For years, Russian troops probed the Ukrainian garrison at Mykolaivka in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, sending in small teams of infiltrators for the defenders to hunt down. On 29 July, they stopped probing. "The Russians have begun an assault on Mykolaivka from the east," observer Thorkill reported, citing the local Ukrainian Telegram channel nikolaevka_online.

Russian assault groups are attacking the apartment blocks along the town's eastern edge. Mykolaivka sits 8 km east of Sloviansk, one of just two big free cities in Donetsk Oblast, and taking it is the precondition for any Russian siege of the city. "The situation is deteriorating," nikolaevka_online warned.

Mykolaivka is "the eastern gateway to Sloviansk," according to mapper Clément Molin. The Russian offensive in Donetsk aims to lay siege to and ultimately capture Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk, which together are still home to nearly 100,000 people despite hundreds of thousands of others having fled.

A Ukrainian garrison anchored by the 81st Airmobile Brigade has defended Mykolaivka for years. But the garrison has been struggling to interdict every team of Russian infiltrators—and now the infiltrators have company.

The sector is an exception to a mostly frozen front. Russian troops captured 106 square km of Ukrainian territory in July, according to the Blackbird Group—the fastest Russian advance since January, but a fifth of what the Russians seized in July 2025. Blackbird reads the figure as evidence Russia has largely exhausted its offensive options; in June, Russian forces lost 9 square km on net. The slow average along the 1,200 km gray zone belies much faster movement in a handful of sectors, and east of Sloviansk is one of them.

Expect a long, hard fight in and around the ruins of Mykolaivka. "It is highly unlikely that the battle for Sloviansk will begin this year, not least because the fighting in Mykolaivka is likely to be prolonged," Molin explained.

Tough terrain

The geography is difficult for both the defenders and the attackers. The Donets Canal, which abuts Mykolaivka on the west, "aids the Ukrainian defense just as much as it facilitates the Russian offensive," Molin noted. To reinforce the 81st Airmobile Brigade in and around Mykolaivka, Ukrainian troops must cross the canal while under Russian fire. "Massing troops there is a highly complex undertaking," Molin warned.

But the Russian army will face the same challenge if and when it marches through Mykolaivka. "Crossing the canal, particularly around the Sloviansk power plant and its network of waterways, will come at a very high cost, especially given the extensive fortifications the Ukrainians have built in the area over recent months," according to Molin.

In other words, the 81st Airmobile Brigade has fallback positions on the near side of the Donets Canal. If the brigade can't hold Mykolaivka, maybe it can hold the canal—and delay if not halt further Russian advances toward Sloviansk.

The Ukrainians would prefer to hold in Mykolaivka, of course. But it's looking increasingly dire. The Russians appear to be accumulating in the seasonal homes, or "dachas," on the northeastern outskirts of Mykolaivka. "It is difficult to say at this point how many Russian soldiers have infiltrated there," Thorkill wrote. "However, their very presence has forced the command of the 81st Air Assault Brigade—responsible for the city's defense—to secure with patrols."

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Can Ukrainian forces save Sloviansk and Kramatorsk?

The Ukrainian brigade is trying to build a wall of infantry and drones between the dachas and a key road intersection that can carry defenders and attackers across central Mykolaivka.

But the 81st Airmobile Brigade is outnumbered, probably badly so. For the first two years of the wider war, the brigade could count on help from the 54th Mechanized Brigade, which clung to the 81st Airmobile Brigade's right flank.

While the 54th Mechanized Brigade still registers on many maps of the gray zone, in fact it's barely there. "Various snippets of information indicate that the 54th Mechanized Brigade—longtime right-flank neighbor of the 81st Brigade—was completely withdrawn from the front between June and July 2024 and sent to the deep rear," Thorkill wrote. East of Sloviansk, "only its drone group remained."

"The unit had long been a brigade in name only," Thorkill noted. So the 81st Airmobile Brigade fights mostly alone, for now—defending the gateway to Sloviansk.

Russia is trying to seize the town of Lyman in northern Donetsk Oblast to turn it into a base for a push toward the twin cities of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, Ukraine's Joint Forces spokesman Viktor Trehubov said on Ukrainian TV, according to Ukrinform. He described control of the town as a necessity for any Russian advance deeper into the region. For now, he said, Russian troops still cannot establish themselves inside it.

Why Russia needs Lyman

Trehubov said the Russians want to enter Lyman and dig in, aiming to hold the town and use it as a launchpad. 

