Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
In a war now shaped as much by narrative as by artillery, the timing of a Kremlin announcement can be as telling as the claim itself.
On the day Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sat next to US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, Russia’s Defense Ministry told the world it had encircled a Ukrainian city that, on the ground, remained in Ukrainian hands.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington think tank that publishes daily assessments of the war, documented on September 22 that the Russian Ministry of Defense had “falsely claimed that Russian forces have encircled Dobropillya,” a mining town in the Donetsk region.
ISW said the claim was incompatible with assessed control of terrain and with recent Ukrainian battlefield reporting.
Neither Ukrainian nor Russian forces advanced anywhere along the front on September 22, according to the same assessment.
An “intensification” of cognitive warfare
ISW frames the Dobropillya claim as part of a wider pattern, calling it an “intensification of the Kremlin’s cognitive warfare campaign alleging encirclements across various sectors of the frontline to falsely present Ukrainian defenses as collapsing.”
The think tank ties the timing directly to the UN. Moscow is likely amplifying the encirclement narrative “against the backdrop of the ongoing UN General Assembly (UNGA) session and recent Ukrainian successes on the northern flank of the Fortress Belt,” ISW writes.
The Fortress Belt is Ukraine’s fortified defensive line in Donetsk running through Kramatorsk, Slovyansk and surrounding towns.
ISW notes that similar false encirclement claims have been made before, in Kursk Oblast in October 2024, around Kupyansk through the fall and winter of 2025-2026, and in the Rubtsi direction northwest of Lyman in June 2026.
The recent Ukrainian gains ISW cites are north of Lyman, where it says Ukrainian forces have eliminated a Russian salient in recent months as part of an operation Kyiv calls Vivaldi. A Ukrainian brigade staff officer in the area told ISW that Ukrainian troops had liberated at least 125 square kilometers there.
Zelensky and Trump meet as claims fly
The false encirclement claim landed the same day Zelensky met Trump at UN headquarters in New York.
Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Zelensky said Kyiv was open to a reciprocal halt on strikes against energy infrastructure and pressed for a trilateral meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kyiv Independent reported.
“We are ready for any kind of format of energy ceasefire,” Zelensky said, adding that he did not know the Russian position.
On a possible meeting with Putin, he said: “I’m ready any time. I think that we all need to move as quick as possible.”
Regional officials briefed on mobilization
ISW also flags that Russian regional authorities are quietly preparing for expanded force generation.
The Udmurt Republic, a region in the Volga federal district, is set to run a two-day training program titled “Organization of Mobilization Training in State and Local Government Bodies” for 20 state and municipal employees, covering wartime economic transition, mobilization planning, military registration of reservists and the handling of classified information.
The think tank notes that the Udmurt Republic has run similar sessions before, but says the program comes amid growing indications the Kremlin may move toward some form of mobilization in the near future.
Russia launched 212 Shahed-type, Gerbera-type and Parodiya-type drones and an unspecified number of missiles against Ukraine overnight into September 22, ISW said, while Ukrainian long-range drones continued strikes on Russian oil refineries on September 21-22.
