Ukraine's southeastern counteroffensive has rolled back Russian advances at the intersections of Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Donetsk Oblasts. The Ukrainian attacks set back, by months if not years, the Russian plan for marching on Zaporizhzhia City from the northeast.

But there's a shorter path for the Russians: the southern approach through the town of Orikhiv, around 50 km from Zaporizhzhia City. And the Russians may not need to travel all of it. The stated Russian objective on this axis, according to the Institute for the Study of War, is to advance within tube artillery range of Zaporizhzhia City—which means getting to within 20 or 30 km of a regional capital, not capturing it. That is what Russian forces did to Kharkiv.

The route is short but hard. And for three years, it has been blocked at its first obstacle by the ruins of a prison.

The first obstacle for the Russians is the village of Mala Tokmachka. In particular, the thickly built ruins of a former prison, which function as an interlocking series of bunkers for the Ukrainian 118th Mechanized Brigade. The second obstacle is Orikhiv itself, which sits astride all the passable roads leading to Zaporizhzhia City.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced the capture of Mala Tokmachka on 16 November 2025. Ukrainian government sources still had the village under Ukrainian control in April 2026. Russian milblogger Boris Rozhin's repeated claims that the village was nearly cleared became, in Meduza's account, the most popular Russian military meme of the first half of 2026—shorthand for the distance between what the Russian army announces and what it holds.

Observer Thorkill has watched closely as Russian forces have probed for weaknesses in Ukrainian defenses between the disputed gray zone and Zaporizhzhia City—and found very few.

The Russian army's 270th Motor Rifle Regiment, which is part of the 42nd Motor Rifle Division, has been trying to advance through Mala Tokmachka "for many months," Thorkill noted. But the Russian attacks "have always faltered against the strongly fortified strongpoint in the complex of ruins of the former prison buildings."

If the Russians can't capture Orikhiv, they can't get their artillery within range of Zaporizhzhia City. But they can't capture Orikhiv if they don't first capture Mala Tokmachka. And they can't take Mala Tokmachka if they don't overrun the old prison.

Surround first, storm later

Frustrated in their attempts to directly assault the prison, the Russians took a different approach in early July. Borrowing tactics that have worked for Russian field armies all along the 1,200-km gray zone, the Russians set out to cut off Mala Tokmachka and starve its garrison before trying again to capture the prison complex.

The geography lends itself to this approach. The Russians control the village of Robotyne, 10 km south of Orikhiv, as well as the road leading north from Robotyne through the village of Novodanylivka, which lies just south of the Mala Tokmachka-Orikhiv conglomeration.

If the conglomeration has a soft underbelly, it's Novodanylivka. And in a series of actions in early July, the 71st Motorized Rifle Regiment pushed enough small infiltration groups into Novodanylivka to take the village from the 118th Mechanized Brigade. In capturing Novodanylivka, the Russians "drove a narrow wedge into the Ukrainian defense," according to Thorkill.

The wedge was not the end of the plan. It was the preparation for it. With Novodanylivka in Russian hands and the supply route between Orikhiv and Mala Tokmachka under threat, the Russians came back to the assault.

Five days in August

In the five days to 17 August, Russian forces "massively stepped up their assault operations towards Orikhiv from several different directions, resulting in a partial collapse of Ukrainian defences," mapper AMK Mapping reported. The mapper counted a Russian gain of around 26 sq km across the sector.

The Russians re-established control over the eastern part of Mala Tokmachka and began infiltrating the northern part. Several groups crossed north over the Kinska River and are now attacking Ukrainian trench fortifications on the tactical heights beyond. "If they are able to consolidate," AMK Mapping wrote, "a defense of Mala Tokmachka by Ukraine will become nearly impossible." To the northeast, Russian forces broke through north of Bilohirya, putting the Ukrainian troops there at risk of being cut off.

The Polish Centre for Eastern Studies reached a similar reading on 18 August, reporting that Russian assault sub-units had begun to replace the sabotage and reconnaissance groups, that the battle for the eastern part of Orikhiv appeared to have begun, and that the eastern part of Mala Tokmachka was most likely under Russian control.

Heavy fighting continues for the prison complex and the residential streets around it. "The goal of the offensive operations by the Russian 42nd Motorized Rifle Division is not, for the time being, the capture of Orikhiv," Thorkill wrote, "but rather the elimination of the presence of Ukrainian soldiers in the Mala Tokmachka area."

