New Russian advances in eastern Ukraine prompt residents to flee

A recent breakthrough has allowed Russia to open up an advantage just 20km from Pokrovsk, a major logistics hub and still home to around 60,000 people.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Thursday (1st) that Pokrovsk was now Russia’s main target.

Moscow has claimed control of four villages east of Pokrovsk in the past week. Ukraine has not commented on the allegations.

Russian troops have reached the outskirts of Toretsk, where the regional governor said a week ago that only 3,500 people remained, just over 10 percent of the pre-war population. Since then, more people have been evacuated by authorities and humanitarian organizations.

“The areas (around) where they entered were completely razed to the ground,” recalled Volodymyr Arkhipov, who fled with his nephew from the eastern town of Rubizhne in April 2022, shortly before it was captured by the Russians.

Sitting in a third-class train carriage about to leave Pokrovsk railway station in eastern Ukraine, Volodymyr Arkhipov reflected on the Russian advances that forced him to flee his second home in two years.

“I took a dead body from the place where (the Russians) bombed us, a 37-year-old woman… when we dug her up, she had suffocated,” the 57-year-old told Reuters, describing his last days in the city of Toretsk before leaving the site.

The heavy Soviet-era train lurched into motion, carrying him and his 84-year-old uncle, Mykola Arkhipov, towards western Ukraine from Pokrovsk, where they had spent the night after arriving by bus from the city of Toretsk.

The two men are part of a wave of people fleeing Russian advances on several fronts in the eastern Donetsk region as Moscow slowly erodes Ukraine’s once-solid defenses.

Pressing their advantages in terms of personnel and weapons, Russian forces have pushed towards key cities and supply routes in pursuit of their goal of total control of Ukraine’s industrialized and mineral-rich Donbas region.