Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Russia’s push to swallow the twin fortress cities of eastern Ukraine was supposed to come from two directions at once.
For much of 2026, Moscow aimed to split its Donetsk axis in two: one thrust through the forests near Sviatohirsk, another up through Dobropillia, meeting at Barvinkove to lock Sloviansk and Kramatorsk into an encirclement. One of the formations tasked with leading the northern thrust is no longer carrying out that mission.
Russia’s 144th Motor Rifle Division, part of the 20th Combined Arms Army, “has effectively been defeated and has ceased to exist as an organised military force,” Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, said on Oct. 19 in an assessment carried by Ukrainska Pravda.
The division had been operating from a bridgehead along the Chornyi Zherebets River when Ukrainian forces hit it during Operation Vivaldi.
Biletskyi described the division’s current activity as patching together defensive positions rather than running the coordinated attacks expected from a division-level unit.
A thwarted encirclement
The bridgehead on the Chornyi Zherebets was the launchpad for Russia’s planned move through Sviatohirsk, bypassing Lyman and closing on the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk urban area from the north. Paired with a second thrust via Dobropillia aimed at the same town of Barvinkove in southern Kharkiv Oblast, the two prongs were meant to envelop Ukrainian forces in Donetsk Oblast.
Russia started executing that plan in 2025 and had hoped to reach Barvinkove by the end of 2026, Biletskyi said. With the bridgehead gone and the 144th Division spent, Moscow’s options now narrow to costly frontal assaults on the fortress cities or renewed pressure through Dobropillia, where Ukrainian units are actively counterattacking.
277 square kilometers and 8,000 Russian casualties
The 3rd Army Corps announced Operation Vivaldi’s completion on Oct. 14, after a four-phase push that began in late May. The corps reported retaking 277 square kilometers and 16 settlements in the Lyman sector, with a Ukrainian-estimated 8,000 Russian troops killed or wounded.
The four phases moved outward from the Chornyi Zherebets, retaking villages including Shandryholove, Derylove, Nove, Ridkodub, Katerynivka, Zelena Dolyna, Lypove and Kolodiazi. Ukraine’s Centre Grouping of Forces now holds defensive positions along the river itself.
Putin’s map versus the ground
The unit-level setback sits awkwardly against the Kremlin’s public account of the year’s fighting. Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed in October that Russian forces had seized about 6,500 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory and 310 settlements since the start of 2026.
An assessment by the US-based Institute for the Study of War, published Oct. 16, put the actual figure far lower: roughly 100 square kilometers and 69 settlements over the same period.
ISW described the exaggerated claims as part of a “cognitive warfare campaign” meant to pressure Ukraine and its Western partners into Russia’s negotiation terms.
Ukrainian units are now dug in along the Chornyi Zherebets and counterattacking in the Dobropillia direction, Biletskyi said, where Russia’s remaining option for an envelopment of Sloviansk-Kramatorsk still runs.
