Russia Claims Encirclement of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk; Experts Skeptical

Russian Military Claims of Ukrainian Encirclement Disputed by Experts and Pro-War Bloggers

Claims by Russia’s top general that Ukrainian forces have been encircled near the strategic cities of Pokrovsk and Kupiansk have been widely dismissed as inaccurate by military experts and even Russian pro-war commentators.

In footage released by the Kremlin on Sunday, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov told President Vladimir Putin that up to 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers were “encircled” near Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region and Pokrovsk, one of Kyiv’s remaining strongholds in the Donetsk region.

“This does not correspond to reality at all,” said military expert Ivan Stupak, a former officer of Ukraine’s SBU security service, in comments to The Moscow Times. Stupak noted that even Russian military correspondents, who typically align with official narratives, questioned Gerasimov’s assertions.

The pro-war Telegram channel Voyennyy Osvedomitel’ (Military Informant), which has over 620,000 followers, directly challenged the claims in a post titled “Enemies have once again infiltrated Comrade Gerasimov’s encirclement.” The channel stated categorically that “there are currently no encirclements.”

“It is highly unlikely that a multi-thousand-strong Ukrainian force is still entrenched within the Pokrovsk-Myrnohrad agglomeration. Modern realities are such that fighting is conducted by small infantry units, both in defense and in offense,” the post explained, adding that this assessment also applies to Kupiansk.

Other Russian war correspondents have expressed similar doubts. Andrei Filatov called Gerasimov’s report “premature,” explaining that “to bring logistics under fire control does not mean to encircle.” The Telegram channel Svideteli Bayraktara acknowledged that while Russian fighters are in Pokrovsk, they are not entering with “armored columns” but rather as “small groups infiltrating the city and conducting its clearance very carefully.”

The Tactical Medicine Courses channel, which covers military medicine and fundraises for Russian forces, suggested the so-called encirclement of Pokrovsk was incomplete, with “the distance between the flanks [being] almost six kilometers.”

International observers have also rejected the Russian claims. The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) stated it “has not observed evidence to support Gerasimov’s claims.” Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a respected Russia-Ukraine conflict analyst, said “there is no mass encirclement of Ukrainian forces at Kupiansk” and described other claims by Gerasimov as “equally untrue.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky forcefully denied the Russian narrative on Tuesday, calling it “a lie.” He suggested Russia was fabricating battlefield successes to strengthen its position in potential peace negotiations with the United States, saying they were “showing them maps already marked with Pokrovsk as captured, claiming they’ve reached the Dnipro region and seized 90% of eastern Ukraine.”

The Ukrainian General Staff has acknowledged that the situation near Pokrovsk remains “complicated” and confirmed a Russian presence of around 200 personnel there. On Tuesday, it reported that Russian forces had launched 79 assault attempts in the Pokrovsk direction and nine attacks near Kupiansk in the previous 24 hours.

Strategically, Pokrovsk holds significant value for Russian forces as they advance in the Donetsk region, which Moscow claims as its territory despite international rejection of such annexation. However, Stupak notes that from an infrastructure perspective, capturing these cities would likely result in their destruction, similar to what happened in Bakhmut and Avdiivka.

This isn’t the first time Gerasimov has been accused of exaggeration. In August, he claimed major victories across eastern and southern Ukraine during Russia’s summer offensive, claims that experts and even pro-war commentators said were overstated.

According to the ISW, “Putin’s and Gerasimov’s claims of battlefield victories are part of the ongoing Kremlin cognitive warfare effort to falsely portray a Russian victory as inevitable.”

Stupak concluded that such statements from Russian military leadership are likely “part of the information war, which also affects the minds and will of people” — designed to create the impression that Ukrainian defenses are collapsing when the battlefield reality appears considerably different.