# PROFILE: Counter-offensive at Lyman — the Ukrainian soldiers who encircle the impossible

> Shandroholove. Sixteen kilometers from Lyman. A village that appears on few news maps, mentioned in few prime-time broadcasts, defended by soldiers whose

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Profile
- Published: 2026-06-26
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/portrait-contre-offensive-a-lyman-les-soldats-ukrainiens-qui-encerclent-l-imposs

## Introduction: Shandroholove, 16 km from Lyman

### A name most maps don't carry

**Shandroholove**. Sixteen kilometers from **Lyman**. A village that appears on few news maps, mentioned in few prime-time broadcasts, defended by soldiers whose names will likely never appear in any official ceremony. And yet, what is happening here in **late June 2026** is one of the most significant operational developments of this phase of the **war** — a methodical, determined **Ukrainian counter-offensive** that is reshaping the territorial logic of the eastern front in ways that **Russian** planners did not foresee and Western observers have barely begun to catalog.

This is a portrait. Not of a general, not of a politician, not of a weapons system. A portrait of the soldiers of this counter-**offensive** — the men and women who are **encircling the impossible**, step by step, village by village, engagement by engagement, in terrain where every crossing of the **Zherebets River** is observed by FPV drones, where every advance is contested, and where the mathematics of loss and liberation are slowly, quietly tilting in **Ukraine**'s favor.

### The operational context: what ISW documented on June 23–24

The **Institute for the Study of War** documented, in its assessments of **June 23 and 24, 2026**, a set of **Ukrainian** tactical advances in the Lyman direction that — taken individually — might seem modest. Taken together, they describe something more substantial: a **coordinated pincer operation** aimed at isolating **Russian** positions in and around Shandroholove, compressing the Russian defensive perimeter, and creating the conditions for a broader operational advance toward Lyman itself.

FPV **drones** now **control all crossing points** on the Zherebets River in this sector. This is not a minor operational detail. It means that **Russian** forces cannot reinforce, resupply, or rotate troops across the river without coming under immediate drone attack. The Ukrainian forces conducting this operation have effectively established air dominance at the tactical level over the most critical terrain feature in the sector. That is the work of soldiers who have mastered a new form of warfare — and it deserves to be documented as such.

*I think often about what it means to fight for sixteen kilometers. In peacetime, sixteen kilometers is a commute, a morning run, a stretch of highway you pass without noticing. In this war, sixteen kilometers is a year of battle, hundreds of casualties, thousands of individual acts of courage, and a geography so contested that every meter requires a decision. The soldiers of Shandroholove are not fighting for sixteen kilometers. They are fighting for what those kilometers mean — to Ukraine, to Europe, to the idea that borders can mean something again.*

## Portrait of an evolving army: the soldiers of the counter-offensive

### From territorial defense to precision maneuver

The **Ukrainian Armed Forces** of June 2026 are not the army that faced the initial **Russian** invasion. That force — brave, committed, but often under-equipped and operating with doctrine developed for a different kind of conflict — has been transformed by three years of total war into something genuinely remarkable: a **combined arms force** capable of sophisticated maneuver, joint operations, and the kind of operational planning that produces coordinated pincer movements against prepared **Russian** defensive positions.

The soldiers of the Lyman counter-**offensive** are the product of this transformation. Many of them have fought continuously for two years or more. They have learned to operate in **GPS-denied environments**, to coordinate with **drone** operators in real time, to conduct fire-and-movement tactics against positions defended by forces that also have access to sophisticated surveillance and precision fires. They are, by any objective assessment, among the most experienced and capable light infantry formations in the world today.

### The human face behind the operational map

It is easy, in the language of military assessment, to describe soldiers as elements — "**Ukrainian** forces advanced," "assault groups consolidated positions," "FPV operators established fire control." The operational language is useful but it abstracts. Behind each advance is a **human being** who crossed a river under fire, who cleared a treeline while **drones** circled overhead, who held a position through a night of artillery fire because the order was to hold and the order was given by someone they trusted.

These soldiers come from every region of **Ukraine**. From **Kharkiv**, which is also under **attack**. From **Odessa**, which watches the sea. From **Lviv**, which has absorbed the displaced. They volunteered, or were mobilized, or chose not to wait for mobilization because someone they knew had already gone and not come back. They fight for reasons that are partly **strategic** and partly intensely personal — and the combination of those two motivations produces a quality of commitment that no professional army built on contractual obligation can fully replicate.

