Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
A contested stretch of woodland in Ukraine’s northeast had become a staging ground for Russia’s autumn push.
Ukrainian special forces moved through the tree line, and for days afterward Russian commanders kept acting as if nothing had changed.
Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate, the HUR, announced on Thursday that a seven-week covert operation by its Group 10 unit had cleared 642 hectares of contested forest in Sumy Oblast and broken an offensive that had been building on that ground. The cleared positions were then handed to other Ukrainian military units.
What the HUR also disclosed was the deception that followed. For about two weeks after the second phase of the operation ended, Russian command did not know the forest tracts and positions had passed to Ukrainian control.
In that window, Russian forces continued to send supply packages into the area and tried to open communications with units that were no longer there.
“Even in the second stage, when we finished our work and completely pulled back from the task, the enemy command thought for two weeks that those were still their forests, still their positions, dropping packages to them and trying to make radio contact,” a masked operator said in a video essay about the operation.
None of the information, including the claim about the Russian army continuing to send parcels to the area, has been independently verified.
A code name taken from prisoner slang
The operation’s name, “Cheburechna,” came from radio slang the operators used in the field. A “cheburek,” normally a deep-fried meat turnover, became shorthand for a captured Russian soldier, with each prisoner reported as “one more cheburek,” according to UNN.
Group 10 belongs to the HUR’s Active Operations Department. The mission ran in two phases through the autumn, following roughly a month of reconnaissance preparation.
The numbers the HUR put on the operation
The HUR put Russian losses at 107 killed, 157 wounded, and 29 taken prisoner. Equipment and infrastructure destroyed included 61 drone launch sites or control points, 31 artillery systems, 368 vehicles, and 630 shelters and fortified positions, the intelligence directorate said.
Those figures come from Ukrainian military intelligence and has not been independently verified.
Four Ukrainian operators were killed during the mission. The HUR identified them only by their call signs: Yuki, Travka, Syoma, and Bas.
