Russian troops are closing in on the strategic eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, according to open-source battlefield maps, casting doubts on Ukraine’s hopes that its new offensive into western Russia will prompt Moscow to scale back its attacks elsewhere on the battlefield.

Russian forces are about 13km from Pokrovsk, one of Ukraine’s main defensive strongholds in the Donetsk region, according to the maps, which are based on combat footage and satellite images.

Pokrovsk, a city with a pre-war population of about 60,000, sits on a key road linking several cities that form a defensive arc protecting the part of Donetsk that is still under Ukrainian control.

In the past week, Russian troops have captured several villages in the area as they push along a railway line leading into Pokrovsk, a city where many Ukrainian soldiers stay to rest after a rotation on the front or to prepare for future operations.

The situation is so dire that the city’s military administration has urged residents to leave, although it has not issued a formal order. “The enemy is rapidly approaching the outskirts of Pokrovsk,” Serhii Dobriak, the head of the military administration said on Thursday. “Evacuation is underway in the community. Don’t delay!”

Military experts say that one goal of the surprise cross-border assault that Ukraine began last week in Russia’s western Kursk region is to compel Moscow to divert troops from the front lines in Ukraine to reinforce its own border region. But so far, Russia has withdrawn only a limited number of units from the Ukrainian battlefield, instead seeking to counter attacks with less-experienced combat units in Russia, analysts and US officials say.

Ukrainian soldiers said this week that there had been no let-up in Russian attacks in the Donetsk region, suggesting that Moscow is pressing ahead with its long-held goal of capturing the entire area.

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank that tracks battlefield developments, wrote on Thursday that “Russian forces are maintaining their relatively high offensive tempo” in the Donetsk region.

In doing so, the Russian military command is demonstrating that it “continues to prioritise advances in eastern Ukraine even as Ukraine is pressuring Russian forces” in the Kursk region, it wrote.

Maps of the battlefield compiled by the Institute and other groups show that Ukrainian troops have made marginal advances in Kursk over the past day, capturing at least one village and pushing into several others.

New York Times News Service and Reuters