territory as possible with bombs to demonstrate to Trump that Zelensky's army is exhausted and thus impose a vague possibility of peace on the best terms for Moscow: this is the key to understanding the ground offensive called for by Putin in recent days and concentrated above all in the Donbass.

A series of intense military operations aimed at heavily influencing the Trump-Putin summit today in Alaska. Cities and villages contested for months, such as Pokrovsk, Kostiantynivka, Siversk, Dobropillia, Rubizhne, and many other small towns, are almost surrounded, are being heavily bombed, and some have already been infiltrated by small patrols of elite Russian troops supported by drones and air force.

The Russians are using a strategy of sending agile, well-trained units, very similar to the one adopted by the Ukrainians at the beginning of the war against the heavy enemy columns aiming for Kiev, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia.

The Kiev General Staff, after repeatedly raising the alarm in recent days about the enemy's conquest of over 120 square kilometers of territory north of Pokrovsk and the infiltration of Russian commandos on foot into Dobropillia, with the risk of isolating Kramatorsk (the most important city in Donbass still in Ukrainian hands), yesterday sent reassuring messages claiming that the attack had been substantially stopped. A few dozen Russian soldiers hiding among houses and in the forests does not at all mean that they are in control, high-ranking officials in the Ukrainian capital specify.

Nearly three and a half years after Putin launched his military offensive to oust Zelensky's government and annex all of Ukraine in a matter of weeks, the Russian army, which seeks to project itself in the international community's imagination as a superpower on a par with the US and China, remains mired in a war of attrition that has decimated hundreds of thousands of its soldiers.

The Russians have been saying for at least 12 months that they are about to liberate Pokrovsk. In April 2022, in front of the Kramatorsk railway station, Army missiles massacred around 60 women and children waiting to be evacuated. At the time, it seemed as if Putin's tanks were only a matter of hours away. Fighting is still ongoing on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, about thirty kilometers to the east, and Bakhmut, the heart of one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war lost by the Ukrainians in May 2023, is only a twenty-minute drive away. However, if the Russians were able to break through the Ukrainian defense line in Donbass, now reinforced by several volunteer battalions from the Azov Battalion, they would easily have a clear path to Dnipro and the center of the country.

However, very serious news is coming from the camp. According to Vadym Filashkin of the Donetsk military administration, of the original 60,000 inhabitants of Pokrovsk remain 1,327, there is no electricity or water, and Russian artillery is firing on all escape routes. It seems that of the 150 Russian commandos who penetrated the urban area, 30 are still operational. The evacuation of over 8,000 residents of Kostiantynivka is also now impossible.

Russian drones dominate the skies. On social media, there are very harsh messages from Ukrainian soldiers who accuse the commanders of being too rigid and of chaos in the trenches.