KYIV, Ukraine — Russian forces declared the eastern Donetsk town of Toretsk fully under their control on Tuesday, the most significant territorial claim by Moscow since February, as Ukrainian commanders rushed reserves north toward the next defensive belt around Kostiantynivka and European foreign ministers gathered in Brussels in an unscheduled session to fast-track an air-defense package they said would land in Ukrainian hands within 72 hours.

Russia’s Defense Ministry, in a midday statement read by spokesperson Lt. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said units of the 8th Combined Arms Army had “completed the liberation” of Toretsk after weeks of street-by-street fighting in the rubble of the small mining city. Ukrainian General Staff officials disputed the claim’s completeness, telling reporters in Kyiv that “isolated pockets” of resistance continued in the southwestern outskirts, but they conceded that the bulk of Toretsk had been lost and that the main Ukrainian line of defense had shifted roughly six kilometers to the north.

The fall of Toretsk, a town of about 30,000 before Russia’s 2022 invasion and now largely depopulated, was widely telegraphed by Western analysts who had warned in late April that Moscow’s spring push along the Pokrovsk-Chasiv Yar-Toretsk axis was likely to yield at least one symbolic urban prize before summer slowed operations. But the timing — coming barely three weeks after the Iran-Israel ceasefire allowed European capitals to refocus on Ukraine — added political urgency to a battlefield setback that might otherwise have been absorbed quietly.

“Toretsk is not Kyiv, and it is not Kharkiv, but it is a place where Ukrainians have died for two and a half years, and it is now in Russian hands,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video address from a forward command post in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region. “Our partners have been told what we need. The question now is how fast it arrives.”

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi told national broadcaster Suspilne that two reserve brigades, including a recently re-equipped mechanized unit drawn from the Sumy axis, had been ordered to take up positions along the Kostiantynivka-Druzhkivka line. The Ukrainian Air Force separately reported the highest single-day total of glide-bomb strikes since February — 187 across the Donetsk front — and said three of its Patriot interceptors had been expended overnight defending the eastern logistics hub of Sloviansk.

In Brussels, EU foreign-policy chief Marta Stenberg convened a hastily added meeting of the 27-member bloc’s foreign ministers, the second such emergency session in three weeks. Officials emerging from the four-hour discussion said member states had agreed in principle to release two IRIS-T air-defense batteries from German stocks within 72 hours, advance the delivery of a Norwegian-Danish NASAMS package previously scheduled for July, and accelerate the next tranche of the European Peace Facility — worth approximately 1.6 billion euros — into a single immediate disbursement.

“What we discussed today was not a new policy. It was a faster clock,” Stenberg told reporters. “The decisions were taken in March. The delivery has been compressed.”

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Berlin would also surge a previously announced shipment of 35,000 155-millimeter artillery shells, drawn from a Czech-led procurement initiative, to arrive in Ukraine before the end of the month. French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne said Paris was prepared to deploy a fourth Mirage 2000-5F squadron to the Ukrainian theater under existing bilateral arrangements, contingent on training milestones being met.

The accelerated European response unfolded against a more measured posture in Washington, where the Trump administration has signaled it intends to keep existing Ukraine assistance flowing but has resisted introducing a stand-alone supplemental package until broader Iran reconstruction financing is settled. Asked about Toretsk at a White House press briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration was “watching the situation closely” and that any new American military assistance “would be considered in the context of the full national-security picture, including the Gulf.”

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the administration’s working assumption was that “Europe has the bandwidth and the inventory” to absorb the immediate Ukrainian requirement and that the U.S. role over the coming weeks would focus on intelligence sharing, satellite support and the continued provision of long-range munitions already in the pipeline.

That posture has drawn criticism from a bipartisan group of senators. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters in Washington that the fall of Toretsk underscored “the cost of treating Ukraine as a residual file” and that she would press to attach Ukraine military assistance to the pending Iran supplemental. Sen. Roger Wicker, the Republican chair of the Armed Services Committee, said in a separate statement that “the calendar in eastern Ukraine does not wait for Washington’s calendar in eastern Iran.”

Independent analysts cautioned against reading Toretsk as a strategic breakthrough for Moscow. Marta Kepe, a Europe defense analyst at a London-based research institute, said the Russian advance remained “grinding rather than decisive” and that the next defensive belt, anchored on Kostiantynivka and the high ground around Chasiv Yar, was significantly better prepared than the lines around Toretsk had been.

“The pattern we’ve seen since February is small towns falling at very high cost to the attacker, with the defender pulling back to better-prepared positions,” Kepe said by phone from London. “What changed today is not the map. What changed is the political clock in Brussels, which had been running slow since March.”

In Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the capture of Toretsk demonstrated “the futility of the Western project in Ukraine” and dismissed the European emergency session as “theater for domestic consumption.” Russian state television led its evening newscast with footage purporting to show Russian flags raised over the rubble of a Toretsk administrative building, though Ukrainian officials disputed the authenticity of some of the imagery.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, speaking briefly to reporters at alliance headquarters, said the secretariat would convene a defense-ministers’ video conference Wednesday morning to coordinate the European deliveries and review what he called “alliance posture along the eastern flank.” He said additional steps on air-policing rotations and a long-planned reinforcement of the Romanian Black Sea presence would be announced after that call.

Ukrainian officials in Kyiv said they expected Russian pressure to continue along the Kostiantynivka axis through the end of May, and that the test of the coming weeks would be whether the European deliveries arrived in time to slow that pressure before the line was tested at scale.