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Russia has claimed to be in full control of Pokrovsk, but Ukrainian forces say they still control the northern part of the strategic city in eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian forces have reported an unusually large Russian mechanised attack inside the strategic eastern city of Pokrovsk, where Russia has reportedly massed a force of some 156,000 troops to take the beleaguered and now destroyed former logistics hub.

“The Russians used armoured vehicles, cars, and motorcycles. The convoys attempted to break through from the south to the northern part of the city,” Ukraine’s 7th Rapid Response Corps said in a statement on Wednesday regarding an assault earlier in the day.

A source in the 7th Rapid Response Corps told the Reuters news agency that Russia had deployed about 30 vehicles in convoy, making it the largest such attack yet inside the city. The source added that previously, Russia had deployed just one or two vehicles to aid troop advances.

While Russia has claimed full control of Pokrovsk, Kyiv maintains that its troops still hold the northern part of the city, where fierce urban battles continue to rage.

Russian troops have pushed into the city for months in small infantry groups, looking to capture the former logistics hub as a critical part of Moscow’s campaign to seize the entire industrial Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Video clips shared by the 7th Rapid Response Corps showed heavy vehicles in snow and mud, as well as drone attacks on Russian troops and explosions and burning wreckage.

Russian forces were attempting to exploit poor weather conditions but had been pushed back, the unit said on Facebook.

Capturing Pokrovsk would be Russia’s biggest prize in Ukraine in nearly two years, and the city’s weakening defence amid Moscow’s onslaught has added to pressure on Kyiv, which is attempting to improve terms in a United States-backed proposal for a peace deal that is widely seen as favourable to Moscow.

Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskii, told journalists earlier this week that the situation around Pokrovsk remained difficult as Russia massed a force of some 156,000 around the beleaguered city.

Syrskii said Russian troops were staging the military buildup in the area under the cover of rain and fog.

George Barros, Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War – a US-based think tank – said Moscow is “hyping” the importance of the fall of Pokrovsk “in order to portray Russia’s battlefield advances as inevitable”.

“That sense of inevitability is being echoed by some members of President Donald Trump’s negotiating team trying to pull together a peace proposal for the Ukraine war,” Barros wrote in an opinion piece shared online.

But Russia has paid a huge price in its push to take the city with “more than 1,000 armoured vehicles and over 500 tanks” lost in the Pokrovsk area alone since the beginning of Russia’s offensive operations in October 2023 to seize nearby Avdiivka, which fell to Russian forces in early 2024 in one of the bloodiest battles of the war so far.

NEW: The Kremlin is significantly intensifying its cognitive warfare effort to present the Russian military and economy as able to inevitably win a war of attrition against Ukraine. ⬇️

The Kremlin’s cognitive warfare effort aims to achieve several of Putin’s original war aims… pic.twitter.com/zXxCKrI06x

— Institute for the Study of War (@TheStudyofWar) December 10, 2025

On Wednesday, President Trump said he had exchanged “pretty strong words” with the leaders of France, Britain and Germany on Ukraine, telling them their plan to hold new talks on a proposed US peace plan this weekend risked “wasting time”.

“We discussed Ukraine in pretty strong words,” Trump told reporters when asked about the phone call with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

“They would like us to go to a meeting over the weekend in Europe, and we’ll make a determination depending on what they come back with. We don’t want to be wasting time,” Trump said.

The initial US peace plan that involved Ukraine surrendering land that Russia has not captured was seen by Kyiv and its European allies as aligning too closely with many of Russia’s demands to end the war, and has since been revised.

Trump has been pushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to agree to the US plan while Ukrainian officials told the AFP news agency on Wednesday that Kyiv had sent an updated draft of the plan back to Washington.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have kicked off a daylong summit in the capital of India, where trade and Western sanctions over the war in Ukraine were set to loom large.

Friday’s summit is the first time Putin has visited India since the start of Russia’s full-fledged war on Ukraine in 2022, and comes as India is seeking a reprieve from United States sanctions related to its purchase of Russian oil.

Moscow, in turn, is hoping to boost ties with India, already the top buyer of Russian arms. Officials have said they want to increase trade with India to $100bn by 2030 — up from an already all-time high of $68bn in 2024.

Modi gave Putin a warm welcome on Thursday, personally greeting him on the tarmac in New Delhi with a hug and a handshake. He later hosted the Russian leader for a private dinner at his residence.

Friday’s agenda began with morning visit to Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential palace, for a meeting with India’s ceremonial head of state, Droupadi Murmu. Putin will then travel to Raj Ghat, the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi.

Putin and Modi will then hold meetings at the Hyderabad House complex. They are scheduled to address the media before a gathering with business and trade leaders.

The Russian leader is set to depart India at 9pm local time (15:30 GMT).

A balancing act

Russia and India have had a strategic partnership for 25 years, stretching back to Putin’s first year in office as the country’s head of state.

However, the balancing act between maintaining ties with both the US and Russia has become more difficult in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

The Russian operation disrupted a longstanding tradition of the leaders trading annual visits. That partially resumed last year, when Modi visited Russia.

As Western countries curtailed their reliance on Russian crude oil amid the war, India ramped up its purchases.

But in August, the US doubled the 25 percent tariffs it had previously imposed on Indian goods to 50 percent, as a penalty for India’s Russian oil purchases, as Trump looked to pressure Putin into accepting a ceasefire.

India, however, continued buying Russian oil.

That is now changing: in November, Trump’s sanctions on Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil went into effect, along with a threat of sanctions against companies from other countries that trade with these firms.

Purchases from the two companies account for about 60 percent of India’s oil imports.

New Delhi has said it was being unfairly targeted, noting that Western nations continue to do business with Moscow when it is in their interests. Speaking to Indian journalists in an interview before he arrived in New Delhi, Putin made a similar argument.

“The United States itself still buys nuclear fuel from us for its own nuclear power plants,” he said.

He added that if the US has the right to buy Russian fuel, India should enjoy “the same privilege”.

Putin is also expected to push India to buy more Russian weapons, another area where New Delhi has faced pressure from Washington.

Moscow has been hoping to sell India additional S-400 missile defence systems and Su-57 stealth fighter jets.

Friday’s meeting comes days after Putin met with a US delegation in Moscow, pushing for an end to the war in Ukraine. Both sides hailed progress after the meeting, but no breakthrough was reached.

On Thursday, US officials met with a Ukrainian delegation.

India has resisted condemning Russia over the war and has called for peace through dialogue and diplomacy.