"The Russians want to enter Lyman and entrench," he said. "Their goal is precisely to take control directly over the settlement."

He stressed that it means "not just somewhere nearby, but over the settlement itself." Russia needs it to "use it as a base for further developing the offensive south toward the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration. Even if you just look at the map, it becomes clear that for them this is a necessity."

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For months Russia has looked for routes that avoid Lyman, he said, including attempts to move through the village of Rai-Oleksandrivka. Without holding the town, he added, any Russian effort to enter Sloviansk would be extremely risky and awkward. So Moscow keeps trying to take it. 

Trehubov told national television that Russian forces have pushed as far as Lyman's eastern edge but cannot secure a foothold there. Lyman sits across the Siverskyi Donets River northeast of the twin cities, the largest settlements still under Ukrainian control in the area.

Ukraine's drones start to tip the balance

Over the past year Ukraine's drone units have grown sharply, gradually shifting the front in Kyiv's favor, Trehubov said. 

"The Russians still have some individual advantages, and there are moments where they have big problems, which they acknowledge, like heavy copters, for example, which they never managed to set up effectively," he said. 

Moscow's failure to field working heavy drones stands out on this stretch of front.

"Overall the situation is evening out in Ukraine's favor thanks to both the quantitative and qualitative growth of Ukrainian drones and drone operators," Trehubov said, adding "There are more of them, they are used more effectively, and the organization of their interaction has become much better relative to the Russian one." 

That shift in the drone math has been building for more than a year.

Over the past day, Ukraine's Defense Forces recorded 226 combat clashes with Russian troops, with the Kostiantynivka direction the most active.

Russia is trying to cut off two of Ukraine's biggest remaining strongholds in the east before it ever storms them, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). The think tank finds Moscow reviving a months-long air campaign against supply lines — the same method that preceded its 2025 advances elsewhere in eastern Ukraine. This time, the target is the Fortress Belt, and the effort leans more heavily on glide bombs than before.

Russia dusts off its 2025 logistics playbook

Through 2025, Russian forces ran long campaigns of drones, glide bombs, and missiles to sever Ukrainian supply lines before pushing near Pokrovsk and Huliaipole. ISW calls this battlefield air interdiction (BAI) — using airpower to strike rear targets behind the front and choke an enemy's logistics. Now the same approach has moved north, ISW assessed, aimed at Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, the twin cities anchoring the top of the Fortress Belt. The goal is to isolate the defenders there from steady resupply. Ukrainian and Russian commentators alike have described the strain, noting that nighttime logistics runs into the two cities have become hard to pull off.

The target list: bridges, rails, and the roads between

Russia has increasingly gone after the locomotives that keep Ukrainian supplies moving, and reportedly handed troops 1,000 Molniya loitering munitions in July 2026 with orders to intensify strikes near Kramatorsk. It has also begun hitting major bridges. Geolocated footage posted on 2 August showed a heavily damaged crossing over the Kazennyi Torets River in eastern Sloviansk. The bridge linked the city to the highway leading to Kramatorsk.

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More glide bombs, fewer drones

This year's campaign appears to lean more heavily on glide bombs than the 2025 versions did, ISW found, with many reports of guided glide-bomb strikes on Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and surrounding settlements over recent weeks. ISW assessed that Russia may be reaching for these heavy bombs because Ukrainian jamming and interceptors have blunted its capacity to field drones as widely as before. The bombs do more than break fortifications. ISW noted the strikes reduce cities to rubble that Russian troops then use as cover, as they have in Kostiantynivka.

A slow build, not a quick breakthrough

The point of the campaign, ISW assessed, is to shape the battlefield for a future offensive against Sloviansk and Kramatorsk — not to seize them now. ISW does not expect Russian forces to reach or push through the cities soon. Russian troops have been infiltrating Kostiantynivka for months without capturing it, despite Russian claims otherwise. Russia's 2025 campaigns needed months to prepare later advances, and ISW expects this one to move just as slowly.

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At the same time, Ukraine's Joint Forces spokesman Viktor Trehubov gave a similar read on Lyman. He told national television that Russia wants the town as a launchpad toward Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. But he said Russian forces still cannot dig in there, and Ukraine's growing drone advantage is tipping the fight toward Kyiv.

A doomed Russian tank assault on 22 July along the southern approaches to the twin cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last big free cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, was ultimately a sideshow. The Russians’ main effort, in their long and bloody campaign to capture all of Donetsk, is playing out in the north, not the south. 

