Russian soldiers hold up the flags of their country and their unit in Siversk, Ukraine, on December 11, 2025 (image taken from a video). RUSSIAN DEFENSE MINISTRY PRESS SERVICE/AP
The Ukrainian army announced on December 23 that it had fully withdrawn from the city of Siversk, which had long served as a bastion that halted the Russian advance toward Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the last major conurbation in the Donetsk region to still be under Ukrainian control. With the other large conurbation of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad to the southeast also being on the verge of falling, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk now represent the last Donbas cities not devastated by Russia in four years of war.
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The fall of Siversk, a small town that had 11,000 inhabitants before the full-scale invasion, came after several months of intense urban combat. It did not come as a surprise, nor did it signal an acceleration of the Russian invasion, which has continued to be laborious and extremely costly in terms of casualties. The Russian Armed Forces (RAF) took three and a half years to advance 12 kilometers from the city of Lysychansk (east of Siversk), which they captured in the summer of 2022.
