A RUSSIAN TV star and real-life cop has been killed fighting against the Ukrainians at the frontline.
Boris Polovinkin, who played the role of a Russian detective on TV like Inspector Morse, died fighting alongside the Russians in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
As a platoon commander, he was one of the five Russian soldiers on an assault who were hit by a Ukrainian drone as they cowered in a dugout near Kurdiumivka, according to reports.
Polovinkin was a real-life police colonel who became the leading star of the popular fictional series District Detective on Russian state television.
As an officer, he worked on murder cases in the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department after serving in the FSB secret service.
“He was the head of the Criminal Investigation Department, a lieutenant colonel of the police,” said a colleague.
As a TV cop, he solved crimes as a detective in a district of Moscow.
Polovinkin had also fought in Chechnya for the Russian armed forces, but had started as a lumberjack after graduating from Moscow Forestry Institute.
“The result was predictable – we will no longer see him in new TV series,” reported Ukrainian journalist Denis Kazansky.
The report said the cop-turned-actor had volunteered to join the armed forces to fight against the Ukrainians.
Russia has been pushing hard to capture Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk”, in Ukraine’s eastern fortress belt.
Hundreds of Russian soldiers have surged into the urban area – dubbed the gateway to Donetsk – which Ukraine has defended for more than a year against non-stop Kremlin onslaughts.
But brave Ukrainian forces continue to defend the strategic city from falling into the hands of Russian soldiers – even though it seems inevitable.
Moscow says taking Pokrovsk would give it a platform to drive north towards the two biggest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donetsk region – Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Russia wants to take the whole of the Donbas region, which comprises Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk provinces.
Ukraine still controls about ten per cent of Donbas – an area of about 1,930 square miles.
Russia has been threatening Pokrovsk for more than a year, using a pincer movement to attempt to encircle it and threaten supply lines, rather than the deadly frontal assaults it employed to capture the city of Bakhmut in 2023.
If captured by the Russians, the city would be the largest in Ukraine to fall since Bakhmut in May 2023.
But Ukraine’s commanders have refused to order a retreat amid claims their troops continue to inflict eye-watering losses on Russia.
The crisis in Pokrovsk follows months of scorched-earth bombardments that have turned the town into a hell scape of bombed and burned-out buildings.
Sources claimed Russia’s best drone units had been hammering Ukraine’s supply lines – using tactics honed in Russia’s Kursk province, where Ukraine was forced to retreat in March.
Kyiv has acknowledged that the situation in Pokrovsk has become difficult in recent days, but says its troops are still fighting there and denies they are surrounded.
According to warbloggers and open source intelligence accounts, the Russian forces are just a few km away from closing their pincer movement around Pokrovsk and neighbouring Myrnohrad.
They are also closing in on Ukrainian forces in Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region.
PUTIN’S PRIZE JEWEL
ON Ukraine’s bloody frontline, the besieged town of Pokrovsk, dubbed Putin’s “prize jewel”, is being fiercely defended.
The key town of Pokrovsk is strategically critical for Putin’s territorial ambitions.
It is a vital railway and transport hub – which if captured could give Russia a huge supply line advantage, intelligence officer Philip Ingram told The Sun.
Nicknamed the “gateway to Donetsk” by Russian media, controlling the key crossroads city of Pokrovsk would make it lot easier for Putin to seize the rest of the area.
Detailing the gruelling battle, the military expert described it as a “cauldron” city – completely surrounded by Russian occupied land.
Ingram says: “Russia is trying to surround it [Pokrovsk] and close the sides of the cauldron in to isolate the Ukrainian troops that are stuck there.
“Ukraine has been defending it bravely for over a year now.
“This will remain Russia’s main effort in its battle to try and push the Ukrainians.
“Vladimir Putin himself has put this as something that is critically important for him.”
Comparing it to another tiresome battle fought between Russia and Ukraine, he adds: “This is another Bakhmut for the Russians.”
The fight for Bakhmut ended after months of tense fighting, bombing and drone strikes in 2023 – with some analysts describing it as the bloodiest battle of the entire war.
