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But in recent weeks, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were storming the city around the clock, taking over the streets where buildings have mostly been reduced to bombed-out, abandoned ruins.
They use reconnaissance drones and satellite imagery to identify gaps in Ukrainian defenses and use small groups of soldiers who are attacked and killed in droves by Ukrainian drones.
But the surviving soldiers surge forward, targeting the drone operators and engaging them in close combat, paving the way for larger groups of servicemen.
They are supported by Russian artillery, drones and glide bombs that destroy even the deepest and most fortified bunkers.
The city is “a flat cake of passages, spots under fire, our and enemy positions,” Kirill Sazonov, a Ukrainian political scientist-turned-military, wrote on Telegram on Thursday.
“Someone is sitting on the third floor, someone is in a neighboring house, someone is in the basement,” he wrote. “There is no front line, sectors under (Russian or Ukrainian) control or logic.”
He is confident that Ukrainian forces will not leave Pokrovsk, because Kiev wants to defend it by any means necessary – and the open fields outside it are “less comfortable than the basements of the city”.
Moscow wants to promote the capture of Pokrovsk because of the deteriorating weather, muddy roads and lack of greenery, which makes troop movements more visible.
But any predictions about Pokrovsk's future can only be made by “an idiot, a cynic or a Tarot card reader,” Sazonov wrote.
Is the takeover coming?
Other analysts disagree with Sazonov's assessment that Ukraine will maintain its position.
Ukrainian forces “have so few soldiers on the front line that it was only possible to hold back the Russian advance while the Russians were in the fields” around Pokrovsk, Mykola Mitrokhin, a researcher at Germany's University of Bremen, told Al Jazeera.
As soon as Russian soldiers entered the city, they met almost no resistance because the Ukrainians were so few and their drones were less effective among buildings, he said.
“The capture of the city is a matter of time,” Mitrokhin, who has written hundreds of authoritative analyzes of military action since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, told Al Jazeera.
Kiev may have to make the difficult decision to withdraw its remaining forces from Pokrovsk or risk encircling them, he said.
Why does Russia want Pokrovsk so badly?
Moscow wants to use the city as a springboard to seize the Kiev-controlled part of the Donbass, a key Rustbelt region that Russia announced it would annex unilaterally in September 2022.
Kiev still controls a third of Donbas, and the fall of Pokrovsk would pave the way for the capture of other parts of Ukraine's “fortress belt”, which has been fortified since 2014.
The city's commanding heights will also allow Russian forces to use swarms of drones to support their push west towards the Dnieper region.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the city in late October to encourage the troops, but even his staunchest supporters criticized him and his top leadership for allowing Russian forces to infiltrate Pokrovsk and smaller towns nearby.
“The president is taking the risk by coming to support the troops, but the systemic problems with the management of the troops are not being addressed and we continue to lose city after city,” lawmaker Mariana Bazula wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.
The fall of Pokrovsk would be a great propaganda triumph for Moscow, even though the victory would cost tens of thousands of lives.
How will the peace talks be affected?
For Russia, capturing Pokrovsk would mean the front line is “unstable” and Moscow will try to convince Washington, where US President Donald Trump has been pushing for peace talks for months, that this push for a ceasefire is pointless, according to Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Kiev-based Penta think tank.
Washington and Kyiv want cease hostilities along the current front line, which stretches more than 1,000 km (620 mi), and to begin negotiations over who will hold what territory next.
The Kremlin's rationale is that “Russian forces are expanding their area of control and that Ukraine will have to unilaterally cede land,” Fesenko told Al Jazeera.
“The peace agreement will be suspended for several weeks or even months,” he said.
Peace talks brokered by Washington have been stalled for months and are unlikely to resume after Trump canceled his summit with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, which was expected to be held in Budapest.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin continues to offer new demands, such as maintaining Ukraine's neutral status, limiting its military and recognizing Russia's annexation of four Ukrainian regions.
Putin also wants the West to lift all sanctions imposed on Russia since it annexed Crimea in 2014 and to recognize Russian as Ukraine's second official language.
However, the possible loss of Pokrovsk will not affect the fighting spirit of the Ukrainian troops.
“This is not the first city in Donbas that Ukrainian forces have to leave. I don't think it will dramatically affect morale,” Fesenko said.
What are the economic consequences if Pokrovsk falls to Russia?
Pokrovsk is a major center of Ukraine's coal mining industry, and large steel plants in Central Ukraine depend on the coking coal it produces.
It's also home to nearly a dozen Soviet-era factories, though they've shut down due to hostilities.
The capture of the city could boost the Kremlin's recent efforts to modify factories in the Donbass to produce weapons and military items, according to Pavel Lisyansky, head of the Institute for Strategic and Security Studies, a Kiev-based think tank.
“They are militarizing the economy,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that Moscow aims to turn the region into a “huge military base to scare Europe.”
Pokrovsk is also located at the intersection of several strategic highways and railways.
After Pokrovsk, Moscow will insist on reclaiming Slavyansk, the first captured Ukrainian city Moscow-backed separatists in 2014
The occupation of Slavyansk, which is located on the Siversky Donets River, is also the only way to restore the canal supplying water to drought-stricken, Russian-occupied city of Donetsk and its metropolitan area.
