SITREP 8/13/25: Pokrovsk Breakthrough Continuation
A quick scattershot update as addendum to yesterday’s main report on the ongoing Pokrovsk situation.
Now that we’ve had a day for events to settle a bit, we can get at least a somewhat clearer picture of what’s sticking and what isn’t, as far as the advances go. Despite Ukrainian claims of counter-attacks and deployments of elite units, it appears the bulk of Russian advances have solidified, though it may be too early to speak of true ‘consolidation’. But in the case of the ‘bunny ears’ salient towards Zolotyi Kolodyaz, we can say the breakthrough has even widened to bulk up its flanks:
There is still no absolute certainty precisely where the line of control is, but what apparently has been confirmed is that the main Dobropillya-Pokrovsk highway has been breached and totally cut by Russian forces just north of Rodinske, which itself is being stormed:
Russian soldiers took over the Krasnolymanskaya Mine and were able to enter the Rodynske after further advance. Small advances in Chervonyi Lyman also.
South of Pokrovsk, soldiers trained by Spetsnaz along with 506th's "Typhoon" assault brigade and the 35th MRB unit allegedly advanced into the city. Russian forces also advanced east of the city.
The situation may very well be worse for Ukraine than the latest reports show.
The green circle represents the last remaining MSR of the E50 road, which some sources indicate is under fire-control. If true, that would mean the entire agglomerate is essentially cut off. Sure, there is still the smaller road outlined in white above. But the problem is, using one smaller backroad to funnel the entire logistics train for a massive two-city agglomerate is patent disaster. Rather than being distributed and dispersed, all logistics would be funneled into this one lane which would come under mass drone attack.
But again, we’ve seen this drill many times before. Usually how it works is the road under ‘fire control’—say, the E50 above—will still be somewhat usable at night, where most of the resupply and rotations will occur. Thus, I’m sure the cut-off is not entirely complete, but is likely putting tremendous pressure on the sector’s logistics.
Some Russian channels are claiming Rodinske is also currently being stormed and almost entirely taken:
Many, by the way, have likened the current scenario to the Debaltsevo cauldron which happened right in the lead up to Minsk 2.0 in February 2015. Some fear that Russia’s breach has political motivations and is meant to be some final desperate land-grab before Putin buttons up the conflict with Trump. But clearly the Alaska meeting will bring no such conclusions: even the US State Department spokesman now says the meeting is “not a negotiations”, and seems more an informal feeler for Trump to dangle a few test carrots in front of Putin.
Several sources now report that Russian officials have again reiterated that all original Russian demands are still firm, to wit:
"Russia will not make territorial concessions in Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions. The territorial structure of Russia is enshrined in the country's constitution," - Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Getting back to the front, one other thing that no one has mentioned is that in neighboring Konstantinovka, also quickly turning critical for the AFU, Russian forces have reportedly made another fairly large breakthrough after capturing Chasov Yar. They have now taken Stupochky and Predtechyne, seen below:
That’s not to mention after Bila Hora was captured to the south, the next settlement was entered, creating a mini-cauldron likely to soon collapse between Bila Hora and Predtechyne.
We can see how the fronts relate as according to sources, the AFU’s 93rd Brigade was pulled from Predtechyne to reinforce the western flank of Zolotyi Kolodyaz on the ‘bunny ears’ of the north-Pokrovsk breakthrough. Soon as they were pulled, the settlement fell.
Others of the ‘elite’ brigades were likewise pulled as emergency stopgap measure from other fronts. AMK_Mapping elaborates on the issue this represents:
The 12th "Azov" Brigade was pulled from Shcerbynivka, west of Toretsk. Most of Shcherbynivka is now under Russian control, with the remaining Ukrainian formations there under extreme pressure in the northernmost part.
The Ukrainian command is prioritising Dobropillya and Bilozerske over Kostyantynivka.
This is what I and so many others mean when we say Ukraine has critical manpower shortages - they have to pull forces away from critical parts of the front to the most critical part just to prevent a breakthrough like this from blooming even further.
That's when we see Russian pushes happen in the area where Ukrainian forces were pulled away from, because Russia knows that advancing will become much easier there. This contributes to the overall goal of stretching and probing the frontline further, making cohesive defence untenable.
AMK Mapping
Likewise on the northern Krasny Lyman front, after capturing Torske (not to be confused with earlier-mentioned Toretsk) yesterday, Russian forces are already entering neighboring Zarichne, seen in the lightly colored reddish area inside the red circle below:
A word on tactics:
In the premium piece yesterday we discussed Russia’s newly-honed Recon-Fire-Complex and how it has paralyzed AFU defenders from being able to respond to Russian advances. Today we’ve had some examples of this in Pokrovsk where roughly 50 accurate glide bomb strike sites are seen on the scattered Ukrainian ‘picket’ positions inside the hedgerows:
In this single satellite picture taken north of Pokrovsk, we can see no less than 50 airstrikes, with more than half hitting treelines and buildings where Ukrainian soldiers are hiding. All those happened since june 11th.