The front northeast of Sloviansk “has been the most successful for the Russian army throughout 2026,” mapper Clément Molin noted. 

The bad news for Ukraine is that its forces in the area—parts of six brigades including the 53rd, 54th and 63rd Mechanized Brigades and the 81st Air Mobile Brigade and the 117th and 120th Territorial Defense Brigades—are “insufficient,” according to Molin. 

Worse, relentless Russian bombardment of the roads and paths leading to and through Sloviansk means the Ukrainians may struggle to sustain any additional brigades in the area. Assuming there are any free brigades, of course.

The bombardment is intensifying. On 31 July, a Russian warplane struck the Sloviansk Chemical Plant, deep inside the city, with a 1,500-kg KAB-1500 precision glide bomb. “The city has come under increasingly heavy attacks in recent days,” AMK Mapping noted.

But the same difficult terrain, crisscrossed by the Donets Canal and dense Ukrainian fortifications, complicates Russian attacks. There are few protected approaches toward Sloviansk from the Russians’ main bases in the ruins of Siversk, 31 km to the east. And one big town town stands between the Russians and the free city: Mykolaivka.

And the Ukrainians are bombarding Russian supply lines with the same intensity that the Russians are bombarding Ukrainian supply line. It’s for those reasons that Molin expects the Russians to eventually lay siege to Sloviansk and neighboring Kramatorsk from the northeast.

But not anytime soon. “It is highly unlikely that the battle for Sloviansk will begin this year, not least because the fighting in Mykolaivka is likely to be prolonged,” Molin predicted.

Crawling advance

The slow pace of the Russian advance belies the worsening conditions in Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. Out of a combined pre-war population of around 440,000, just 90,000 people remain in the twin cities. The other 350,000 have fled.  

As the cities slowly empty, all eyes turn to the tiny village of Rai-Oleksandrivka, 14 km east of Sloviansk. “This small village, seemingly insignificant at first glance, is actually of strategic importance, as the surrounding high ground overlooks the city of Sloviansk,” Molin explained. 

“In recent weeks, Russian forces have been consolidating their hold on the village and the surrounding heights, even though Ukrainian troops still maintain positions in many areas,” Molin wrote. 

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Russian forces are already relentlessly bombarding Ukrainian supply lines in the area with air-launched glide bombs. As Russian ground forces advance closer to Sloviansk and consolidate along key heights such as those around Rai-Oleksandrivka, they can begin aiming more tube artillery at the same supply lines, compounding the Ukrainians’ logistical problems. 

The coming battle is neither won nor lost yet. But time is running out for Ukrainian forces to reset the battlefield in their favor. 

If the Ukrainian command can prioritize the front, and push enough supplies to front-line positions, it might yet save Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. As Ukrainian Pres. Volodymyr Zelensky completes his reshuffle of key civilian and military leaders and a new command, that command’s attention “must shift to the Donbas,” Molin stressed.

Russia is still unable to break into Sloviansk and the fortified towns shielding it, months into an offensive to seize the rest of eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) found. Its troops keep leaning on guided bombs and small groups of infiltrating infantry, while Ukrainian forces counterattack and hunt the drone crews harassing their supply lines. In the latest fighting the attacker moved and the front did not.

Russia's drive on Sloviansk holds nothing new

Russian forces kept up offensive operations toward Sloviansk on 1 and 2 August without a confirmed advance, as Ukrainian units counterattacked, ISW says. A Russian milblogger claimed Ukrainian troops hit back near Rai-Oleksandrivka, just east of the city. Russia's TASS state news agency claimed its forces had taken and were clearing Lyman to the north, but the assessment confirmed no such capture.

The northern approach is not new. Lyman is the gateway to the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk area, and its defense has repeatedly blunted the claw Russia needs to close around the two cities. The current push is part of a Fortress Belt offensive that opened in spring and has crawled forward at heavy cost since.

Russia is using guided bombs to shape Sloviansk before its infantry moves. Vadym Lyakh, head of the city's military administration, reported a FAB-250 glide-bomb strike on the morning of 2 August. The strike fit a long-running pattern: level the buildings from the air to open a path the ground troops have not been able to take.

Kostiantynivka holds as infantry infiltrates on foot

To the south, Russian forces attacked around Kostiantynivka on both days without a confirmed gain, ISW noted. Ukraine's General Staff logged continued fighting, and Russian bloggers claimed only small local moves to the north.

