For much of the past year, Russian drones, rockets and glide bombs have blasted the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine.
The shelling has scarred the city's infrastructure, hammering large holes in the facades of apartment blocks and reducing some to rubble.
From a pre-war population of more than 60,000, about 1,200 remain in the city, according to regional authorities.
Those who decided to stay live in their basements in the most spartan of conditions.
Now it looks like the fight for this small, but strategically important city is entering a critical stage.
This week, the general staff of Ukraine's armed forces confirmed that about 200 Russian soldiers had broken through the lines and into the centre of Pokrovsk.
Ukrainska Pravda, a news website, this week also cited reports of fierce street fighting in the city.
However, Ukrainian forces defending Pokrovsk are not encircled as Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed on Wednesday.
Geolocated footage assessed by the Institute of the Study of War (ISW), a US-based think tank that publishes daily reports on frontline activity in Ukraine, shows Russian infiltration in the east of the city.
Mapping by ISW shows Russian forces have taken the southern edges of Pokrovsk but still remain about 6km to 8km from linking up with Russian units to the north of the city.
Both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine's top general Oleksandr Syrskyi, who visited frontline units in the area on Thursday, denied the claims of encirclement.
Looking at interactive updates by DeepState, a Ukrainian group that maps frontline positions, a large part of the centre of Pokrovsk is now highlighted in grey, indicating that neither Ukrainian nor Russian forces fully control the area.
Capturing Pokrovsk, a rail hub in the Donetsk region, would establish a strategically important bridgehead for Russian forces.
They could then advance farther north along a main road that leads to another strategically important city, Kramatorsk, about 80km north, and just beyond that, to the city of Slovyansk.
Russia’s leader desperately wants full control of the mineral-rich region.
He reportedly told US President Donald Trump during their Alaska meeting last August that he would freeze Russia’s invasion provided Ukraine withdrew its forces from Donetsk and Luhansk, already almost entirely occupied by Russian forces, as his price for ending the war.
According to ISW, there are about 11,000 Russian troops concentrated in the area around Pokrovsk.
Ukrainian officials have not commented on the size of their troop levels defending Pokrovsk.
But Mr Zelensky said this week that Russian forces outnumber Ukrainian units around the city by eight to one.
That ratio spells out the dire manpower deficit facing Ukraine’s armed forces along the front in general.
Ukraine's inability to redirect a few thousand men to defend a strategically important hub like Pokrovsk shows it has real problems with replenishing frontline units.
The Kyiv-based editor of the Atlantic Council's UkraineAlert service, Peter Dickinson, wrote this week that Ukraine's mobilisation issue "has been exacerbated by President Zelensky’s reluctance" to lower the age for compulsory military service from 25 to 18.
Instead of lowering the draft age, Mr Zelensky backed a government plan earlier this year that offers bonuses to young recruits if they sign up to fight for a year.
That initiative, Mr Dickinson said, has so far failed to fill the gaps in Ukraine’s frontline units.
Recruitment figures may also be down due to the Ukrainian government’s decision in August to ease travel restrictions for young Ukrainian men, aged 18 to 22, enabling that particular cohort to leave the country for the first time since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Data published this week by the Polish Border Guard showed that about 45,000 Ukrainian men, aged 18 to 22, entered Poland between January and August this year.
However, almost 100,000 young men from the same age group have entered Poland since late August when Ukraine eased its exit rules, marking a significant increase.
It appears that many of those young men who enter Poland keep travelling west to Germany.
This is known as Germany’s federal ministry has also reported a significant increase in the number of Ukrainian men, aged 18 to 22, entering the country.
The figure is up from about 100 per week in late August to more than 1,400 per week in October.
Those numbers prompted Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder, from the Christian-conservative CSU, to last week call on the European Union and the German federal government to influence Ukraine to reverse its relaxed exit rule for young men.
"It doesn't help anyone if more and more young men from Ukraine come to Germany instead of defending their own homeland," Mr Söder told Bild, a German tabloid.
In Poland, the far-right Confederation party was quick to criticise the government for allowing more young Ukrainian men to enter the country.
The unknown factor for Ukraine's government is just how many of the young men will voluntarily decide to return home and face the draft after years abroad.
The battle for Pokrovsk is following the same pattern that befell other large towns in eastern Ukraine, occupied by Russia during this war.
Russia lays siege through rocket and artillery fire for months, making the area uninhabitable for the residents.
Then repeated squads of Russian troops are sent headfirst into bitter urban combat until Ukrainian forces order a tactical withdrawal.
The final act involves Moscow claiming a pyrrhic victory over a charred landscape of destroyed flats and desolate streets.
If Russian troops take the ruins of Pokrovsk in the coming weeks, then Mr Putin will likely sell it as a vindication of Russian war tactics in Ukraine.
He will use it to promote a Kremlin narrative that the "special military operation", as he terms the war, is still headed for victory.
Those war tactics continue to include massive nightly attacks on Ukrainian cities, now taking place on a larger scale than at any previous point during the war.
On Wednesday night into Thursday morning, Russian forces fired more than 650 drones and about 50 missiles at targets across Ukraine, mostly targeting the country's energy infrastructure.
But the attacks also hit residential areas and killed civilians.
With the Trump administration's efforts to bring Russia to the negotiating table stalled yet again, Russia is under little pressure to reduce its volley of night-time attacks on cities.
But whereas European military aid can continue to help Ukraine bolster air defences in cities and contribute heavy equipment to the battlefield, Ukraine's recruitment problem remains its own issue to solve.
Without enough troops to replenish frontline units, Ukraine's defence of key cities in Donetsk, like Pokrovsk, will become more challenging.