A French analyst has mapped all the airstrikes in the Pokrovsk region from May onward. For instance, he tallied a monstrous 1,100 strikes on the Pokrovsk corridor just from May to June alone:
I started mapping those airstrikes near Pokrovsk in late june when I noticed large strikes against ukrainian fortifications. Since then, I put dots for every airstrike, with different color each month. Here is may to june 11th 2025, 1 100 airstrikes.
He continued mapping them through the months leading up to this breakthrough, coming up with a total 3,200 strikes, 1,400 of which were from July 11 to August 11.
He states that airstrikes began targeting the ‘New Donbass’ line, as the large rear fortification Ukraine was in the process of building is called:
More interestingly, I managed to find around 20 new airstrikes around the new Donbass line. This is where russian assault units managed to breakthrough as per deepstate reports.
He states that the strikes likely targeted the ongoing construction, which facilitated the later Russian breakthrough of precisely this zone:
You can see here more than 20 FAB impacts all around the hole in the defensive line. This probably stopped the urgent engineering work to fill the hole. Russian forces may have entered the village here.
Where russian airforce is bombing, russian infantry is following.
Other analysts have likewise been able to predict many of Russia’s advances by simply pinpointing where the most intense glide bomb bombardments are carried out. Some have noted that the Dobropillya area was subjected to unusually large strikes for the past month, and now we know why.
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Speaking of tactics, WSJ has a new piece that blames Ukraine’s faults on its legacy ‘Soviet’ military system.
The thesis the article presents is a comically backward one and essentially awards all Ukraine’s battlefield successes to the ‘NATO’ or ‘Western’ system, while selectively blaming all failures on the ‘Soviet’ one.
It begins:
SUMY, Ukraine — In the first year of Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukraine’s defenders repeatedly outmaneuvered a lumbering Russian army, relying on improvisation and the judgment of men in the field.
But now, they have somehow ‘regressed’:
Three years on, Ukraine’s military has slipped back into a more rigid, top-down mode of fighting with roots in the Soviet era, creating mounting frustration about unnecessary casualties while hurting civilian morale and army recruitment. Without overhauls, the Soviet-style habits could undermine Ukraine’s ability to sustain its defense against Russia, which shows no sign of relenting in its quest to conquer the country.
They hilariously claim Russia, too, suffers from a Soviet system of an ‘iron fist’-style command, which is why Russia is unable to win—insert eyeroll here. When you really study their examples, you realize how shallow and unconvincing the arguments are. They essentially claim any bad decision carried out by the AFU command is due to a “Soviet” system—for instance, the Kursk assault.
But what does that have to do with a rigid “top-down style command”? It’s simply a bad military decision, period. What one quickly notices in these arguments, particularly when they’re developed and elaborated on by the pro-UA commentariat, is that none of the people making them even actually understand how Western command systems work.
They’ve adopted a bizarre caricatured conception where any military that has a commander-in-chief who hands down orders is by default a ‘Soviet’ one; and what is the alternative, you ask? They seem to believe the West has no centralized command at all, and orders from above simply do not exist. All decisions are completely at the behest of lower echelon commanders in some kind of utopian free-for-all.
But this is not the case at all: do they really think Desert Storm and major operations of that sort were not entirely planned and scripted by the various central command organs? In fact, NATO and the West have a far more bureaucratized and top-heavy command than Russia, and it’s not even close. When you count all the various theater commands like EUCOM, EUSAREUR-AF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, Allied Command Operations, etc.—who do they think does all the theater and operations planning?
These casuals and armchair types seem to think that Western forces have no generals at all, and instead rely entirely on some kind of “superhero”-esque NCOs to command everything from tactical up to the strategic level of theater operations—a notion that’s simply absurd. In fact, even during 2023’s grand Zaporozhye ‘counter-offensive’ we saw that US generals actually micro-managed the entire planning and operations aspects of the disaster from the earliest stages, and with a heavy hand at that, as it later came to be known.
● Ukrainian, U.S. and British military officers held eight major tabletop war games to build a campaign plan. But Washington miscalculated the extent to which Ukraine’s forces could be transformed into a Western-style fighting force in a short period — especially without giving Kyiv air power integral to modern militaries.
In reality, as I’ve been explaining for two years now, the Russian Armed Forces have proven to have far more flexible, unit-driven command than Western counterparts. Virtually every famous successful Russian operation of the war was designed and executed from the ground up by the lowest echelon units themselves, like some of the various pipeline ops in Avdeevka and Kursk.
