But in recent weeks, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been attacking the town around the clock, occupying streets where most of the buildings have been left in ruins by bombing.
They used reconnaissance drones and satellite imagery to identify gaps in Ukraine’s defenses, and then used small groups of soldiers to be attacked en masse and killed by Ukrainian drones.
However, the surviving soldiers move forward and target the drone operator in close combat, clearing the way for a larger group of military personnel.
They are supported by Russian artillery, drones and glide bombs, which destroy even the deepest and most fortified bunkers.
Kirill Sazonov, a Ukrainian political scientist turned military officer, wrote on Telegram on Thursday.
“Someone is sitting on the third floor, someone is in the house next door, someone is in the basement,” he wrote. “There are no departments or logics that are on the front line or under (Russian or Ukrainian) control.”
He is confident that Ukrainian troops will not leave Pokrovsk because Kiev wants to defend it by any means necessary. And because the fields outside Pokrovsk are “less comfortable than the city basements.”
The Russian government wants to expedite the capture of Pokrovsk, as worsening weather, muddy roads and a lack of foliage make troop movements easier to detect.
But any predictions about Pokrovsk’s future can only be made by “fools, cynics or tarot card fortune-tellers,” Sazonov wrote.
Is an acquisition imminent?
Other analysts disagreed with Sazonov’s assessment that Ukraine would maintain its position.
Nikolai Mitrokhin, a researcher at the University of Bremen in Germany, told Al Jazeera that the Ukrainian army “has so few troops on the front lines that it was only able to stop the Russian advance around Pokrovsk while the Russian army was in the field.”
As soon as the Russian soldiers entered the town, he said, they encountered little resistance because the number of Ukrainians was so small and the drones were less effective inside the buildings.
“The takeover of the city is only a matter of time,” Mitrokhin, who has written hundreds of authoritative analyzes of hostilities since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, told Al Jazeera.
He said Kiev may have to make the uneasy decision to withdraw its remaining forces from Pokrovsk or risk being surrounded.
Why does Russia want Pokrovsk so badly?
Moscow wants to use the town as a springboard to seize the Kiev-controlled region of Donbas, a major Rust Belt region that Russia unilaterally declared annexed in September 2022.
Kiev still controls a third of Donbass, and the fall of Pokrovsk would pave the way for the capture of other parts of Ukraine’s “fortress zone”, which have been fortified since 2014.
The town’s vantage height would also allow the Russian military to use swarms of drones to support its westward push into the Dnipro region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited the town in late October to encourage troops, but even his most ardent supporters accused him and his top brass of allowing Russian troops to invade Pokrovsk and small nearby towns.
“The president is taking the risk to come and support the military, but the systemic problems with military management remain unresolved and we continue to lose town after town,” Rep. Mariana Bazoula wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.
The fall of Pokrovsk would be a major propaganda victory for Moscow, even if the victory cost tens of thousands of lives.
How will peace negotiations be affected?
Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Kiev-based think tank Penta, said for Russia the capture of Pokrovsk meant the front was “unstable” and Russia would try to convince Washington, where US President Donald Trump has been pushing for peace talks for months, that its claims of a ceasefire are moot.
Washington and Kiev want to suspend hostilities along the current front line, which stretches more than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), and then begin negotiations over who holds what territory.
Fesenko told Al Jazeera that the Kremlin’s rationale is that “Russian forces are expanding their control of territory and Ukraine will have to unilaterally cede land.”
“The peace agreement will be suspended for weeks, possibly months,” he said.
Washington-brokered peace talks have been stalled for months and are unlikely to resume after President Trump canceled a planned summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin continues to issue new demands, including maintaining Ukraine’s neutral status, limiting its military capabilities, and recognizing Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions.
Putin also wants Western countries to lift all sanctions imposed on Russia since its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the recognition of Russian as Ukraine’s second official language.
However, the loss of Pokrovsk will not affect the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian military.
“It’s not the first town in Donbass that Ukrainian troops have to leave. I don’t think this will have a big impact on morale,” Fesenko said.
What would be the economic impact if Pokrovsk fell to Russia?
Pokrovsk is a major center of coal mining in Ukraine, and large metallurgical plants in central Ukraine depend on the coking coal produced there.
There are nearly a dozen factories built here during the Soviet era that have ceased operations due to hostilities.
The takeover of the town could further the Kremlin’s recent efforts to renovate factories in Donbass for the production of weapons and military-related items, said Pavel Lisiansky, director of the Kyiv-based think tank Institute for Strategic Studies and Security Studies.
“They are militarizing the economy,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that the Russian government aims to turn the region into “a huge military base that threatens Europe.”
Pokrovsk is also located at several strategic highway and railway intersections.
After Pokrovsk, Moscow will push to retake Sloviansk, the first Ukrainian town captured by Moscow-backed separatists in 2014.
The capture of Sloviask, on the banks of the Siversky Donets River, is also the only way to restore the canal that supplies water to the drought-stricken Russian-occupied city of Donetsk and its metropolitan area.
