Fighters of the Bratstvo Battalion, part of the Timur Special Unit of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR), captured three Russian servicemen and gave first aid to one of them, HUR reported on 19 October. They also found and destroyed Russian sabotage groups, HUR said, adding that counter-sabotage operations in the Zaporizhzhia direction are ongoing.

Russian forces have spent months trying to get closer to Zaporizhzhia, one of Ukraine’s largest cities. They may try to use the dried-up bed of the Kakhovka Reservoir to infiltrate north toward it as autumn fog and dense vegetation set in, the Institute for the Study of War reported on 26 September. Ukrainian troops are now clearing the area of Russian saboteurs trying to get into the rear of Ukrainian positions, according to HUR.

HUR’s video shows the fighting and the captures, with one dead Russian soldier blurred. At the end, a captured Russian says two of the three men in his group were killed by a “Baba Yaga,” the nickname Russian troops use for Ukraine’s heavy bomber drones.

HUR described what the Russian groups are trying to do:

“Using small sabotage groups, the enemy is attempting to penetrate deep into the rear positions of Ukraine’s Defense Forces, build up forces to destabilize the situation, disrupt logistics, and neutralize Ukrainian defenders’ combat crews.”

Russia seeks to bring the front closer to Zaporizhzhia

Russia’s objective in the Zaporizhzhia direction is to advance within artillery range of the city, hold forward positions, and protect its rear from Ukrainian strikes, the Institute for the Study of War noted.

In January, Russian forces were trying to capture Stepnohirsk and advance along the shore of the former Kakhovka Reservoir toward Zaporizhzhia. Taking the settlement would let Russian troops place long-range artillery or fiber-optic drones there to strike the city’s outskirts, Southern Defense Forces spokesperson Vladyslav Voloshyn told Ukrinform on 14 January.

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Russia drained the Kakhovka Reservoir. Now it hides in the dry bed to creep toward Zaporizhzhia

On 22 September, Anastasiia Shevchenko, spokesperson for the Southern Forces Group, said there were no signs of preparations for a direct offensive on Zaporizhzhia and that Russian forces lacked the troops and means to advance directly toward the city.

Dense vegetation and limited visibility: combat on the reservoir bed

The Kakhovka Reservoir was a vast artificial body of water on the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine that supplied water to millions of people, as well as to agriculture and industry. On 6 June 2023, Russian forces blew up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant, the Southern Operational Command reported.

After the dam was destroyed, the bed of the former reservoir quickly became overgrown with willows, poplars, and shrubs, creating a new battlefield. Ukrainian troops have fought there before.

In November 2025, fighters from the same Bratstvo unit carried out a reconnaissance and sabotage operation 7 kilometers from the shoreline of the former reservoir, HUR said. They found and eliminated Russian troops, then raised the Ukrainian flag over the islands there and took control of the area.

In April, the Bratstvo unit’s chief of staff, who goes by the call sign “Dyviziia,” described the conditions on an earlier raid across the reservoir bed:

“You’re just constantly moving through these thickets, with no way to figure out which direction to go. You can literally see everything just two meters ahead of you.”

Russian missiles and drones destroyed 13 million Ukrainian books this summer, The Guardian reported. That is about a third of all books printed in Ukraine this year, the government estimates.

Russia is striking civilian warehouses, including those where publishers store their books. The uncertainty is pushing publishers toward safe international bestsellers, Publishers Weekly reported. "We'll all end up fed up with safe, non-risky books—if there are still publishers around to publish them," said Iryna Baturevych, co-founder of the publishing news outlet Chytomo.

Millions of Ukrainian books on fire

Ranok is one of Ukraine's largest publishing houses and a leader in children's literature and school textbooks. On one day in August, Russia destroyed more than 85% of its stock, The Guardian reported.

Viktor Kruhlov, the publisher's co-founder and chief executive, was on the warehouse floor at its headquarters in Kharkiv. The facility, built on the site of a former bread factory, covered about 10,000 m².

Together with five senior colleagues, he was discussing plans for the upcoming school year, the peak of the distribution season. Moments after the meeting began, a strike hit about 30 meters from where the staff had gathered. Kruhlov heard an explosion and almost at once saw a huge fire. As colleagues tried to put out the flames, a second strike came, and he realized there could be a third and a fourth, so the staff evacuated. Fifty people were on shift that day, and no one was injured, Kruhlov told The Guardian.

Eight million books, including 628,000 new school textbooks, were in the warehouse at the time. None could be saved. Firefighters battled the blaze for a week.

Several editorial staff members who saw the remains of the warehouse for the first time looked shaken as they recognized fragments of books they had helped create.

"When you see what was produced with your brain, with your hands, with your imagination, spoiled by Russia, it's an awful feeling," Kruhlov said.

He predicted shortages at Ranok's stores this fall, when the books in stock run out and there is nothing to replace them.

Literature is part of Ukrainian identity

Kruhlov is convinced that Russia deliberately targeted the book warehouse, but Bohdana Laiuk, Ukraine's deputy culture minister, sees the strikes as part of Russia's broader campaign against warehouses, The Guardian wrote.

"They cannot occupy Kyiv. So they target warehouses around Kyiv to take the possibility of everyday life from us—and books are part of everyday life," she said.

Books also matter to Russia's occupiers, Laiuk said.

"When the Russians occupy, the first thing they do—and we know this from the areas that were occupied and then liberated in 2022 in the Kherson and Kharkiv regions—is to go to the libraries, take the Ukrainian language books out, and destroy them," Laiuk said.

Before 2022, about 70% of the Ukrainian book market consisted of Russian-language titles, most of them imported from Russia.

Russian dominance in Ukrainian publishing developed over centuries, from tsarist bans on publishing in Ukrainian in the 19th century to Soviet Russification. Ukrainian writers were purged, and Ukrainian literature stayed in the shadow of Russian literature, the article notes.

Laiuk calls the dominance of Russian books a form of colonialism. Russia deliberately built its own information space in Ukraine through books, media, and television, she argues, so that everything would be ready for it once its tanks arrived.

Even after independence, a commercially successful Ukrainian-language novel was long seen as unlikely. But at the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukrainian bookstores stopped selling Russian imports, and interest in Ukrainian literature grew, from 1920s classics and poetry to contemporary authors and translations.

"So people are asking: what does it actually mean to be Ukrainian? Literary culture gives us the place to understand who we are," Laiuk told The Guardian in 2023.

The future of Ukrainian literature is uncertain

Ranok is now rushing to reprint textbooks and bestsellers: schools need the former, while sales of popular titles will help the publisher make up for lost revenue.

For debut authors and writers of less commercial or experimental books, the situation is particularly difficult. Even before the strike on Ranok's warehouse, some publications had been delayed by attacks on printing infrastructure.

Ksenia Shpak's debut novel, an urban fantasy about a girl displaced from eastern Ukraine to the Carpathians, was due out in February 2025 but was published only that November, the article says. Half of the print run was in Ranok's Kharkiv warehouse when it was attacked.

It was her first published book, and Shpak fears the publisher will now focus on bestsellers and reprint her novel only if money allows. The Ukrainian book market is also feeling demand level off and the cost of living rise, she said.

Despite the loss of 8 million books, Kruhlov remained optimistic. Looking over the ruined warehouse in Kharkiv, he said he planned to rebuild everything—and to do it better.