Zelenskyy decries Russia’s attempt to gain battlefield edge pre-US summit maintains its army is holding back ‘occupier’.Russia has made gains in Ukraine’s Donetsk region before President Vladimir Putin’s high-stakes meeting with his United States counterpart Donald Trump in Alaska, raising fears that it may have increased its leverage amid talks aimed at ending the war.In advance of Friday’s summit in Anchorage, Moscow’s army pounded away at Ukraine’s industrial heartland, attempting to seize the flashpoint town of Pokrovsk, a key highway and rail junction in eastern Donetsk, after repeated attempts to breach its defensive line during the week.As Putin and Trump prepared to meet, battlefield analysis site DeepState said that Pokrovsk was partially encircled. In recent days, Russian forces had reportedly seized the village of Yablunivka and the settlement of Oleksandrohrad – both in Donetsk.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who has rejected Putin’s demands that Kyiv withdraw from the remaining 30 percent of Donetsk that it still controls, played down the Russian advances, saying on X that his forces were “countering” and “increasing the pressure” on the “occupier”.“The Russian army continues to suffer significant losses in its attempts to secure more favourable political positions for the Russian leadership at the meeting in Alaska. We understand this plan and are informing our partners about the real situation,” he said.Reporting from Kyiv, Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford said that “small groups of Russian forces” had “pushed through gaps in Ukrainian defensive lines in that area, taking around 10 kilometres [6.2 …
