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Today, the biggest news comes from the Pokrovsk direction.
Here, after weeks of low-intensity fighting, Russian soldiers attempted to enter the city under disguise, hoping to destabilize Ukrainian lines from the inside. But the operation backfired, and what followed was a coordinated Ukrainian response, culminating in one of the clearest displays yet of Ukraine’s ability to dismantle these tactics in real time.
Russian forces tried to infiltrate Pokrovsk using a tactic that has become more common across the front, small sabotage groups entering urban areas dressed as civilians. In this instance, several Russian units abandoned their uniforms and attempted to blend in with the local population. While some were intercepted during a nine-day sweep, others slipped through and later regrouped into armed cells inside residential blocks.
These survivors sometimes managed to organize fierce resistance in specific sectors, forcing Ukraine to treat infiltrations not just as threats, but as opportunities to locate enemy staging areas and pre-empt escalation with direct force.
The clearest example came when Ukrainian forces deploy Leopard 2A4 tanks across key points in the city. These tanks are used in coordinated efforts to dislodge entrenched Russian sabotage units that had seized positions inside multi-story buildings.
The footage shows not a routine patrol or deterrence move, but a direct fire mission against a nine-story residential building that a Russian sabotage group had seized. The Leopard deliberately targeted the lower floors to collapse the entrance and neutralize the group inside. In most frontline situations, using a tank inside a city would be considered risky, but here it served a very specific function.
Russian units operate without heavy weapons or body armor, and to pass civilians, they often carry no visible gear at all, with weapons and radios dropped to them later by drones. Having only light weapons makes them highly vulnerable once exposed, allowing Ukrainian tanks to operate at close range with little risk.
The tank’s armor is more than enough to shrug off small arms or grenade launchers, while its firepower ensures that the threat is eliminated quickly before it spreads. Ukrainian combat units in Pokrovsk now use the Leopard as a precise, low-risk option against larger infiltration groups that manage to regroup and dig in. In these moments, the tank is not used for breakthrough operations, but for precision urban cleaning, especially when speed matters more than minimizing property damage.
Still, around 90% of infiltrators are eliminated before they even get that far. The local residents also help to expose them, as one footage shows how two local residents guide a Ukrainian FPV drone toward a house where a lone Russian soldier had entered. The drone was then used to eliminate him before he could link up with the others. This type of micro-coordination between civilians and operators has become common in frontline towns. Russian soldiers cannot always hide in plain sight; there are too many residents willing to point them out, and the Ukrainian drone network is now dense enough to act on that information immediately.
Ukraine is also taking a more proactive stance by striking Russian troops before they can even begin their infiltration. In the past week alone, a series of precision airstrikes have hit staging areas across the western Donetsk region.
Near Kotlyne, a Su-27 used a bomb strike to destroy an entire cluster of Russian troops and ammunition stored in a mine shaft.
Two other strikes, this time with GBU-62 JDAM-ERs, hit concentrators of assault troops near Pishchane, while MiG-29s targeted buildings in Novotroitske where infiltration teams had been assembling. In several cases, only one out of multiple bombs hit the intended target due to Russian electronic interference, but even partial success was enough to disrupt Russian preparations.
These strikes reveal that Ukraine is not waiting for saboteurs to appear in cities; it is identifying them during staging and eliminating them beforehand using Western-supplied precision munitions.
Overall, Pokrovsk is becoming a test case for Ukraine’s evolving doctrine against infiltration warfare. Rather than responding passively, Ukraine is using local intel, drones, tanks, and air power to neutralize threats at every stage, from staging to entry to entrenchment. And the more Russia relies on these tactics, the more they expose themselves to all three levels of response.
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