As Russian forces advanced deeper into the battered Ukrainian stronghold of Pokrovsk this month, figures in Ukraine’s outspoken military and civil society circles pleaded with their leadership: pull back before it is too late.

“Despite the official bravado, the situation is more than complicated and less than controlled,” former deputy defence minister Vitaliy Deynega, the founder of Come Back Alive — a Ukrainian foundation supporting the military — wrote on Facebook. Ukrainian forces, Deynega said on November 4, “need to get out of these cities while it is possible”.

Deynega was among a growing number of voices suggesting the situation in the twin cities of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad in eastern Ukraine, which together housed close to 100,000 people before the invasion and served as a logistics hub for the military until last year, had reached a point of no return.