*Professional militaries study motivation as a force multiplier. They run programs, pay bonuses, craft messaging designed to sustain it. Ukraine doesn't need programs. Its soldiers fight within sight of their own burned cities, within reach of their own families. That proximity between the abstract cause and the concrete stake is the deepest source of military effectiveness in this war. It is also the deepest tragedy of it.*

## The 7-to-1 ratio: the territorial loss balance

### The number that reframes the narrative of stalemate

The dominant media narrative of this **war**, for much of 2025 and into 2026, has been one of **stalemate** — a grinding attritional **conflict** in which neither side could achieve decisive territorial gains. This narrative is misleading, and the data generated by **ISW's territorial tracking** for the period December 2025 through May 2026 illustrates why. During this period, **Russia lost 281 square kilometers** of previously held territory to Ukrainian counter-offensive operations. **Ukraine** lost only **40 square kilometers** to **Russian** advances during the same period.

The ratio — **7 to 1 in Ukraine's favor** — does not describe a stalemate. It describes an asymmetric territorial dynamic that, if sustained, will progressively erode **Russian** strategic positioning in the east. The soldiers conducting operations like the Shandroholove counter-offensive are the human agents of this ratio. They are not achieving the spectacular breakthroughs that make headlines. They are achieving the methodical, compound territorial reclamation that changes facts on the ground.

### What 281 square kilometers means in human terms

Two hundred and eighty-one square kilometers is not a large number in the abstract geography of a country the size of France. But in the context of eastern **Ukraine** — where Russian forces have spent three years fortifying defensive positions, mining terrain, establishing overlapping fields of fire, and constructing the most extensively prepared defensive lines since the Second World War — recapturing 281 square kilometers represents an **extraordinary operational achievement**. Every square kilometer of recaptured territory required penetrating those defenses, neutralizing those minefields, and defeating those prepared positions.

More importantly: the soldiers who recaptured that territory also **liberated the people who lived in it** — and the people who had fled when **Russian** forces arrived. Each village retaken is a community potentially returned to its inhabitants, an infrastructure potentially restored, a connection to Ukrainian national life potentially reestablished. The territorial statistics do not capture this dimension of what the soldiers of the counter-offensive are accomplishing. A portrait must.

*The stalemate narrative is not just inaccurate — it is politically consequential. It is cited by those who argue that Ukraine cannot win, that negotiations are inevitable, that further Western support is wasteful. The 7-to-1 territorial ratio is a direct rebuttal of this argument. The soldiers holding it are proving, one village at a time, that the narrative is wrong. What they need, beyond weapons and training, is an international media environment willing to report accurately on what they are achieving.*

## The liberation of Podubne and Voskresenka

### The northern axis: a strategic advance toward the Dnipro

The liberation of **Podubne and Voskresenka** — two villages on the northern operational axis, oriented toward the Dnipro — represents more than a localized tactical success. These advances compress the **Russian** defensive depth along a line that, if extended, positions Ukrainian forces to threaten the Russian-held corridor connecting Lyman to the broader eastern front. This is **operational geometry**: the liberation of these specific villages creates options for subsequent advances that would not exist if they remained in **Russian** hands.

The soldiers who liberated **Podubne and Voskresenka** did so against defenders who had prepared positions, who had months to fortify, who had drone surveillance of the approach routes. The operational approach — combined use of FPV drones to suppress **Russian** observation and fire, followed by assault group advances under drone cover — reflects the doctrinal evolution of Ukrainian tactics over three years of combat learning. This is not improvisation. It is applied doctrine, refined in blood.

### What liberation means for the civilians who remained

Not all civilians who lived in **Podubne and Voskresenka** left when **Russian** forces arrived. Some remained — too old to move, too attached to their homes, too hopeful that the occupation would be brief. When Ukrainian forces retake a village, the first hours are not triumphant in any conventional sense. They involve finding the people who stayed, documenting what happened to them, providing medical care to those who need it, and beginning the process of understanding what the occupation meant for the specific human beings who experienced it.

These first hours are the work of soldiers, of territorial defense units, of psychological support teams. They are also the work of the **Ukrainian** officers who have understood that **liberation is not only military** — it is administrative, humanitarian, and testimonial. The documentation of what happened in occupied villages is part of **Ukraine**'s ongoing effort to build the evidentiary record that will eventually support accountability proceedings. The soldiers of the counter-offensive are, in this sense, also witnesses.

