DONETSK REGION, Ukraine ¨C For months, Ukraine has picked off Russian soldiers by the thousand around the front-line city of Pokrovsk, using small drones armed with bombs to tie down a numerically superior force.
Now though, Russian troops are creeping forward in a summer offensive that has probed weak spots in Ukraine¡¯s defenses and last week saw some Russian soldiers enter the city for the first time, according to geolocated footage on Ukrainian and Russian Telegram channels.
Ukrainian soldiers¡¯ success in stopping their enemy from taking Pokrovsk since last year has long thwarted one of Moscow¡¯s central military goals, although the city itself is heavily damaged and all but a few hundred of the 60,000-strong population has fled.
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