It is probably Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most cynical and ridiculous gambit yet: proposing a temporary ceasefire in Pokrovsk so his “journalists” can confirm that the Ukrainian-held city of Pokrovsk is surrounded and doomed. It is neither – and life for the Russian troops who have crept into the urban area of Pokrovsk has become nasty, brutish, and short.

Let’s cut through the hype and separate tactical fact from fiction.

Approximately 25 Russian assault teams – five to ten men, many dressed in civilian clothes – have slithered into the rubble and massacred civilians. An atrocity, but not a victory.

Captured Russian prisoners have revealed a new tactic: they’ve been ordered to enter the city and avoid contact with Ukrainian defenders. These small groups of infiltrators have been told to hide out in the city until they can link up with other Russian units, so united forces can then assault Ukrainian positions.

Is that a plan? Not exactly. One by one, Ukraine is locating and cordoning off these pockets of infiltrators. Enter the Ukrainian air force and French-made AASM “Hammer” glide bombs.  As Russians seek cover in shattered apartment buildings, “Hammer” smart bombs slice through multiple floors to vaporize sniper nests and drone control points.

Make no mistake, the fighting in Pokrovsk is a fierce, frightening grind. But do not forget, it has taken Russia four bloody years to advance from Donetsk to Pokrovsk – a distance that a hiker in peacetime could cover in a day. Donetsk has been a bloodbath for Russia. And the battle for Pokrovsk will continue to be every bit as costly.

A dynamic tactical situation

Like all battles, the situation is fluid. Russian infiltrators have clawed into central districts, turning streets into snipers’ alleys and basements into strong points. The fight continues, door to door and floor to floor.

Playing to its strengths, Ukraine continues an innovative and asymmetrical fight. In a high-stakes airborne assault near Pokrovsk, US-made Blackhawk helicopters inserted HUR special forces behind Russian lines south of Pokrovsk.

The complex operation was supervised in person by Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, who directed strikes on Russian supply depots, communication hubs, and command posts.  Before extracting, Ukrainian Operators ambushed convoys, mined roads and disrupted Moscow’s logistics by burning fuel and ammo depots.

Strikes on Russian forward command positions disrupted Russian operations and took the pressure off Ukrainian positions amid intense fighting.  This bold direct action raid demonstrated to the Russians that from now on there are no ‘safe. rear areas.

President Volodymyr Zelensky calls Pokrovsk’s situation “difficult but under control.” The noose tightens, but it chokes Russia with a rope made of its own illusions.

The Russians claim that Pokrovsk’s ground lines of communication and supply are severed.   Again, not exactly. Both sides struggle with logistics in the lethal “drone zone” that lies in a 20-km belt on either side of the zero line.

To the west, Ukraine’s lines of communication and supply are dispersed and provide more than adequate logistics into the battlespace, while logistical snarls hamstring the Russian horde.

The motorcycles, civilian vehicles, and wheelbarrows used on Russian supply runs are blown up by Ukrainian infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs). Artillery shatters Russian fuel convoys, lights up ammo dumps, and takes out warehouses full of food, water, and desperately needed winter uniforms.

Russian probes from the south and east nibble at Myrnohrad’s edges and hope to cross the E50 highway, yet Ukrainian reinforcements – the 7th Rapid Reaction Corps and shadowy spec ops – locate, isolate, and terminate Russian units before they can be resupplied or reinforced.

Russian casualties in the Pokrovsk area of operations alone are conservatively estimated at 70,000 during Putin’s vaunted “summer offensive.” That’s 70,000 casualties in a desperate lunge for a city that’s long since morphed from logistical lifeline to dead end.

Air and ground duels define the daily grind. Ukrainian counterstrikes – first person view (FPV) drones and counterbattery fire – rain down, vaporizing exposed Russian artillery pieces before they can shoot and scoot. While Russian infiltration efforts occasionally succeed, the opposite can be said for its botched attempts at conventional assaults.

Inevitably, when Russia assembles tanks and IFVs to deliver motor-rifle troops, Ukraine’s superb battlefield intelligence makes sure defenders are alert and waiting.  A recent – and typical – Russian attack unfolded in broad daylight, with armor and troop carriers lined up bumper to bumper on an assault vector that was perpendicular to the zero line – a recipe for annihilation.

In less than 40 minutes, Ukrainian FPVs and artillery reduced four Russian tanks and six IFVs to burning wreckage. These weren’t lucky hits; they were the fruit of adaptive warfare that turned Russian assembly points into abattoirs.

Moscow’s riposte? An indiscriminate torrent of FAB-3000 glide bombs, KABs, and thermobaric shells – hundreds of rounds fired daily, pummeling Pokrovsk’s heart and the few civilian diehards remaining from the city’s pre-invasion population of 60,000.

What has Russia gained?

This question can be answered by stating what Russia has lost. Across the entire front, Russian casualties clock 1,200-1,500 souls a day – three full infantry battalions killed, wounded, or captured every day, seven days a week. Some 350,000 so far this year. This number does not count the more than 70,000 Russian troop who are known to have deserted.

Russian casualties occasionally reach 2,000 per day – an entire brigade of infantry destroyed in 24 hours. No army in history has ever won (or even survived) a conflict sustaining this level of loss.

Is this merely Ukrainian propaganda? The Kremlin’s own documents peg Russia’s burn rate at 1,100-1,600 casualties daily.  In September, Russia’s infantry loss rate was up 30 percent over August.