The tactic is the same one Russia has run for weeks. A Ukrainian special-forces officer reported that small groups hide in basements and ruins, waiting for reinforcements, and a Ukrainian non-commissioned officer reported that troops use dense summer foliage to conceal the approach. It echoes the assault Russia has pressed into the city for weeks, flattening it and pushing men in on foot.

Ukrainian forces are striking Russian drone control points in the near rear south of Kostiantynivka, likely in part to protect their supply roads. Ukraine's General Staff reported a strike on one such point near Berestok on 1 August. The drones reach deep: Ukrainian troops described Molniya drones flying up to 20 kilometers and aircraft-type drones up to 40 kilometers, complicating nighttime resupply through Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

"Neither Ukrainian nor Russian forces made confirmed advances on August 2," ISW wrote regarding the situation all across the front.

Ukrainian investigators have published a framework that challenges Russia’s standard justification for missile strikes on civilian places: that a precision weapon hit a legitimate military target. Precision settles nothing, they argue, when the missile takes 10 minutes or more to arrive, and the target is a gathering of people who can leave, disperse, or be warned before it lands.

The report, titled “Out of Control” and published on 28 July by the documentation group Truth Hounds and Project Expedite Justice, builds the argument on four strikes and calls the pattern a “moving target attack.”

The report reaches a war crime conclusion for only one of the four—the 2023 strike on a Kramatorsk cafe. The other three are offered as variations on the same problem, not as verdicts. The framework itself is new: a test the authors want courts and investigators to apply to a kind of attack that existing law, they say, has addressed without enough rigor.

A missile can hit its programmed coordinates exactly and still land where no military objective remains.

The two hours before the pizzeria

The diagnostic case is the strike on the Ria Lounge cafe in central Kramatorsk on 27 June 2023, which killed 13 people and injured 60. A Russian informant last watched the site at around 17:00. The missile arrived at 19:29, after a flight of nine to 15 minutes. In the interval, no one on the Russian side could see who was inside, and once the missile was launched, no one could call it back.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it had destroyed a temporary command post of the 56th Motorized Infantry Brigade, killing two generals, up to 50 officers, and up to 20 foreign mercenaries.

The evidence describes an ordinary pizza restaurant instead: 40 to 50 customers, around half civilians and half off-duty soldiers in mixed dress, unarmed, out with friends and family. A basement room had been booked a month ahead for an officer’s birthday. No one outside could tell the place was military.

The missile struck the public level. The basement that Russia said it was aiming at came through essentially intact. Of the 13 killed, two were serving soldiers. Among the dead was Victoria Amelina, a novelist who had retrained as a war crimes documenter and worked with Truth Hounds itself. The organization concluded in 2023 that the strike was a war crime in the form of an indiscriminate attack under the Rome Statute.

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The gap the weapon leaves open

The framework turns that single case into a test. A moving target attack, as the authors define it, combines three features: a military rationale resting on a temporary presence of personnel, a location of civilian character where civilians are foreseeably present, and a weapon whose flight time is long enough that the situation on the ground can change before impact.

A missile can hit its programmed coordinates exactly and still land where no military objective remains.

The authors selected three further strikes that met the same criteria and examined them through open sources.

In Vinnytsia on 14 July 2022, the report finds, three Kalibr missiles killed 29 people, including three children and five servicemen, and wounded at least 154. Russia said the target was a scheduled Air Force command meeting. The air raid alert sounded at 10:12; the missiles hit at 10:41, about 40 to 50 minutes after launch.

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In Zlatopil on 4 July 2023, the report documents, a missile landed 800 meters from a serviceman’s funeral, in a residential area, wounding 42 civilians including 12 children. Organizers had asked mourners to shelter from the heat about 10 minutes earlier, leaving the square nearly empty.

In Chernihiv on 19 August 2023, a missile fitted with a proximity fuse detonated in the air above the Drama Theatre, where NGOs were running a defense-tech exhibition inside. All seven people killed were outside the building.

For these three, the report states that the evidence does not support conclusions equivalent to Kramatorsk.

What the report asks investigators to do

The recommendations run to the International Criminal Court, the ICRC, the UN human rights office, and prosecutors working under universal jurisdiction.

They ask that the launch-to-impact interval be treated as a working indicator, that technical precision no longer be read as evidence that a strike was lawful, and that the presence of soldiers in a civilian place not be taken to strip it of protection.