The WSJ article goes on to explain that the “Soviet system” is responsible for Ukrainian units not being given orders to retreat. What does that have to do with anything ‘Soviet’? Are they suggesting that in the US Army, any unit can retreat at will without the slightest approval from superiors? That would mark the US Army as an unprofessional and amateur force. These people know literally nothing about military history or science; it is simply embarrassing. The oversimplification of what represents a “top-down” system versus its alternative needs to stop, because there is no military on earth that operates so close to one extreme or the other as caricatured here.
This excerpt is exemplary:
During Ukraine’s failed 2023 counteroffensive in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, generals from higher-level headquarters were shouting over the radio at brigade commanders, and even at sergeants on the battlefield, to attack again and again, even as units’ casualties were making them incapable of combat, Pasternak said.
So, they claim the ‘Soviet system’ caused the generals to bark attack orders at individual unit commanders. Yet, hilariously, we learned that it was American generals blindly barking catastrophically inept attack orders at Zaluzhny and co. during these operations.
Recall New York Times’ seminal piece:
The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine
This is the untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies.
Which had revelations like the following:
In late autumn 2022 in Wiesbaden, General Christopher T. Donahue questioned Zaluzhny's deputy, General Mykhailo Zabrodskyi, on advancing through Russian trenches toward Melitopol, saying, “They’re digging in, guys. How are you going to get across this?”
And this:
The article is rife with examples of US generals Donahue, Cavoli, and Milley ordering Zaluzhny around, forcing Ukrainian units to disastrously advance into traps, where they were destroyed. Is this the ‘Soviet’ system? One wonders how those cunning Americans mastered this ‘Soviet’ style so well!
As you can see, the argument is total sophistic nonsense. US and NATO’s top generals were in fact utilizing the ‘Soviet’ system at every step, while Russia actually utilizes true “mission command”. It’s lucky for Russia that Western analysts are too stupid to understand this.
In reality, the comparison to 2022’s “nimble” Ukrainian army has nothing to do with these nonsensical platitudes, but is simply a consequence of all the most motivated and trained Ukrainian units having been attritioned off: you can’t have a “nimble” army staffed with forcibly mobilized old men with zero motivation to fight; these are only fit to sit in trenches and soak up UMPKs.
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Some last items:
Another NYT piece details a new Russian strike—which is actually the second in the past two weeks—that wiped out a Ukrainian troop concentration:
This one happened to have a bunch of foreign mercenaries who were ‘innocently’ trying to enjoy their picnic.
At least a dozen foreign volunteers in Ukraine’s military were killed late last month when a Russian missile struck a training camp’s mess hall during lunchtime, in one of the deadliest attacks on foreign fighters of the war, according to soldiers with knowledge of the incident.
Three soldiers, including one who witnessed the strike, described a harrowing assault that hit fresh recruits from the United States, Colombia, Taiwan, Denmark and other places.
The missile attack on the training camp, which took place near the central Ukrainian city of Kropyvnytskyi on July 21, was timed for when recruits sat down at picnic tables for lunch, the soldiers said.
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Those new anti-drone interceptors being adopted by Russia, like the Yolka increasingly seen this year, have now been experimentally adapted onto Mig-29 planes:
Experiment on integrating a interceptor drone onto the MiG-29SMT fighter of the Russian Aerospace Forces.
The "Archangel" project claims that the communication problem was solved "radically" – the drone operator was allegedly trained to pilot the aircraft.
At the same time, the drone itself is carelessly attached with plastic ties directly to the sensor of the radar warning system. How this is supposed to be launched in reality, and then controlled (or guided to a target) – is completely unclear.
Nevertheless, the idea of using cheaper means to intercept kamikaze drones, compared to conventional air-to-air missiles, is a step in the right direction.
Military Informer
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The same Arkhangel team has another video on new variants of this drone:
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Speaking of drones, a new report on Russian Lancets which reveals how they are using terminal AI-guidance to strike targets:
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A Ukrainian report shows the net tunnels going up on the Pokrovsk, Dobropillya, and Konstantinovka fronts, precisely where Russian forces are now breaking through:
These are likely some of those last remaining main supply routes between the embattled towns.
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Russians are more widely utilizing the Chinese-sourced anti-drone lasers on the front, which are reportedly frying enemy drones at 2.5km+ distance:
Preliminarily, it is about the Silent Hunter (LASS) air defense system, which has been put into service.
The effective range is about 3 km.
The footage shows a laser beam burning through an enemy long-range drone, which then falls and explodes.
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Azov National Guard head Bogdan Krotevych says there is no infantry at all in Pokrovsk, the entire front is held by drones:
“We ran out of people.”
Yes, but keep believing those Western casualty figures.
