[hardspunned]

I just posted this on a similar thread.

It was a one way road (the ONLY road) in, the Russian drones, air superiority and artillery open and shut the road out at their pleasure now. The Russians have been more than happy to swing the door open to permit entrance to the slaughterhouse.
The Russians even opened the gate to allow a 20+ unit convoy to flee in the direction of Petrovsk last night. The Military Summary Channel has geo located footage of the column being Iskandered on the road.

It’s a horrible situation for the hapless, near ammo less Ukes still holed up in the pocket. Kadyrov and his Chechen hunter/ambush/killer units are making ghastly sport of killing them.

[BroJoeK]

hardspunned: "It was a one way road (the ONLY road) in, the Russian drones, air superiority and artillery open and shut the road out at their pleasure now.
The Russians have been more than happy to swing the door open to permit entrance to the slaughterhouse."

By my count, here, Ukrainians have 14 brigades in or around Pokrovsk.
That equates to theoretically circa 50,000 troops in total.

Some estimates put Ukraine's Pokrovsk strength at only 12,000 which may refer to numbers in the front line trenches, not including reserve and support troops.

Estimates of Russian troops near Pokrovsk are circa 30,000, though again, no suggestions if that's just front line or also reserve and support troops.

In six months since the fall of Avdiivka, Russians advanced 20 miles, or roughly one mile per week, and are currently within about five miles of Pokrovsk, meaning within artillery range.

Artillery range means the logistical roads into and out of Pokrovsk are already under Russian fire and so much less reliable that previously.

Contrary to Russian propaganda, Ukrainians have sent reinforcements to Pokrovsk, notably its Kara-Dag Brigade:

"The Kara-Dag Brigade is a southern brigade.
It fought north of the southern city of Melitopol in the early days of the wider war and pretty much stayed in the same area for two years.
But 'we guarantee combat clashes on the front line,' the national guard promises recruits on its website — and as the wider war grinds into third year, the heaviest fighting is in the east.

But sending in the Kara-Dag Brigade hasn’t halted the Russian advance.
And some Russian observers are wondering where the rest of Ukraine’s reserves are.
Sure, many Ukrainian troops who weren’t already manning some trench somewhere have joined Ukraine’s surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk Oblast.

Even so, there should be a few uncommitted brigades somewhere in Ukraine right now, out of a total ground combat force of around 100 brigades.
'We know that the Ukrainian armed forces still have several reasonably intact and well-equipped units in reserve, about five brigades,' Russian propagandist Evgeny Norin wrote.

Why isn’t Ukraine rushing those forces to Pokrovsk to save the city’s vital supply lines?
'It could mean two things,' Norin wrote.
'They plan to deploy them elsewhere, and they aim to achieve some kind of decisive impact before before the front in Donbas completely collapses.'

That elsewhere might be Kursk, where the Ukrainian invasion has rolled into its fourth week—and shows no sign of stopping.
In adding forces to Kursk while withholding them from Pokrovsk, Ukraine’s leaders are gambling that the gains from their surprise invasion in the north matter more to the war’s outcome than their potential losses in the east.

It’s an extremely risky gamble."

When I look at the map near Pokrovsk, I see a Russian salient, which any decent military commander would be eager to choke the life out of.

But that's just me, what do I know?