Russia’s Pokrovsk advance could be pivotal in the war

Pokrovsk lies at the heart of a network of roads that spread out in all directions together with a key railway station. Ukrainian military expert Mykhaylo Zhyrokhov told the BBC: “If we lose Pokrovsk, the entire front line will crumble.” Losing a transport artery like Pokrovsk would make it impossible to resupply troops across the defensive line in the Donbas — and since each point of the line relies on every other, a collapse of a few key nodes would cause the whole thing to crumble.

There is no doubt that the Russians are advancing toward the town – and quickly. Both Russian and Ukrainian sources show the same advance, which has accelerated in the past week. This is part of a more general advance of the Russian army over the past few weeks. Newsweek reports that Moscow captured 93 square miles of territory in August, five times higher than the 21-square-mile average its army took in the first seven months of the year.

The situation in the Donbas is not helped by what now seems like a serious miscalculation in Kursk. Pro-Ukrainian analysts are now saying that the incursion of the Ukrainian army into enemy territory was designed to force Moscow to pull troops back from the Donbas front line to counter the Ukrainian army on Russian soil. But this has not happened. The Russians are allowing elite Ukrainian units to sit in Kursk doing nothing while they hammer away at the Donbas front.

What happens if the Donbas front line crumbles? Many people in the West have been convinced that the slow, grinding warfare in Ukraine is indicative of a stalemate. But this has never been true. The Russo-Ukraine war is, like the First World War, a war of attrition. The goal on either side is to wear the other side out. When this happens and the front lines collapse, the conflict reverts to movement warfare with armies traversing large swathes of land.

If the front line in Donbas collapses in the coming weeks, there is no clear obstacle to the Russian army until it reaches the Dnieper River. Meanwhile, there are reports that the Belarussian army is gathering on the border with Ukraine. This may be a feint to force Ukraine to hold troops back from the front line in Donbas, but it could also be part of a broader Russian plan: Belarus is the perfect staging ground from which to encircle Kiev.

There is nothing that Ukraine can do to stop the inevitable from taking place. The only question in Washington D.C. right now is whether the front line will hold up until the election in November. It may seem deeply cynical that the Americans would allow thousands of deaths of Ukrainian soldiers a week – many of them conscripts – simply to prevent bad optics before an election. But these are the grim realities of Washington’s foreign policy. “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy,” Henry Kissinger once said. “But to be America’s friend is fatal.” No one seems to want to learn that hard lesson.

Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and investment professional, and the author of The Reformation in Economics