Ukraine says its troops still holding out in Pokrovsk as Moscow says pincer closing

Russia has been trying to capture Pokrovsk, dubbed "the gateway to Donetsk", since mid-2024 in its campaign to control the entirety of Donetsk, a Ukrainian province it claims to have annexed. Capturing Pokrovsk would be the most important Russian territorial gain inside Ukraine since Moscow took the ruined city of Avdiivka in early 2024 after one of the bloodiest battles of the war. Deepstate, a Ukrainian map of the front line made by compiling data from open-source images, shows Russian troops in full control of a small southern part of the city, with most of the rest of it still depicted as a grey zone, fully controlled by neither force.