Drone-Led Ukrainian Offensive Retakes Ground in Critical Eastern Front Sector

A low-profile, patient counteroffensive led by a crack Ukrainian combat corps has pushed back Kremlin forces up to 15 kilometers (9 miles) in an eastern sector of the fighting front and potentially cutting off hundreds of Russian troops from supply and support. The Ukrainian ground gains and battle successes to the north of the fortress city Lyman have been step-by-step and incremental, the result of months of small-scale infantry assaults densely covered by strike and observation drones to route Russian defenders from positions, field reports and analysts say.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. The 3rd Army Corps, a major Ukrainian army formation with roots in a single, untrained volunteer civilian infantry battalion raised in Kyiv to help defend the capital in February 2022, is reportedly at the center of the offensive. Ukraine’s army has kept a tight lid on ongoing operations in the Lyman sector for months, practically banning media visits to front lines and only reporting the fact of heavy fighting, while confirming neither terrain gains nor losses. The sector – located between the Siverskyi Donets River, a major waterway, and the Zherebets River, a local barrier waterway – is covered with thick woods or swamp, intermixed with rolling hills, farmland and agricultural villages News and information feeds of formations assigned to the 3rd Corps and reviewed by Kyiv Post painted a consistent picture of successful offensive operations accompanied by heavy Russian casualties due to drone strikes, but as per Ukrainian Armed Forces’ (AFU) OPSEC rules, the information was presented without identifying geographical locations. Civilian rescue information networks monitored by Kyiv Post confirm continuing but limited Ukrainian losses in the sector. Other Topics of Interest Donbasification: How Russia Manufactured an Identity How an economic term for a coal basin became a weaponized identity – and how Russia spent decades manufacturing the divide it later claimed to discover. In comments to Ukrainian media in July and August, Brig. Gen. Andriy Biletsky, the 3rd Corps commander, acknowledged his troops were carrying out limited counterattacks to expand Ukrainian control of territory north and east of Lyman, and that the operations were generally successful. Biletsky is a proponent of drone-led tactics with unmanned aircraft preceding, covering and providing fire support to small infantry units advancing in light armored vehicles to Russian positions to disembark and carefully mop up resistance on foot. Multiple sources outside Ukraine are pointing to hard AFU ground gains in rough, wooded and swampy terrain northeast of Lyman, near the village Drobysheve, that had carved a 5 km x 10 km (3 x 6 mile) salient into Russian defenses and cut a key Russian supply road, potentially threatening Russian army units in the area with isolation. Kyiv Post researchers confirmed the presence of at least four Ukrainian combat brigades in action in the sector but did not publish identities for security reasons. All reports said the pocket now nearly encircled by the Ukrainians contained Russian troops, with estimates ranging from a few dozen to several hundred. The Ukrainian drone unit Phoenix, a veteran air strike outfit drawn from Ukraine’s border troops forces, on Sept. 1 published imagery it said was from operations in air space above the Lyman sector. The footage shows first person view (FPV) and bomber drones attacking Russian motorcycles and trucks, individual infantrymen, and fortifications thought to hold Russian troops. Accompanying text states camouflage and shelters did not protect the targets. Footage published by the unit on Aug. 31 showed strike drones hitting Russian artillery (including a 2A36 Giatsint-B gun, a D-20 howitzer, and a BM-21 Grad MLRS), along with more trucks, motorcycles, transport vans and fighting positions. Ukrainian military media reported the actions depicted were authentic, but Kyiv Post could not confirm each engagement independently. Graphics in a situation assessment published on Aug. 31 by the US-based Institute for the Study of War showed Ukrainian forces to have reached the outskirts of Zarichne, a large village, which, if captured by Kyiv’s forces, would create a full-on encirclement of potentially hundreds more Russian troops in a 15 km x 45 km “kessel” (or “cauldron,” to use the German military term for encirclement).For both sides in the Russo-Ukrainian War, ground gains by attacks since 2023 have been orders of magnitude slower and punishingly expensive. Russian forces in 2024 spent almost a year and lost at least one half of an estimated 80,000 men army sent to conquer a similar-sized space of ground between the Ukrainian cities of Adviivka and Pokrovsk. Neither side has reported heavy or even continuing Ukrainian casualties in actions around Lyman.German OSINT researcher Andy Schneider in an Aug. 25 X comment on the Lyman battles said that contrary to Russian claims the city Lyman is fully under Ukrainian control, and that the Ukrainian advance to the east of the city cutting supply roads had formed “pockets of tactically enclosed units.”Schneider wrote: “This is a systematic failure of the Russian defensive lines. The AFU has seized the initiative and can thus, as desired, launch a comprehensive strategic offensive from local successes. We will see if this happens.”The widely read pro-Moscow milblogger Rybar (Mikhail Zvinchuk, a former Russian army officer and high-profile propagandist) in an Aug. 23 situation estimate passed on to his more than 1.5 million followers imagery that effectively matched Western reports of Ukrainian progress around Lyman but downplayed the importance of the success, saying: “Ukrainian formations are undertaking counterattacks in the area of Korovii Yar. Judging by objective control footage, the AFU managed to restore part of the positions on the approaches to the C051020 highway.”French military analyst Clément Molin in an Aug. 30 confirmation of Ukrainian progress around Lyman city praised the AFU for maintaining tight OPSEC around the operation and that in his view “it is now too late” for Russia to salvage the situation, because Ukrainian advances have bitten too deeply into formerly Russian-controlled territory for Russian forces to take them back without prohibitive losses. Fighting was continuing over a 200 km-squared (124 square mile) battle area, he said, but already the Kremlin has suffered “a significant blow.”The Ukrainian success will undermine Russian chances of carrying out its latest attack plans: an offensive to the south that Moscow hopes will capture the fortress cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk they have been trying to control for more than 12 years.The Russian Defense Ministry, for its part, has insisted its forces under the command of 25th Combined Arms Army have made continual ground gains over August, and acknowledged no successful Ukrainian counterattacks. In May, the Russian Defense Ministry announced, falsely, that its troops had captured Lyman entirely. Subsequent statements by that agency have tacitly acknowledged Ukrainian forces actually still control the town by reporting continued Russian attacks against Ukrainian defenses there.A key plank of the Russian state narrative about its invasion of Ukraine is that Russian progress is slow but relentless and that Moscow’s current main war aims – the total conquest of Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions – will inevitably be reached.According to Ukraine’s government, its forces had brought net Russian ground gains to a total halt in May 2026 and that since then Ukrainian forces have, each month, liberated more Ukrainian territory than Russia has taken.