One question the report raises and declines to settle is whether the four strikes are a run of targeting failures or a method. Answering it needs orders and targeting packages that only investigators with coercive powers can reach—at a moment when Truth Hounds is working on a budget cut by a third after the US withdrew funding, Reuters reported in May.

Russian troops are working deeper into Ukraine's last fortified cities in Donetsk Oblast, pushing infantry into Kostiantynivka while wrecking the towns behind it, the Ukrainian monitoring and analytical project DeepState reported. The US-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) recorded fresh Russian movement inside the city over the same days.

Kostiantynivka: Russian infantry keeps slipping in

Russian forces keep up constant infiltration attempts on Kostiantynivka, DeepState said. Their aim is to entrench inside the city, mass infantry there and take control of the ground. One of their main tasks is to take control of the part of the city between the settlements of Illinivka and Novodmytrivka. If Russian troops take Novodmytrivka, the entire Ukrainian grouping defending Chasiv Yar faces encirclement, DeepState noted. Supply into Chasiv Yar has been difficult for a long time, because Russian drone numbers hand Moscow the advantage in the air. Alongside the infantry, Russian forces use artillery and guided glide bombs to destroy the city.

ISW assessed on 28 July that Russian forces recently advanced in Kostiantynivka and kept up infiltration missions inside it. Geolocated footage from 27 July points to a Russian advance in the city's west, ISW said. Video published a day later shows Ukrainian troops hitting Russian positions in the north and center of Kostiantynivka, after what ISW assesses were infiltration missions.

Unnamed soldiers from units defending the city told Hromadske that the situation there is getting worse. Ukraine's General Staff counted 31 Russian attacks on the Kostiantynivka axis over the past day.

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Druzhkivka and the towns behind the front are turning to ruins

The whole agglomeration around Kostiantynivka is suffering. DeepState said Druzhkivka and neighboring Oleksiievo-Druzhkivka are gradually turning into ruins under constant shelling, and staying there is extremely dangerous. Russian forces fired 1,243 times at the front line and residential areas of Donetsk Oblast on 28 July, Ukraine's National Police recorded.

Russian pressure is rising on the stretch running roughly from Yampil to Minkivka further north, which may become the next main axis after Kostiantynivka, DeepState said. Russian artillery is already destroying mine barriers along the routes it would use, and Russian drones are working against Ukrainian logistics there.

Sloviansk and Kramatorsk under fire 40 km deep

Russian forces are leveling Sloviansk and Kramatorsk—the northern anchors of the Fortress Belt—with guided glide bombs, rocket artillery, Shahed attack drones and small first-person-view drones that hunt people and cars in the streets. DeepState noted that Russian fire control runs about 40 km deep from the contact line. The agglomeration is gradually becoming an isolated place, where travel will soon be possible only out of critical necessity, in order to fight.

ISW noted that Ukrainian troops have recently advanced farther south, toward Huliaipole in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. A Russian milblogger acknowledged the Ukrainian gains near the town on 28 July.

Overeager to break through Ukrainian defenses and march on the city of Kramatorsk from the south, the Russian Center Group of Forces got desperate and sloppy this week. They paid for their desperation and sloppiness in lives and metal. The tanks were carrying a brand-new anti-drone shield, and they had left the welded scrap metal at home.

That combination is the news. For more than a year, Russian commanders have kept their armor off the roads because Ukrainian drones kill tanks faster than factories can rebuild them. The Arena-M active protection system is the fix that was supposed to let the tanks come back—reliable enough, the Kremlin's own press said 10 days ago, to make the improvised cages unnecessary. This week it went out on a road in Donetsk Oblast without them.

On and around 23 July, the Russians rolled tanks along the road through the village of Pankivka, roughly 36 km southwest of Kramatorsk and its twin free city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk Oblast. Ukrainian drones spotted the tanks coming, and attacked.

When the smoke and dust cleared, the Russians had lost at least 9 tanks. Ukrainian tank kills were already running hot: the general staff in Kyiv claimed Ukrainian forces took out 28 Russian tanks across the 1,200-km gray zone in the two days before, 21–22 July. "It was a good day," wrote Dimko Zhluktenko, a soldier with the Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces' 413th Regiment.

The mechanized assault was unusual for its rarity. For more than a year now, the Russian army of occupation in Ukraine has mostly parked its armored vehicles, and instead attacked on foot or on motorcycles or other light vehicles. The pause in mechanized assaults has bought time for the Kremlin to ramp up vehicle production and bring battered regiments and brigades back to up to their full allotment of tanks and other armored vehicles.

