Russia deploys 170,000 for push in Donetsk: Zelenskiy

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia has deployed nearly 170,000 troops to Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where they are trying to capture the fortress of Pokrovsk, in a major move to gain victory on the battlefield.

“The situation in Pokrovsk is difficult,” Zelenskiy said, while also rejecting Russia’s latest claims that the devastated city was surrounded after more than a year of fighting. He acknowledged that some Russian troops had infiltrated the city but insisted that Ukrainian defenders were weeding them out.

Speaking at a press conference in Kiev, Zelenskiy said, “There are Russians in Pokrovsk.”

“They are being destroyed, slowly being destroyed, because we need to protect our personnel.”

In previous sieges in the almost four years since Russia began its all-out invasion of its neighbor, Ukraine has withdrawn from some places to avoid losing troops. Ukrainian forces are hopelessly inadequate against Russia’s massive army.

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently claimed that Russian forces have made significant advances on the battlefield, but their progress has been slow and costly in terms of troops and armor.

Putin is trying to convince the USA, which wants him to sign a peace agreement, that Ukraine cannot survive against Russia’s military superiority. He also emphasized that Russia’s nuclear capabilities were increasing, while refusing to compromise on his country’s legitimate war aims.

Ukraine responds by striking targets inside Russia to disrupt military logistics and make Russian civilians feel the effects of war.

Since the beginning of the year, Ukraine has carried out more than 160 successful long-range attacks on Russian oil extraction and refining facilities, Vasyl Maliuk, head of the Ukrainian Security Service, told reporters at the briefing.

Maliuk said Ukraine carried out 20 attacks on Russian oil facilities in September and October alone.

He claimed that the strikes led to a 20 percent drop in oil products in Russia’s domestic market and temporarily halted the operation of 37 percent of Russia’s oil refining capacity. The allegations could not be independently verified.

“Frankly, we don’t rest on our laurels. There are a lot of new perspectives and new approaches in this work,” Maliuk said. he said.

“These include new equipment, new combat units and new communication methods and tools.”

He said that this year Ukraine had destroyed nearly half of Russia’s advanced Pantsir air defense systems, which stopped Ukrainian long-range unmanned aerial vehicles.

He also noted that last year Ukrainian forces struck a military base in Russia, destroying one of Russia’s advanced new hypersonic missiles that can fly 10 times faster than sound.

According to Maliuk, the Oreshnik missile, which was touted by Putin at the end of last year as a game-changing weapon that is impervious to air defense systems, was shot down at the Kapustin Yar military firing range near the Caspian Sea in southwestern Russia, about 500 km from the Ukrainian border.

Putin said a year ago that the missile was used in an attack on the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, a few months after Maliuk said Ukraine had destroyed one.

Meanwhile, Russian drones crashed into apartment blocks in the northeastern city of Sumy overnight, injuring 11 people, including four children, and also hit the energy infrastructure of the southern Odessa region, authorities said on Friday.

The UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine, Matthias Schmale, said on Friday that the war is deadlier for civilians this year than in 2024, with a 30 percent increase in casualties so far.

At a briefing in Geneva, Schmale said Russia’s almost daily air strikes on Ukraine’s energy production and distribution facilities were particularly worrying as the winter was expected to be much colder than last year.

Ukrainian cities have centralized public infrastructures to run water, sewage and heating systems, and the UN fears that denying these services to people living in high-rise buildings in cities close to the frontline could “turn into a major crisis,” according to Schmale.

“The destruction of energy production and distribution capacity as winter begins clearly affects the civilian population and is a form of terrorism,” he said.