There is much of significance happening in Ukraine right now that is being reported either lightly or not at all by the mainstream Western media in an apparent attempt to harmonize their reporting with Kiev’s narrative in order to keep hope high and economic and military support flowing.
Though the mainstream media has begun to report on the Russian encirclement of the Donetsk city of Pokrovsk, it is failing to report on how dire and how ominous the situation is. The reporting suggests that the battlefield situation is being stabilized, that the Russian losses are enormous, and that the loss of Pokrovsk would be strategically insignificant. None of those claims is true.
Russia’s chief of staff, General Valery Gerasimov, reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Russian armed forces are “advancing along converging axes” and “have completed the encirclement of the enemy” in Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad.” His Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksandr Syrskii, said the report does “not correspond to reality.” Ukrainian officials “insist,” The New York Times reports, “that special units are clearing Russians out of the city.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky boasted that “in Pokrovsk, we continue to destroy the occupier.”
Though the Ukrainian armed forces may have temporarily pushed the Russian forces partially back, the Russian forces have retaken a large part of Pokrovsk and now control about 80% of it. The pincers that are steadily closing around Pokrovsk are now just a kilometer apart, a gap that is difficult and dangerous for Ukraine’s best paratroopers to escape through. Though Ukraine continues to deny the encroaching encirclement, admitting only that the situation is “difficult,” the narrative won’t change the reality on the battlefield. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press says that Pokrovsk now “risks becoming a graveyard for Ukraine’s finest.” The Kyiv Independent assesses that “saving the city from falling in the short term looks to be a daunting, and likely impossible task.”
The Western media also reports that Russia’s gains are coming at a greater loss. The Times reports that “Russia’s incremental advances have come at an immense cost. While Ukraine wants to hold on to Pokrovsk, military commanders argue that the large losses it is inflicting on the Kremlin’s troops there will hurt the Russian war effort more broadly.”
But The Times exaggerates Russia’s losses in the war more broadly by at least three times and shrinks Ukraine’s losses by the same amount. As far as Pokrovsk goes, analysts have noted that the attrition of Ukraine’s forces in the war have led to a situation in Pokrovsk where Russia’s forces are taking the fortified city without huge losses in troops or equipment.
And, according to The Times, “the military significance of losing Pokrovsk may be relatively small for Ukraine.” But, the loss of Pokrovsk means, not only the loss of a critical strategic hub for supplying Ukrainian forces in the east, but also the possible loss of control of Ukraine’s defensive line of linked fortification in Donetsk.
Perhaps even more lacking in Western reporting of the battlefield is that a number of military analysts have pointed out that singular focus on Pokrovsk misses the larger picture that that the Russian armed forces have entered or partially encircled several cities in Donetsk, threatening a larger encirclement of the area, and that for the first year in the war, the Ukrainian armed forces have been unable to launch any kind of offensive in 2025. Those two battlefield realities combine to create a larger context that is more ominous still. It suggests that Russia’s war of attrition has depleted Ukrainian troops to the point that they are no longer able to attack Russia or to defend themselves.
Ukraine’s desperate situation on the battlefield has led to two more underreported events. The first was the simultaneous explosions at oil refineries in Hungary and Romania. The fact that both refineries process Russian crude oil and that Ukraine and Europe seem to have shifted their strategy from defeating Russia on the battlefield to cutting off Russia’s oil revenue to drive them to the negotiating table, have led to speculation that Ukraine was behind the two acts of sabotage.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said recently that the explosion at Hungary’s oil refinery could have been caused by an “external attack.” The external actor is unlikely to be Russia. They lack the motivation to sabotage their own customers at a time when U.S. sanctions are attempting to strangle its exports of oil. That seems to leave, as a consensus among analysts suggests, Ukraine or its partners. Ukraine has offered no comment on the explosions, and the silence of the Western media adds to the suspicion. It is alarming that the mainstream media has not a word to say about seemingly coordinated attacks on two European countries that could have enormous consequences in the post Ukraine war world.
Ukraine’s desperation has also led to an underreported crisis at home. Ukraine is losing troops, not only to Russian attacks on the battlefield, but to desertion. As part of the solution, Ukraine has turned to forced mobilization in which men are abducted, often aggressively, against their will and bussed off to recruitment centers. From there, they find themselves on the battlefield with very little training.
Once on the front, troops have deserted in the thousands. Though little reported in the mainstream media, in the first months of 2025 alone, more than 110,000 Ukrainian soldiers deserted. As many as 20% of Ukraine’s armed forces have deserted. Since the war began, the number of desertions may be as high as 200,000, and it is getting worse by the month.
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