By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 10/30/25
Reports are coming in that the situation in Pokrovsk is critical. Some 250 members of the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) have broken into the city and there are running street battles. The supply routes to this key logistical hub that supports the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) Donbas operations are under heavy attack and the manpower shortage is acute. If Pokrovsk falls, as Avdiivka and Bakhmut fell before it, there is a danger that the entire eastern defence could suddenly collapse and the war will be over bar the shouting.
It’s hard to be sure what is actually going on as we are limited to one-sided Ukrainian reporting as little is coming out of the Russian side. Moreover, even Bankova has drastically restricted access to its frontlines in order to control the media message. Milbloggers on both sides – which are in touch with individual soldiers – are the best source of information and on the whole a few have emerged as pretty reliable.
The bottomline is that the fighting has clearly gone up a notch and even established western military analysts like Rob Lee and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) say the situation is “critical.”
The western reporting on this story is afraid to go negative, but that is slowly starting to change and tone is starting to get more negative. But the Western politicians are still talking up their “irreversible” support for Ukraine, but the truth is that the campaign is in crisis and in my opinion that is starting to gather momentum.
The main points are:
• The US has withdrawn and will not supply any more arms or money;
• The EU has been left to carry the can, but has run out of money to fund the government ;
• The EU’s stockpile of weapons is also depleted so there is little military help either and the investments to make more are only now getting underway;
• The AFU is suffering from a “catastrophic” shortage of manpower and kilometre-long holes have opened up in the frontline, which is what allowed AFR troops to enter Pokrovsk; and
• the manpower shortages are being worse by rising desertion rates in the AFU, with reports recently of up to 250,000 men AWOL (impossible to check).
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is putting on a brave face and has denied that Pokrovsk is surrounded, but admits the fighting is intense. He is also pushing ahead with his attacks on Russian refineries with some effect. US President Donald Trump also imposed his first and very harsh oil sanctions last week.
But it’s all too little, too late, if you ask me. If you listen to the rhetoric, then it’s all still about “all we need to do is increase/tighten the sanctions a bit more…” to make a difference. And it’s just not happening.
As we have reported, the Trump oil sanctions are unlikely to make a difference. They are the same sanctions that were imposed by the Biden administration in January on Surgutneftegas and Gazprom Neft, the third and fourth largest oil companies, in January. Those did reduce oil exports by about 15% for a few months, but they recovered again very quickly.
The same thing will happen again this time with sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil (numbers 1 & 2), as the flaw in these sanctions – which no one is mentioning – is that the sanctions are specifically on naming Rosneft and Lukoil, not the oil they export. That means there are no sanctions on trading companies or shell companies if they switch to those to continue their exports – which of course, they probably already did the very next day.
As for the EU raising money for Ukraine, the Reparation Loans idea has failed as it undermines Europe’s financial system, will hurt trust in the euro, and exposes Belgium to huge legal and liabilities risks. Hungary and Slovakia are going to veto any proposal anyway. The talk has now shifted to issuing Eurobonds to come up with the €140bn loan, but that is an even less appealing idea than the Reparation Loan.
Given Ukraine’s drone production and its strong defensive line in Donbas, I guess that the AFU can hold out and fight on for a while, but if Pokrovsk falls the war could be over suddenly. And that will unleash a political crisis on the first order that could see Zelenskiy quickly ousted. Then all hell will break loose. Indeed, one of the theories to explain why Zelenskiy suddenly proposed a law to neuter National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) last month is that he is anticipating a political attack and has been drawing more raw power into his own hands in order to weather a coming storm. He has already badly stained his war hero reputation with western partners.
Another sign of trouble on the way is a string of stories looking at the Flamingo cruise missile, claiming that they are fake, which are circulating in the local press. The anticorruption watchdog, NABU, was investigating it for corruption, which both the NYT and The Kyiv Independent have reported, when Zelenskiy pushed through his law at the weekend in the middle of the summer recess.
