KYIV: Russian assaults are raising pressure on the strategic eastern logistics hub of Pokrovsk, Ukraine said on Friday, as waves of guided bombs and infantry lead to some of Moscow’s largest territorial gains since the spring.
The push is fueling a surge in civilians fleeing, with requests for evacuation in the area increasing about tenfold over the past two weeks, according to a volunteer helping people leave.
Russian forces have been steadily inching forward on several fronts in the eastern Donetsk region, staging particularly fierce attacks near Pokrovsk with Kyiv’s troops stretched thin 29 months since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Russia’s gains of around 57 square km (22 square miles) in the space of a week are the third largest recorded since April after they made only modest gains in June, Pasi Paroinen, an analyst with the Black Bird Group, told Reuters.
Russian forces are using warplanes and artillery fire to support waves of infantry assaults in the area near Pokrovsk, Ruslan Muzychuk, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s National Guard said in televised remarks.
“These assaults are not always supported by armored vehicles, often it is infantry assaults,” he said, flagging the bombing by Russian warplanes as a particular problem.
“It’s a significant threat ... because the Pokrovsk and Toretsk fronts are taking a large share of the daily aviation strikes carried out on the positions of Ukrainian defenders.”
Russia’s Ministry of Defense said its forces had captured five settlements in the Donetsk region in the past week.
Russia’s use of warplanes to fire guided bombs was crucial for Moscow’s battlefield tactics, said Valeriy Romanenko, a Kyiv-based aviation expert, who compared it to a “conveyor belt.”
“The Russians are not piercing our defense, they are pushing it back. They are advancing 100, 150, 200 meters every day using this tactic: dropping guided bombs, then a ‘meat assault’, (and if those are) repelled, dropping guided bombs again, a ‘meat assault’ again.”
He said the supply of US F-16 fighters to Ukraine could disrupt that dynamic if the jets were able to threaten Russian warplanes, but that such operations were unlikely for now given the risk it would present for the new pilots operating expensive jets.
Paroinen said the Russian offensives around the settlements of Toretsk and Niu York as well as the one to the east of Pokrovsk around the villages of Ocheretyne and Prohres had created a “double crisis” for Ukraine toward the end of June.
That, he said, followed the Russian offensive into the northeastern Kharkiv region, which was halted by Ukraine, but opened a new front and spread the defenders extremely thin.

’THEY ARE DESTROYING EVERYTHING’
Roman Buhayov, an evacuation driver from humanitarian organization East SOS, told Reuters that the number of requests for evacuation in the area had increased about tenfold over the past two weeks.
On Friday, he drove a bus evacuating residents from Novohrodivka, a town with a pre-war population of some 14,000 near Pokrovsk. It now lies around 10 km from the front line, which inches closer each day.
Antonina Kalashnikova, 62, and her disabled son Denys, 34, evacuated their pummelled home by taking Buhayov’s bus to Pokrovsk where she spoke to Reuters.
Together with their neighbor, they arrived to the town with all of their possessions reduced to a few market bags before continuing their journey to the southern city of Mykolaiv.
“They started bombing heavily and it became extremely frightening. We didn’t sleep all night, and we decided to leave,” Kalashnikova said. “They are destroying everything.”

KYIV: Ukraine’s central bank has predicted emigration levels this year will be far higher than previously forecast, largely due to power cuts caused by Russian attacks on energy facilities.
“The worsening of the energy situation and slow normalization of the economic conditions will lead to a larger outflow of migrants abroad in 2024 and 2025 than previously expected,” the National Bank of Ukraine said in a report released Thursday.
It predicted there would be a net outflow of 400,000 people this year, while the outflow in 2024 would be 300,000 people.
In April, the central bank had forecast that a net 200,000 Ukrainians would leave this year but a net 400,000 would return from abroad next year.
The higher emigration is due to “significant destruction of the Ukrainian energy system, which is accompanied by long power outages and increased risks for the (winter) heating season,” the central bank said.
Beyond the inability to heat homes, power cuts reduce economic activity and demand for workers, further stimulating migration, it said.
The economy has also been hit by millions of young men leaving the country, some doing so illegally to avoid mobilization, although their exact numbers are hard to quantify.
The bank now predicts that there will be a net return of 400,000 in 2026 but the process will be “gradual” as Ukrainians get more accustomed to living abroad while conditions at home will be harder than previously anticipated.
The report cites UN figures from July this year that there are now 6.6 million Ukrainians living abroad, up almost 240,000 since the start of the year.
The total population of Ukraine is the subject of debate since the last census was in 2001 — giving a figure of over 48 million.
There has since been a low birth rate and high death rate and the country has lost swathes of territory to Russian annexation and occupation since 2014.
Estimates for the population as of 2023 vary from 28 million to 34 million, down from 41 million before the war began.