Understanding the conflict two years on.
The latest Russian offensive in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, threatens to finally topple the city of Pokrovsk—and that carries both military and economic risks for a beleaguered Ukraine already bracing for its most challenging winter of the war.
Pokrovsk, a once-vibrant city of 80,000 people, is the object of a Russian encircling move that began in July and is creeping within miles of the city as every day passes. The city has served as a key logistics and transportation hub for Ukrainian military operations in eastern Ukraine and is the gateway to conquering the rest of Donetsk Oblast—and potentially on to even bigger prizes such as Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city before the war.
The latest Russian offensive in Donetsk, in eastern Ukraine, threatens to finally topple the city of Pokrovsk—and that carries both military and economic risks for a beleaguered Ukraine already bracing for its most challenging winter of the war.
Pokrovsk, a once-vibrant city of 80,000 people, is the object of a Russian encircling move that began in July and is creeping within miles of the city as every day passes. The city has served as a key logistics and transportation hub for Ukrainian military operations in eastern Ukraine and is the gateway to conquering the rest of Donetsk Oblast—and potentially on to even bigger prizes such as Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city before the war.
But Pokrovsk’s fall could have an even more insidious impact on Ukraine’s ability to keep fighting: The city is the source of most of the coal used for the country’s steel and iron industry, once the backbone of the Ukrainian economy and still its second-largest sector, though production has fallen to less than one-third of its pre-war levels. That metallurgical coal is needed to produce pig........