Ukraine says still fighting in Pokrovsk, city claimed by Russia

This grab from a handout footage released by the Russian Defence Ministry press service late on December 1, 2025, shows what is said is the city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine. [AFP]

Ukrainian forces said Tuesday that fighting was ongoing in Pokrovsk, an important logistics hub in the eastern Donetsk region that Moscow claimed to have captured after months of intensive fighting.

The Russian defence ministry one day earlier posted a video purportedly showing Russian soldiers raising their country's flag over a central square in Pokrovsk.

"Search and assault operations and the elimination of the enemy in urban areas continue in Pokrovsk," the Ukrainian military's eastern command wrote on social media.

It also said -- without explicitly denying Moscow's claim -- that Russian troops that planted a flag in the town's centre had been beaten back.

It added that Russian forces had taken advantage of poor weather conditions to move into the centre of the road and rail hub that had around 60,000 residents before Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

An AFP analysis of data from the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) showed this week that the Russian army last month made its biggest advance in Ukraine since November 2024.