Russia ‘rapidly approaching’ key Ukraine city despite Kursk setback

(CNN) — Russia is “rapidly approaching” a key military hub in eastern Ukraine, a local official has said, as Moscow continues its advances despite Kyiv’s surprise gains in its enemy’s Kursk region.

While Pokrovsk is not a major city – about 60,000 people lived there before the war and many have left since the start of the full-scale invasion – it serves as a key hub for the Ukrainian military thanks to its easy access to Kostiantynivka, another military center.

Ukrainian troops use the road connecting the two to resupply the front lines and evacuate casualties toward Dnipro.

Serhii Dobriak, head of the Pokrovsk city military administration, urged the community there to evacuate without delay.

“The enemy is rapidly approaching the outskirts of Pokrovsk,” he said in a Telegram post on Thursday.

His warning is proof that Moscow has not relented in its attack on other parts of Ukraine, despite Kyiv’s successful incursion across the border over the past week, a major development after two-and-a-half years of open conflict.

Ukraine said it has captured more than 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of Russian territory since the start of its surprise assault, forcing tens of thousands of Russians from their homes.

On Friday, Russia’s foreign ministry said Ukraine had used Western rockets for the first time to destroy a bridge over the Seym river in the Kursk region, adding the strike killed volunteers trying to evacuate civilians.

HIMARS, or the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, has perhaps been the most revered and feared piece of weaponry in Ukraine’s fight and since arriving have helped Ukraine to take back significant swaths of territory from Russia.

Ukraine has used US weaponry and vehicles as part of its push into Russian territory, according to US officials, even though the Biden administration did put boundaries on the use of US weaponry in Russia.

Ukraine officials said its military, already some 35 kilometers into Russian territory, is still advancing “in some areas from 1 to 3 kilometers,” on Friday.

Russia appears to have diverted several thousand troops from frontline fighting in occupied Ukraine in order to address the territorial loss in the Kursk region.

But according to Dobriak, the enemy is “almost right up close” to Pokrovsk, Ukraine’s key logistics and military hub that has become the focus of the Russian offensive in the Donetsk region.

“They are a bit more than 10 kilometers (about 6.2 miles) from the outskirts of Pokrovsk,” he said, adding that the situation “is only getting worse.”

For months, Russia has been stretching Ukrainian defenses across the entire front line, trying to capture as much territory as possible before new Ukrainian recruits and fresh batches of Western weapons start arriving on the battlefield.

The gains made by Russia have been largely incremental – the front line has barely moved in the past few months – but the recent advance toward Pokrovsk has Ukraine and its allies worried.

The city’s capture would bring Russian President Vladimir Putin closer to his goal of seizing all of the eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.

Kostiantynivka is the southernmost part of a belt of four Ukrainian cities – with Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – that form the backbone of Ukraine’s defenses of the region, so any progress of Russian troops toward the city is significant.

Officer of Ukraine’s 59th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade Serhii Tsehotskyi told Ukrainian national broadcaster Suspilne on Friday that Ukraine’s incursion into Russia had not led to a decrease in Moscow’s attacks in the Donetsk region.

He said Russian attempts to advance do not stop “for a minute,” and “the battles continue around the clock.”

“Taking into consideration the events in the Kursk region, they (the Russian forces) are trying to do everything in order to be successful at least somewhere,” he said.

Ukrainian army chief Oleksandr Syrskyi acknowledged Friday that “intense fighting” is taking place in the cities of Pokrovsk and Toretsk.

The US-based Institute for the Study of War said Thursday that Russian forces are “maintaining their relatively high offensive tempo” in Donetsk, “demonstrating that the Russian military command continues to prioritize advances in eastern Ukraine even as Ukraine is pressuring Russian forces within” the Kursk region.

Additional reporting from CNN’s Olga Voitovych in Kyiv and Edward Szekeres in Hong Kong.

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