If the Russians can squeeze the Ukrainians out of Mala Tokmachka, they could pivot toward Orikhiv without worrying about Ukrainian positions at their rear. And they would be one strongpoint closer to putting a regional capital of several hundred thousand people under daily artillery fire.

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Russia's Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, a version of the ground-launched Iskander, travels as far as 2,000 km at a claimed 10 times the speed of sound while packing a 500-kg warhead. It was one of a clutch of purported super-weapons that Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin revealed in a dramatic announcement in 2018.

Launched in mid-air by specially modified Mikoyan MiG-31 interceptors in order to boost its speed and range, the Kinzhal is, in theory, a powerful deep strike munition capable of blasting right through all but the best and rarest air defenses.

In practice, it kept missing. Russia stopped building the $4.5-million missile in April, Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitskyi, Ukraine's deputy chief of defense intelligence, told RBC-Ukraine—and the rocket fuel and components that had gone into Kinzhals now go into Iskanders, sea-launched Kalibr cruise missiles, and air-launched Kh-101 cruise missiles instead.

A missile of this class needs to land within five to seven meters of its aim point to be worth firing. The Kinzhal, according to Skibitskyi, lands within 30 meters or more. "We can hardly recall a single instance where this missile hit the target precisely," he said. Satellite imagery of the Ukrainian air base at Starokostiantyniv, a favorite Kinzhal target, shows the craters ringing the airfield rather than sitting on it.

The Kolomna Machine Building Design Bureau reportedly contracted 44 Kinzhals in 2024 and 144 in 2025, Militarnyi reported from Russian defense ministry documents. The line climbed for two years and then stopped dead.

The Kinzhal isn't the only munition reportedly getting the ax. The Kremlin is also halting production of the Kh-32 air-launched cruise missile, which Russian engineers repeatedly failed to improve before the program was sent back for further work. "This would explain why Russia has not launched any Kinzhals for multiple months, and very few Kh-32s," AMK Mapping noted.

At least one analyst anticipated this development years ago. Way back in 2022, then-CNA analyst Michael Kofman wrote that he didn't "understand the interest in Russian use of Kinzhal. There's nothing special or particularly exciting about this system." It is, according to Kofman, just an Iskander but with a more complicated and expensive launch method.

It may have taken the Russians a few years to come to the same conclusion. The last Kinzhal strike might have been on 14 May, when the Russians launched three Kinzhals as part of a wider strike on Ukrainian cities involving 731 missiles and drones.

The purported Kinzhal shutdown, if true, could orphan the boutique fleet of around two dozen MiG-31K/I interceptors whose main role is to haul a Kinzhal to high altitude before launch. The Kinzhal carriers account for around 20% of the wider MiG-31 fleet, whose main mission is air defense over the vast Russian interior.

The MiGs may end up as victims of ruthless efficiency-seeking. If Skibitskyi is right, the Kremlin simply can't afford to keep every munition in production as it seeks to escalate its bombardment of Ukrainian cities amid growing economic losses from Ukrainian deep strikes targeting Russian strategic industries.

It's possible the only way the Russians can boost production of their best deep strike munitions is to cut production of the underperforming ones. According to the pro-Ukrainian Conflict Intelligence Team, the savings in fuel, components, and funds from the suspended Kinzhal and Kh-32 assembly lines "were redirected to other types of missiles."

Production winners and losers

That's how, in July, Russia reportedly produced 65 Iskanders, surpassing its target of 60 by nearly 10%. Meanwhile, production of Kh-101s reached 140% of the monthly target. Kalibr production 111%. Across its main missile lines, Russian industry is running at 110 to 120% of plan. Certain Russian munitions may soon disappear from the sky over Ukraine, if they haven't already. But only because more copies of better munitions are taking their place.

Ironically, the Kinzhals and their carriers are fading away at the same time Ukraine's own deep strike forces may have landed their most powerful blow against the aerial hypersonic strike force. On 15 August, a barrage of Ukrainian drones and cruise missiles struck a range of targets deep inside Russia.

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Among the targets was Savasleyka air base, in Nizhny Novgorod around 785 km from Ukraine. "Direct hits and fires reported," WarTranslated noted.

Among other aircraft, Savasleyka air base hosts some of the MiG-31Ks that carry Kinzhal missiles. Or once carried them, if Skibitskyi is correct and the missile has fallen out of use. It's unclear whether the attack on Savasleyka damaged or destroyed any MiG-31s.

Even if the Kinzhal launchers burned to the ground, it may be too late to matter. The Russians may have rendered the planes and their missiles irrelevant before the Ukrainians could drone them.