Bodies of Russian troops killed in the battle for Pokrovsk would fill Moscow’s Red Square, Ukraine’s Air Assault Forces claimed, as they sought to illustrate the scale of recent Russian losses.
Over six months of fighting in the Pokrovsk area, Russian forces have suffered significant personnel and equipment losses, according to Ukraine’s 7th Rapid Response Corps of the Air Assault Forces. The unit said it decided to visualize those losses using well-known Moscow landmarks. In the fall, Russia massed one of its largest groupings on the Pokrovsk axis hoping for a blitzkrieg to seize the agglomeration but met stiff resistance from Ukrainian units, the corps said in a Telegram post.
The corps estimated around 15,000 Russians were killed or wounded. It claimed that if the bodies in body bags were placed tightly together, they would cover all of Red Square.
The remains of about 1,000 destroyed and damaged armored, motor, quad and motorcycle vehicles near Pokrovsk could fit on the field of Luzhniki Stadium, one of Russia’s largest, the unit said.
Roughly 150 struck artillery systems and multiple launch rocket systems would form a column up to 1.5 kilometers long - about the length of Arbat, one of Moscow’s best-known pedestrian streets, it added.
It also reported about 23,000 strike drones shot down or forced to land, arguing that their simultaneous use could have caused significant destruction—damage Ukrainian forces say they prevented.
Separately, analysts with the OSINT project DeepState reported Russian advances within Pokrovsk and north of Robotyne, saying the overall area of occupied territory grew due to a shrinking “gray zone.”
Earlier, Russian pro-war bloggers claimed Ukrainian forces had launched counteroffensive actions in the Zaporizhzhia region, with increased activity on the eastern flank near the Dnipropetrovsk–Zaporizhzhia border. They suggested the moves could aim to split Russian groupings applying pressure toward Pokrovsk.