In the Pokrovsk-Donetsk cauldron, 8-12 tanks, APCs, IFVs, and 15–20 trucks burn every day.  That’s 250–350 vehicles a month. Just in Pokrovsk. Russia’s mechanized fist is being pulverized by drone swarms.

The same script is playing out in Pokrovsk that ran in Bakhmut. Russia lost tens of thousands of dead to take the “strategic city” of Bakhmut. And they finally did – when there was nothing left but moonscape. Victory? Again, not exactly.

West of Bakhmut, the key terrain surrounding Chasiv Yar is still held by Ukraine – definitively thwarting any Russian advance. The takeaway? Russia bleeds for yards; Ukraine adapts for miles.

As in Bakhmut, there will be no victory in Pokrovsk – just the Russian vampire feasting on its own veins – with thousands, even tens of thousands of unrecovered Russian corpses littering an irrelevant battlefield.

Like Bakhmut, Pokrovsk has been irresistible kryptonite for Putin’s generals; and there’s delusion at the core of their desire. Pokrovsk’s so-called “strategic significance” is a mirage peddled by Putin’s bots and open-source intelligence keyboard commandos.

Is Pokrovsk relevant? 

It was once a vital logistical nexus – 24 months ago – when it pumped bullets, beans, and band-aids to the east during the defense of Avdiivka.

Two years ago, Pokrovsk was a main artery, a major hub feeding Ukraine’s fight. No more. It is sometimes lost on self-appointed experts that a military objective’s tactical and strategic worth is defined not merely by cartography, but by the circumstances of the battlespace that surrounds it.

Pokrovsk was once vital, but is not now. Ukraine has rerouted its logistical sinews westward; the city is now a terminus, not a waypoint; a scarred, end-of-the-road outpost clinging to relevance by circumstance, not topography.

But Putin hasn’t captured a Ukrainian city since he took the town of Velyka Novosilka last winter. Ukrainian attacks on Putin’s refineries have caused kilometer-long lines at Russian gas stations. Putin knows he needs a win, no matter what it costs in blood and treasure.

Taking Pokrovsk, like Bakhmut before it, will not change the calculus of the eastern zone of conflict. The city is not, and never has been, the keystone of Ukrainian defenses.

We can call Pokrovsk what it is now – a deadly three-dimensional urban battlefield. A kill box, like Bakhmut, that greatly favors the Ukrainian defenders. You may be sure that Russia will pour tens of thousands of forces into the city, and most of them will die in the rubble.  Just like Bakhmut.

As this battle unfolds, it is Ukraine that will dictate the time, place, and pace of battle. It is Ukraine, and not Russia, who will decide how many resources Kyiv will put into the defense of what is left of Pokrovsk.

Russia has again blundered into a classic “attritional battle” ripped right out of the pages of von Clausewitz.  With causality rates remaining firm at 5:1, these battle sap Russian manpower, vehicles, fuel, ammunition and morale.

A look at the map will underscore what Russia will “gain” from occupying Pokrovsk. For again, like Bakhmut, the options for Russian advancement beyond the city are as vague as they are pointless. Open country, rolling fields, little or no cover – a place of drone strikes, crushing counterbattery fire, and minefields.

The loudest Pokrovsk prophets – those who tweet defeat without tasting the cordite – miss this point. Ukraine doesn’t defend red lines on a map. She defends the spaces between, three-dimensional kill zones where Russian dreams are sent to die.

What after Pokrovsk?

Disaster again beckons Russia. Putin’s generals, promoted like mafia Dons, not tacticians, have been slow to pick up that in 21st-century war, Ukraine’s open terrain is not space for maneuver – it’s a killing field.

Ukrainian technology has turned open space into unbounded “fortresses” prowled by hundreds, even thousands of Ukrainian FPVs, smart bombs, and HIMARS artillery systems that do not miss their targets.

The cost of this charade – tens of thousands of Russian widows, a mechanized graveyard – and Russia gains that amount to another burned-out rind of a city.  Pokrovsk will again prove that Russia can only destroy the places it touches. Putin and his hordes bring only death and misery, not liberation or freedom – Russki mir writ large.

Ukraine, meanwhile, hones her edge: drone swarms that rewrite the rules of land combat, and deep strikes that burn the refineries that fuel Russia’s Imperial ambitions. For Russia and Putin, the futility isn’t just tactical; it’s existential.

Ukraine will not lose this war, and Putin cannot survive if he loses.

The Russian people know, even if they do not say it aloud-- this war was Putin’s idea. A 72-hour walkover he told them, and 1.3 million Russians have paid for his hubris.  Putin knows that his fate, like that of all warmongering dictators, hangs by a slender thread.

By Jan. 12 of the coming year, Putin’s Ukraine adventure will mark a grim milestone. Russian invaders will have tried to subdue Ukraine for 1,418 days—exceeding the time the Soviet Union fought Nazi Germany in World War II.

Here is a fact: once upon a time, the Russian army won a World War in less time that it has taken Putin to capture an area equivalent to the US state of Ohio.  A piece of ground less than 19 percent of Ukraine’s total land mass.

Putin knows the narrative is shifting from “special military operation” to quagmire. He fights on because he knows this inevitable defeat will devour him. Moscow’s war machine grinds on, but each shell screams the same question: For what?

Pokrovsk won’t break Ukraine – but it will bury another Russian illusion.