KYIV, Ukraine — Exclusive drone footage obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday shows a devastated Ukrainian town nearly encircled by Russian forces near the city that Moscow this week claimed to now control.

Barely a street appears to be untouched in Myrnohrad in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, 12 kilometers (7 miles) from the key logistics hub of Pokrovsk. Some destruction is so fresh that smoke was still rising in the footage shot in the past few days.

“They are trying to simply erase the (town) from the face of the earth,” said Oleksii Hodzenko, press officer of the drone battalion of the 38th Marine Brigade, whose soldiers were still fighting inside Myrnohrad on Wednesday.

The town is almost encircled by Russian forces, according to DeepState, an open-source Ukrainian map w

See Full Page