Ukraine says still fighting in Pokrovsk after Russia asserts claim on city

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Ukraine said Tuesday its army was holding on 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 had posted a video a day earlier claiming to show 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 who planted a flag in the town's centre had been beaten back.

To support Russia's declaration to have captured the city, President Vladimir Putin later on Tuesday invited foreign journalists to tour it.

"I have already suggested that your foreign colleagues, and even Ukrainian ones, please, we are ready to grant this right to Ukrainian journalists as well -- to visit the city of Krasnoarmeysk and see with their own eyes," he told a journalist at a press briefing, using a Russian name for Pokrovsk.

Putin also signalled he was still sticking to his initial maximalist goals in Ukraine, as US negotiators were in Moscow to discuss an end to the conflict.

He said Pokrovsk is a "good foothold for solving all the tasks set at the beginning of the special military operation", using Russia's term for the nearly four-year-long war.

According to the Ukrainian army, Russian forces had taken advantage of poor weather conditions to move into Pokrovsk, a 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, excluding the early weeks of the war when the front line was highly mobile.