Russian forces ‘completely cut off’ from Kupiansk, says Ukrainian commander

Ukraine says it has retaken parts of Kupiansk, a town in the northern region of Kharkiv, which Russia’s Ministry of Defence claimed to have seized on November 21.

On Friday, as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited Kupiansk and hailed the defending troops, a Ukrainian commander said Russian forces in the city had been completely surrounded.

“Today, we can say that the Russians in the city are completely cut off. For a long time, they couldn’t understand what was happening. But now they know they are surrounded,” said Ihor Obolienskyi, head of the Khartiia Corps of the National Guard, as quoted by the Ukrainska Pravda news outlet.

The battlefield unit said it had liberated northern districts of the town.

Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed Kupiansk had been “practically in the hands of Russian forces” on November 4.

“Our guys, so to speak, were finishing mopping up isolated neighbourhoods and streets. The city’s future had already been determined at that point,” Putin told his National Security Council.

“The volume of Russian lies far exceeds the actual pace of Russian troop advances,” Oleksandr Syrskii, the Ukrainian commander-in-chief, wrote on the Telegram messaging service. “The enemy uses disinformation and fake maps in a hybrid war against Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine has continued to fight in its contested eastern city of Pokrovsk this week, despite Russian claims to have seized it entirely.

“The defence of Pokrovsk continues, our troops control almost 13 square kilometres [five square miles] in the northern part of the city,” Syrskii said on Tuesday, calling it an “extremely difficult phase” of the fight.

Geolocated footage showing Russian drones striking there on Wednesday confirmed the presence of Ukrainian troops.

Russia had claimed complete control over Pokrovsk on December 2.

Syrskii later explained that Ukrainian forces had tactically retreated from Pokrovsk, but fought their way back in.

“At a certain stage in the autumn, there were no more of our troops in Pokrovsk due to limited capabilities,” he told Ukrainian media executives on Wednesday.

He also said Ukrainian forces held 54sq km (21 square miles) west of the city.

Ukrainian forces were also resisting Russian advances in Myrnohrad, east of Pokrovsk, Syrskii said.

The two cities are almost surrounded by Russian forces, with supply lines and evacuation routes running only through a narrow neck to the west.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said their troops were still repelling attacks in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad on Thursday, as well as in outlying villages near the two towns.

Russian narratives were part of a campaign to force Ukraine to sign a peace agreement that United States President Donald Trump presented last month, said the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

That plan demands that Ukraine hand over Pokrovsk and the rest of a “fortress belt” of cities in the eastern Donetsk region. Ukraine invested an estimated billion dollars last year to defend the region.

“ISW continues to assess that the Russian campaign to militarily seize the rest of Donetsk Oblast, including Ukraine’s heavily fortified Fortress Belt, would likely take at least two-to-three years, pose a significant challenge, and result in difficult and costly battles that the Russian Federation may not be able to sustain,” the ISW wrote.

Zelenskyy said Ukraine had not agreed to any territorial concessions demanded in the original plan, and was continuing to negotiate the proposal, though many observers believed it was a dead end.

“I don’t think the current US-managed Ukraine peace process is serious,” wrote Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash on his Substack newsletter. “Trump wants the quick win, in effect. He is not really bothered to understand the core drivers of the conflict.”

Putin repeated on December 9 that Russia’s wartime goals had not changed, including the seizure of Donetsk, casting doubt on whether Moscow was serious about negotiating.

Despite highly publicised seizures of villages and rural terrain, Russia’s progress has been slow for the past two years of the war, figures show.

Last year it seized 4,168sq km (1,609sq miles), equivalent to 0.69 percent of Ukraine. So far this year, the ISW estimated it has seized 4,669sq km (1,802sq miles), or 0.77 percent of Ukraine. During that time, Russia has suffered an estimated 820,000 casualties.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov this week said Russian manufacturing, construction, agriculture and services faced a shortage of 2.3 million workers.

After weathering the first three years of war well, the Russian economy slowed down in 2025 and its treasury, central bank and energy corporations are running out of cash, leading to cuts in defence spending.

The European Union aimed to deal Russia another economic blow on Friday, freezing 210bn euros ($246bn) in immobilised Russian assets indefinitely rather than in rolling six-month periods, in a step towards using the cash to finance Ukraine’s war effort.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops, though outgunned, have not lost their will to fight, according to the testimony of a Russian assault company commander, identified as Vladimir, in a Telegram post published by Russia’s Defence Ministry.

The ministry said he led the seizure of the village of Rovnoye in Donetsk.

Source: Aljazeera