Kyiv, Ukraine
—
Small groups of Russian troops have pierced parts of Ukraine’s defenses in its eastern Donetsk region, according to local officials, as Russia appears to be making an 11th-hour dash to snatch as much territory as possible ahead of the planned meeting between President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart Donald Trump on Friday.
Russian forces are making a push towards Dobropillia, the Ukrainian battlefield monitoring group DeepState reported Tuesday. The town is around 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of the key strategic city of Pokrovsk, which has been in the Kremlin’s crosshairs for more than a year.
“Groups of Russians have advanced about 10 kilometers (6 miles) in several places. All of them have no equipment, only weapons in their hands. Some have already been found, partially destroyed, partially captured,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a briefing Tuesday.
“The task of this advance is clear to us,” Zelensky said, adding that Russia is trying to create the distorted perception ahead of the Putin-Trump meeting “that Russia is moving forward, advancing, and Ukraine is losing.”
Ukrainian officials conceded that their defenses near Dobropillia had been infiltrated by clusters of Russian forces, but stressed that this involved small numbers of troops and did not mean Russia had taken control of territory. Elsewhere in the area, Ukraine’s military warned of “heavy defensive battles against superior enemy forces.”
“In the Pokrovsk direction alone, the occupiers have concentrated a group of more than 110,000 personnel,” the Ukrainian General Staff said in an update Tuesday evening, adding that the army is allocating additional forces and assets to strengthen defenses in some areas.
Zelensky said that the overall ratio of manpower is 1 to 3 in favor of Russia’s troops, but added that Russia’s losses are also three times greater than Ukraine’s.
“They are preparing for an offensive operation, we believe, in three directions. The main directions are Zaporizhzhia, Pokrovsk, and Novopavlivka,” Zelensky said, emphasizing that Russia’s troop buildup is happening just before Trump and Putin sit down in Alaska on Friday.
“We believe that they will do everything to prepare for offensive actions after the 15th,” the Ukrainian president added. “We believe that they will be ready with these brigades by September.”
In his meeting with Trump, Putin – potentially seeking to secure at the negotiating table what Russia has not been able to win by force – will be at pains to give the impression that Russia’s advance in Donetsk is inevitable. Although there is confusion over Putin’s reported conditions for a ceasefire in Ukraine, most versions stress that the Russian president will demand that Ukrainian forces withdraw from all parts of Donetsk region they still hold.
But Ukrainian officials on Tuesday warned that their grip on the front lines was loosening, after months of incremental Russian gains, driven by Moscow’s superior manpower.
Lt. Col. Bohdan Krotevych, a former chief of staff of the 12th special forces of Ukraine’s elite Azov Brigade, gave a rare public warning to Zelensky about Ukraine’s dwindling defenses. “Mr President, I honestly don’t know what you’re being told, but I am informing you that the situation (near Pokrovsk) is, without exaggeration, a complete mess,” Krotevych wrote on X.
“The front line is virtually non-existent,” he said.
A commander near Pokrovsk, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told CNN that Ukraine’s defenses in the area mostly comprise two-man positions resupplied by drones alone. Rather than two frontline trenches facing each other, the battlefield now consists of a series of mostly hidden, isolated and small outposts, where infantry try to hold ground covertly, without being spotted by enemy drones.
This new type of face-off plays to Russia’s advantage of greater manpower, enabling them to surge forces forwards in small groups, content to lose troops if they run into resistance, or reinforce any success.
“The enemy is trying to use the ‘thousand cuts’ tactic,” Valentin Manko, the commander of Ukraine’s Assault Forces, told CNN.
“Three small groups of several men each slipped through our positions (near Dobropillia). They slipped through and inflicted some damage,” he said. “Some of them were destroyed, some were taken prisoner.”
Manko said Ukrainian officers were working to search the entire area, which could take some days.
The regional command of Ukraine’s ground forces in Donetsk claimed that many of the groups that infiltrate Ukraine’s defenses are soon picked off.
“The enemy personnel who infiltrate between the positions of (our) units are met by Ukrainian soldiers and face certain death,” it said.
Viktor Tregubov, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s ground forces in the neighboring Dnipro region, said that these infiltrations “does not mean (Russia has) taken control of that territory.”
“What actually happened is that a small Russian group – perhaps five to 10 people – managed to slip through,” he said, stressing that battlefield control maps – like those produced by DeepState – can depict this as a solid territorial gain for Russia.
“It doesn’t mean they control the entire route they moved through. They simply made their way in and tried to hide in a basement somewhere,” Tregubov said.
The fear for Kyiv, however, is that Russia will use so many of these small groups that it will eventually be able to consolidate its gains behind Ukraine’s patchwork defenses, even if many of the groups are picked off.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think-tank, said Tuesday that it was “premature” to call Russian advances near Dobropillia an “operational-level breakthrough, though Russian forces very likely seek to mature their tactical advances into an operational-level breakthrough in the coming days.”
It said this tactic is reminiscent of Russia’s penetration of Ukraine’s defenses around Avdiivka, another city further east in Donetsk, which Russia was able to capture in April 2024.
“The next several days in the Pokrovsk area of operations will likely be critical for Ukraine’s ability to prevent accelerated Russian gains north and northwest of Pokrovsk,” ISW assessed.
Bohdan Miroshnikov, a Ukrainian military blogger, was bleaker in his assessment, saying the situation in the area “is gradually approaching the point where Pokrovsk… can no longer be saved.”
“For now, that point has not yet been reached. The critical moment has not yet come. But unfortunately, everything is heading in that direction as of now,” he wrote on Telegram.
