KYIV — Russian forces drew within three kilometers of the eastern Ukrainian logistics hub of Pokrovsk on Thursday after a fresh wave of glide-bomb strikes and infantry probes, the closest they have come to the city since the war began, as European Union ambassadors in Brussels cleared a long-stalled air-defense tranche for Kyiv that officials acknowledged should have been authorized in early March.

The Ukrainian General Staff said Russian troops had taken three small villages in the suburbs over the previous 48 hours, consolidating a salient that now threatens the highway and rail lines feeding the Donetsk region’s largest western logistics node. Ukrainian commanders have not ordered a general withdrawal from Pokrovsk, which serves as the rear base for operations along a 60-kilometer arc of the front, but engineering brigades have begun extracting non-essential supplies and have demolished two bridges east of the city to slow any armored thrust.

“The geometry of the front is being redrawn while the West catches its breath,” said Mykola Bielieskov, a Kyiv-based military analyst at the National Institute for Strategic Studies. “Pokrovsk has been the backbone of the Donetsk defensive system for two years. If it falls, the question is not only what happens to the city itself but to the half-dozen towns that depend on its logistics.”

The renewed Russian pressure marks the culmination of a roughly six-week window in which Moscow exploited Western preoccupation with the Iran-Israel war and its diplomatic aftermath. Senior European officials have acknowledged that munitions deliveries, air-defense rotations and ministerial-level decision-making on Ukraine slowed sharply between mid-March and mid-April, even as the Kremlin accelerated operations along the Pokrovsk and Chasiv Yar axes.

In Brussels on Thursday afternoon, the EU’s Political and Security Committee endorsed a 1.6-billion-euro release from the European Peace Facility specifically earmarked for air-defense interceptors and radar replacement, according to two diplomats familiar with the deliberations. The package, originally scheduled for a March 10 decision and then twice deferred, was the largest single Ukraine-related authorization since the start of the year. A formal communiqué was expected Friday.

“Today’s decision closes a gap that the Iran war forced open,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas told reporters in a brief statement outside the Berlaymont. “I will not pretend the gap had no cost. It did. The work now is to make sure it does not widen again.”

The Brussels move was paired with parallel announcements from national capitals. Berlin confirmed that the two IRIS-T air-defense units re-routed to a German Gulf contingent during the war would be redirected to Kyiv next week, and that a separate order had been accelerated for delivery in July. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, speaking at the Bundestag’s defense committee, said the German government would also lease two long-range surveillance radars to Ukraine on a 12-month rotation, a step Berlin had resisted before the Iran war but which officials now describe as “operationally necessary.”

In Paris, French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné announced that Paris would dispatch an additional Mamba surface-to-air battery and expand French training of Ukrainian air-defense crews at a base in eastern France. The Czech-led artillery shell initiative also closed a new procurement cycle this week, with commitments from Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway totaling roughly 480,000 shells for delivery by September, according to a statement from the Czech foreign ministry in Prague.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his nightly address Wednesday, welcomed the European moves but warned that “decisions in Brussels arrive in Pokrovsk only after they arrive on trucks.” He said Ukrainian air-defense crews had intercepted 41 of 56 incoming drones and missiles over the previous 24 hours, a hit rate he described as “the lowest since February” and a direct consequence of interceptor stocks “rebuilt only this week.”

Russian operations have shifted in character as well as scale. Ukrainian intelligence officers, briefing reporters in Kyiv on Wednesday under conditions of anonymity, said Russian forces had begun deploying a higher proportion of glide-bomb sorties against fixed defensive positions, particularly along the approaches to Pokrovsk and the towns of Toretsk and Kostiantynivka. The shift, the officers said, reflected Moscow’s calculation that depleted Ukrainian air-defense stocks would not be able to push intercept envelopes far enough forward to threaten Russian aircraft launching the munitions from inside Russian airspace.

“The math is brutally simple,” said Marta Kepe, a defense analyst at a London-based research institute. “Each glide-bomb sortie that goes unchallenged is a structure destroyed, a position degraded, a unit pinned down. Multiply that by six weeks of slowed Western deliveries and you get the situation around Pokrovsk.”

The Trump administration’s posture on Ukraine has remained consistent through the war’s aftermath, with senior officials describing Europe as the appropriate “anchor” for the file in the immediate term while Washington focuses on Iran ceasefire monitoring and a Gulf reconstruction supplemental. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters at the State Department, said the United States would continue to provide intelligence and logistics support to Ukrainian forces and that “no decisions” had been made on additional U.S. military assistance. House Speaker Mike Johnson, asked whether a stand-alone Ukraine supplemental could reach the floor before Memorial Day, repeated his position that the Iran supplemental would be addressed first.

European officials have begun to organize as though American assistance will arrive late or in smaller volumes. A senior official in the European External Action Service, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bloc had “stress-tested” Ukrainian needs through August on the assumption of only modest additional U.S. munitions support, and was preparing a follow-on financing package for presentation at a Foreign Affairs Council meeting on May 19.

Moscow’s posture has been correspondingly bullish. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova described the EU’s Brussels decision as “a futile gesture” and said Russian operations would continue “until the political objectives of the special military operation are achieved.” A Defense Ministry briefing in Moscow claimed advances of “up to four kilometers” along the Pokrovsk axis over the previous week — figures that broadly aligned with Ukrainian acknowledgments.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, after a defense-ministers’ video conference Thursday morning, said allied air-policing rotations over the Black Sea would be increased and that a Polish-led contingent would expand its presence in southeastern Romania. He declined to characterize the situation around Pokrovsk as a strategic emergency but said the alliance “recognizes the asymmetry of the past six weeks and the work required to close it.”

In Kyiv, the mood among officials Thursday was one of weary calibration rather than alarm. Olha Stefanishyna, deputy prime minister for European integration, said the government had “absorbed harder weeks than this one” and that the renewed European pace would, given a month, restore deterrent depth along the eastern front. The General Staff said additional defensive engineering works west of Pokrovsk would be announced in the coming days.