I have had some big questions since the Flamingo story broke. How did a bunch of Zelenskiy friends from the TV business, with no engineering or weapons experience, developed a sophisticated cruise missile from a standing start in only nine months? And now have a $1bn contract with the state to make them.
Both Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic missile and America’s Tomahawk took a decade to develop by worldclass teams of engineers with multiple decades of experience working at some of the biggest defence industry firms in the world. The lady that runs Fire Point, Iryna Terekh, the maker of the Flamingo, made her money from designing attractive flowerpots made out of concrete. She apparently moved into an empty warehouse and set up the firm, paying for the initial development from her own pocket until the government contracts started to come in.
Even the story about why the missiles are pink smacks of that scene in “Wag the dog” where Dustin Hoffman goes out at night and throws old shoes into the trees outside the White House to create a social media meme with the right connotations. The pink missile story has certainly got a lot of attention.
However, I have been watching closely for reports of Flamingos being used. The initial article in AP claimed that Fire Point was making seven a day, yet I have yet to see a single report of them being fired. They are supposed to be a gamechanger and as good (actually better) than Tomahawks.
So far this is starting to look like Werner von Braun’s wunderwaffen that Hitler was pushing at the end of WWII, the V2 rocket, that was going to win the war overnight. At least Werner von Braun was a real rocket scientist that went on to work at NASA. And let’s face it, Terekh is no von Braun.
I won’t go into detail here, but I filled the rest of the list today with our Asian team’s reporting on global leaders gathering in Gyeongju in South Korea to shape APEC cooperation as that summit gets underway. As we have been reporting, while Europe distracts itself with the slowly imploding Ukraine war story, the rest of the world is getting on with the business of doing business. This is part of building what we have dubbed the Global Emerging Markets Institutions (GEMIs) to counter the West’s dominance of global geopolitics.
The main take out is that there seems to be a pause in the Sino-US showdown after Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Both sides have agreed to put off their retaliatory actions for a year and to meet in April when presumably a trade deal can be done. Trump has threatened 100% tariffs, but Capital Economics released a note saying the actual adjusted tariffs are currently 30%. Trump has agreed to ease restrictions on the export of top end microchips while Xi has agreed to delay rare earth metals (REMs) export restrictions for a year.
The final thing I will say is that watching this whole row develop, what has struck me is that at every step Xi has been reasonable and called for partnership, not confrontation. He did this in conversations with former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and former US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who both met him in Beijing and were frankly rude and aggressive. He just used the same rhetoric with Trump. So there does seem to be some real common ground to do a real deal.
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Russia Matters, 10/31/25
This week has seen Russian forces advance in two pincer movements from the center of Pokrovsk and villages to the northeast with only a few miles separating the military advances, according to DeepState’s maps analyzed by NYT. DeepState, a reputable Ukrainian OSINT group, reported a “massive infiltration” of this Donetsk region city, which Russian command claims to have encircled along with Kupyansk, warning on Oct. 29 that “the situation in Pokrovsk is on the verge of [being] critical.” In a follow-up Oct. 31 assessment DeepState reported that Russian forces advanced in Pokrovsk while Ukraine’s Korrespondent.net reported on the same day that “a fierce battle is ongoing for the city of Pokrovsk.” If captured, Pokrovsk would be the largest city to be taken by Russian forces since Bakhmut in May 2023, according to The Washington Post. Its fall will be a serious setback, as the city is a junction for road and railway lines and would bring Russian forces closer to the Donetsk region cities of Kramatorsk and Kostiantynivka, according to the Post. In the past four weeks (Sept. 30–Oct. 28, 2025), Russian forces gained 154 square miles of Ukrainian territory, an increase over the 146 square miles these forces gained during the previous four-week period (Sept. 2–30, 2025), according to the Oct. 29 issue of The Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. In the week of Oct. 21–28, 2025, Russia has gained 39 square miles of Ukraine’s territory, up slightly from the previous week’s gain of 33 square miles, according to the card.