Valery Gerasimov (L) and Vladimir Putin meet at an undisclosed at a Russian military command post at an undisclosed location. Photo: EPA/RUSSIAN PRESIDENTIAL PRESS SERVICE
The Kremlin on Monday evening announced the capture of Pokrovsk and Vovchansk, two key cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, as Kyiv warned that Russia was escalating its disinformation campaign ahead of forthcoming peace negotiations.
Though Ukraine has not directly confirmed or denied Russia’s claims, Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation, warned on Monday evening that Russia would escalate claims of its territorial gains in Ukraine over the coming weeks “to raise the stakes” in preliminary negotiations with Washington about an eventual peace deal.
On 20 November, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov announced the “liberation” of the Kharkiv region city of Kupyansk in the presence of Vladimir Putin during a visit to a Russian military command post at an undisclosed location.
Putin is set to meet with US President Donald Trump’s Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner in Moscow on Tuesday, after Washington said it was “very optimistic” about reaching a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine.
During a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denied Gerasimov’s late November claim that Russian forces had seized Kupyansk, RBC-Ukraine reported.
Though he admitted that there was “intense fighting” in Pokrovsk, Zelensky said Ukrainian troops were having greater military success near the city of Kupyansk. “Although Russia claims it has taken Kupyansk, in reality, we have cleared almost all of them from the city,” Zelensky said.
When Gerasimov informed Putin that Russia had captured Kupyansk on 20 November, he also said that Russian troops controlled 80% of Vovchansk and 70% of Pokrovsk, a claim that was immediately contradicted by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) immediately contradicted that claim at the time.
Pokrovsk has long served as a key AFU logistics hub, housing a major drone operations unit that has come under increasingly heavy Russian infantry assaults, allowing Moscow’s forces to consolidate their foothold in its eastern and central districts.
Vovchansk, a town just 5 kilometres from the Russian border with a pre-war population of 17,000, was captured by Russian troops at the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but was liberated by the AFU in the autumn of the same year. However, intense fighting has continued since, with the city practically reduced to rubble.