But those vehicles aren't necessarily being used in Ukraine. Ukrainian tiny explosive drones are everywhere all the time, and Russian forces have few ways of reliably defeating them. Russian commanders correctly concluded that small groups of infantry stand a better chance of slipping past Ukraine's undermanned defenses than big, easy-to-detect tanks do.

Infantry infiltrations work. They're how Russian assault groups have ground their way into the city of Kostiantynivka, 24 km southeast of Kramatorsk. Moscow claimed the city on 3 July. Ukraine's general staff says it still holds it. And infiltration is how the Russians are gradually creeping around the city of Lyman, 21 km northeast of Sloviansk. The infiltrations are slowly closing a vice around Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, the last free big cities in Donetsk Oblast.

Costly attacks

But the infantry action is costly. The Kremlin recruits around 30,000 fresh troops every month but, if the Ukrainian general staff's tallies of killed and wounded are accurate, loses roughly that many troops every month. Ukraine is desperately short of infantry. Russia isn't nearly as desperate, but that doesn't mean it's got infantry to spare.

Last month, analyst Jompy predicted that if infantry casualties spiked or recruitment slipped, Russian commanders "could also be forced to go back to mechanized warfare." That may be why the Center Group of Forces pivoted back to tank-led assaults in their south-to-north push toward Kramatorsk.

The shield that replaced the scrap metal

Without so-called "active defenses" that can shoot down incoming drones, "it is currently very easy to throw a tank battalion into [an] assault and lose it all without achieving anything," analyst Jakub Janovsky explained. The Arena-M is Russia's answer. It uses a Doppler radar to spot incoming rockets, missiles, and drones, and 12 launchers ringed around the turret fire tiny charges meant to shred the threat a few meters out.

Twelve is the whole magazine. And the system does not run itself: the commander switches it on when reconnaissance or a drone detector warns him, the Russian state newspaper Izvestia reported on 13 July, in a dispatch from a training range where crews of the Center grouping's 90th Tank Division were learning the new machines.

That dispatch is worth reading for what the reporter noticed was missing. No turtle armor. No tsar-mangal. No dreads, no cages, no hedgehogs—none of the welded scrap the Russian army has bolted onto its armor for two years. A company commander told Izvestia the system had shown high effectiveness against drones on the range, and that the tanks would reach the line of contact within days. Russian industry has been calling the Arena-M the first system in the world able to protect armor from FPV drones and loitering munitions. Israel's Rafael announced drone-interception upgrades to its Trophy system in January 2025.

Ten days later the tanks were on the road, without the cages, and Ukrainian drones found them. Footage published by Ukraine's border guards and by the National Guard's Omega unit shows a T-72B3A taking a hit to the rear, then two more drones finishing it. A second tank—this one wearing a conventional mangal cage—was leading it and was immobilized too. Both Russian answers to the drone problem were on that road. Neither one came off it.

What the shield actually did is contested, and the argument is worth following. One Russian armor specialist watching the video saw no reaction at all—countermeasures still sitting in their launchers, no attempt to engage. Observer Matt Drew, watching the same footage, read it the other way: a puff of smoke off the turret in the opening seconds, an explosion to the side, and several drone feeds that cut out before reaching the tank—which is what an interception looks like from the drone's camera. Only after the tanks were disabled and abandoned could the drones close in and linger, and it took bomber drones to finish the hulks. "Probably not the success the Russians were hoping for," Drew wrote, "but it definitely worked for a while."

A while is the problem. Twelve charges is a finite number and Ukrainian drone crews do not attack in twelves. A shield that intercepts the first drones and runs dry against the tenth turns a tank into a slower target, not a surviving one. And the latest push toward Kramatorsk failed.

That doesn't mean Kramatorsk and Sloviansk are safe. Hurling tens of thousands of troops and, occasionally, a few armored vehicles against Ukrainian defenses, the Russian Center Group of Forces is making very, very slow progress toward the twin cities from both the south and the north.

But every assault the Ukrainians defeat delays the day when Kramatorsk and Sloviansk come under direct siege and infiltration. The cities are most vulnerable from the north around Lyman, mapper Clément Molin noted. "The current situation is not very good for Ukraine in this direction."

At the current rate of advance, the Russians may be able to slip their first infiltrators into Sloviansk from the north some time next year, Molin concluded.