For more than a year since capturing the ruins of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, the 600,000-strong Russian army of occupation in Ukraine has had its sights set on one main objective: Pokrovsk, a city in Donetsk with a pre-war population of 60,000 that anchors a chain of important towns and cities stretching north toward the border with Russia.
On Tuesday, a Russian reconnaissance and sabotage group managed to cross the no-man’s-land south of Pokrovsk and take shelter in a building on the city’s edge. They probably weren’t there very long before a drone belonging to the Ukrainian army’s 155th Mechanized Brigade spotted them—and the brigade destroyed the building.
“The guys were caught,” Russian military blogger Anatoly Radov confirmed.
A 155th Mechanized Brigade trooper was less circumspect. “Those two are dead for sure,” they said in a video circulated by one Ukrainian open-source intelligence analyst.
A hard march
It cost the Russian tens of thousands of casualties and hundreds of vehicles marching the roughly 40 kilometers from Avdiivka to Pokrovsk. But march they did, and as 2024 ground into 2025, two Russian field armies—each overseeing as many as a dozen regiments with up 2,000 troops apiece—were on Pokrovsk’s outskirts. The lead Russian elements hunkered down just a few miles from the city.
Ukraine rushed reinforcements to the city, including the newly formed 155th Mechanized Brigade with its German-made Leopard 2 tanks. But the hastily organized and poorly led brigade disintegrated as it arrived, prompting senior Ukrainian officials to intervene.
Drones helped save the garrison in Pokrovsk. Ranging miles into the Russian rear, drones turned one important supply line—the Ocheretyne-Prohres road—into a graveyard of Russian vehicles. Drones raids “significantly complicated logistics for the [Russian armed forces],” the pro-Ukraine Conflict Intelligence Team observed.
Today, the 155th Mechanized Brigade is in better shape, and the Russian armies south of Pokrovsk are in worse shape. It’s one thing for a few Russian saboteurs to briefly infiltrate the very edge of Pokrovsk—and die trying. It’d be quite another for a large Russian force to achieve the same feat, and stay.
But everyone expects the Russians to keep trying. “The Pokrovsk direction is viewed by Ukraine’s military-political leadership as the absolute priority for the armed forces of the Russian Federation,” the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies noted.
