But in recent weeks, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been storming the town around the clock, taking over the streets where buildings are mostly reduced to bombed-out, deserted ruins.
They use reconnaissance drones and satellite images to identify gaps in Ukrainian defences and use tiny groups of soldiers who are attacked and killed in droves by Ukrainian drones.
But the surviving soldiers grind forward, targeting drone operators and engaging them in close combat, blazing the trail for larger groups of servicemen.
They are backed by Russian artillery, drones and glide bombs that destroy even the deepest and most fortified bunkers.
The town is “a layer cake of passages, spots under fire, our and enemy positions”, Kirill Sazonov, a Ukrainian political scientist-turned-serviceman, wrote on Telegram on Thursday.
“Somebody is sitting on a third floor, someone’s in a house next door, someone’s in the basement,” he wrote. “There’s no front line, sectors under [Russian or Ukrainian] control or logic.”
He’s confident that Ukrainian forces won’t leave Pokrovsk because Kyiv wants to defend it by any means necessary – and the open fields outside it are “less comfortable than the town’s basements”.
Moscow wants to spur Pokrovsk’s takeover because of worsening weather, muddy roads and a lack of tree foliage that makes troop movements more detectable.
But any predictions about Pokrovsk’s future can only be made “by an idiot, a cynic or a tarot cards reader”, Sazonov wrote.
Is the takeover imminent?
Other analysts disagreed with Sazonov’s assessment that Ukraine will hold its position.
Ukrainian forces “have so few soldiers on the front line that it was possible to contain Russia’s advance only while the Russians were in the fields” around Pokrovsk, Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.
As soon as Russian soldiers infiltrated the town, they met next to no resistance because Ukrainians are so few and their drones are less effective among buildings, he said.
“The town’s takeover is a matter of time,” Mitrokhin, who has written hundreds of authoritative analyses of the hostilities since Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022, told Al Jazeera.
Kyiv may have to make the uneasy decision to pull the remaining forces out of Pokrovsk or risk having them encircled, he said.
Why does Russia want Pokrovsk so badly?
Moscow wants to use the town as a springboard for the takeover of the Kyiv-controlled part of Donbas, a key rustbelt region whose annexation Russia declared unilaterally in September 2022.
Kyiv still controls one-third of Donbas, and Pokrovsk’s fall will pave the way for the takeover of other parts of Ukraine’s “belt of strongholds” that have been fortified since 2014.
The town’s commanding heights will also let Russian forces use swarms of drones to back their advance westwards to the Dnipro region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the town in late October to encourage the troops, but even his staunchest supporters lambasted him and his top brass for allowing Russian forces to infiltrate Pokrovsk and smaller towns nearby.
“The president takes the risk by coming to support the troops, but systemic problems of managing the troops are not being solved, and we keep losing town after town,” lawmaker Mariana Bazuhla wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.
Pokrovsk’s fall would be a major propaganda triumph for Moscow even though the victory will have cost tens of thousands of lives.
How will peace talks be affected?
For Russia, the takeover of Pokrovsk would mean that the front-line is “unstable” and Moscow would try to persuade Washington, where United States President Donald Trump has been pushing for peace talks for months, that this insistence on a ceasefire makes no sense, according to Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kyiv-based Penta think tank.
Washington and Kyiv want to suspend hostilities along the current front line, which stretches more than 1,000km (620 miles), and begin negotiations on who will hold what territory after that.
The Kremlin’s rationale is that “Russian forces are expanding the zone of their control and that Ukraine will have to unilaterally cede land”, Fesenko told Al Jazeera.
“The peace settlement will be paused for several weeks or even months,” he said.
The Washington-brokered peace talks have been stalled for months and are not likely to be resumed after Trump cancelled his summit with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, which had been expected to be held in Budapest.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin keeps coming up with new demands, such as Ukraine maintaining a neutral status, limitations of its military and recognition of Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian regions.
Putin also wants the West to lift all sanctions slapped on Russia since it annexed Crimea in 2014 and the recognition of Russian as the second official language in Ukraine.
However, the possible loss of Pokrovsk won’t affect the fighting spirit of Ukrainian troops.
“This isn’t the first town in Donbas Ukrainian forces have to leave. I don’t think it will cardinally affect the morale,” Fesenko said.
What are the economic consequences if Pokrovsk falls to Russia?
Pokrovsk is a major centre for Ukraine’s coal mining industry, and large metallurgical plants in central Ukraine depend on the coking coal it produces.
It is also home to almost a dozen Soviet-era plants although these have suspended work because of the hostilities.
The town’s takeover could boost the Kremlin’s recent efforts to modify the plants of Donbas for production of weaponry and military-related items, according to Pavel Lisyansky, head of the Strategic Research and Security Institute, a Kyiv-based think tank
“They militarise the economy,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that Moscow aims to turn the region into “a huge military base to frighten Europe”.
Pokrovsk also sits at the intersection of several strategic highways and railroads.
After Pokrovsk, Moscow will push to retake Sloviansk, the first Ukrainian town seized by Moscow-backed separatists in 2014.