*Liberation as a word has become almost clichéd through overuse in the commentary on this war. But when I think about what it means in practice — the hours after a village is retaken, the first Ukrainian soldier who knocks on the door of a family that spent months under occupation, the moment the Ukrainian flag replaces the Russian one on the village building — I cannot find a better word. Some experiences are exactly what they are called. Liberation is one of them.*

## The pincer maneuvers at Shandroholove

### The geometry of encirclement: how a pincer works at the tactical level

ISW's assessment of **June 24, 2026** documents that **Ukrainian** forces liberated **Shandroholove via a pincer maneuver** — a coordinated advance from two directions that compressed **Russian** forces within the village and severed their ability to reinforce or withdraw along primary routes. At the tactical level, a successful pincer requires extraordinary coordination: two assault groups must advance on diverging axes, maintain communication under fire, suppress Russian reinforcement efforts on both flanks, and time their convergence to prevent Russian forces from identifying and exploiting the gap between them.

Executing this operation against a prepared **Russian** defensive position, with FPV drones overhead — both Ukrainian drones supporting the assault and Russian drones observing and targeting the assault groups — reflects a level of **small-unit tactical sophistication** that would have been impressive in any military. In a force built largely from civilians mobilized into soldiers over three years of **war**, it is extraordinary.

### The role of FPV drones in enabling pincer operations

The **FPV drone** has transformed small-unit tactics in this war more completely than any other weapons system. In the Shandroholove operation — and throughout the broader Lyman counter-offensive — FPV **drones** perform functions that previously required artillery support, air cover, or specialist reconnaissance units: they suppress enemy observation posts, destroy crew-served weapons that would otherwise prevent infantry advance, and provide the assault groups with real-time imagery of the tactical situation as it evolves.

The soldiers who operate these drones are not specialists in the traditional military sense. Many of them were civilians with technical backgrounds — engineers, software developers, **drone** hobbyists — who were mobilized, trained, and integrated into frontline units within months of the full-scale invasion. Their contribution to operations like the Shandroholove pincer is immeasurable. They are the **invisible enablers** of the visible advance — the operators whose work makes the infantry's movement possible, whose names will not appear in operational summaries, and whose skill has fundamentally changed what Ukrainian small units can achieve against prepared **Russian** defenses.

*The history of warfare is, in significant part, a history of which side adapted faster. The Ukrainians adopted FPV drones not because they had a doctrine for it, but because they had a problem — how to suppress enemy positions without the artillery advantage Russia enjoys — and they found a solution. The willingness to adapt, to test, to integrate civilian expertise into military operations, is one of the most important and least celebrated aspects of how Ukraine has sustained this fight.*

## 66 engagements in one day: the portrait of intensity figures

### What 66 combat engagements in 24 hours looks like from the inside

On **June 20, 2026**, **Ukrainian** forces conducted or repelled **66 combat engagements** in the Lyman direction in a single day. Sixty-six. Each engagement involves, at minimum, hostile fire contact between opposing forces — a **Russian** assault on a Ukrainian position, a Ukrainian assault on a Russian one, a firefight initiated by one side and concluded by the other. In the most intense engagements, they involve sustained artillery fire, drone strikes, and close-quarters combat by assault groups.

Sixty-six engagements in 24 hours means that, on average, a new combat action was initiated or repelled every **22 minutes**. For the soldiers rotating through this sector, there is no such thing as a quiet day. There is no such thing as a safe position. The rear is under artillery fire. The forward positions are under **drone** surveillance. The intermediate terrain is mined, observed, and contested. The soldiers who function in this environment — who maintain their unit cohesion, their tactical discipline, their combat effectiveness — are performing under conditions of sustained psychological and physical stress that most people cannot imagine.

### The operational sustainability question: how long can this pace be maintained?

Sixty-six engagements per day is not sustainable indefinitely for any force. The physical and psychological toll of sustained high-intensity combat accumulates. Units require rotation, rest, resupply, and time to reconstitute after significant losses. **Ukraine**'s ability to maintain the operational tempo of the Lyman counter-offensive depends on its ability to **rotate and regenerate forces** faster than attrition degrades them — a challenge that is directly connected to the mobilization debates that have occupied **Ukrainian** politics throughout the first half of 2026.

General **Syrskyi**'s statement on **June 22, 2026** that **Ukrainian** forces had reconquered **600 square kilometers since January** reflects the cumulative product of this operational tempo. That achievement is real. It also reflects a cost — in lives, in equipment, in the psychological reserves of soldiers who have been fighting at this pace for months. The portrait of the soldiers of the Lyman counter-**offensive** must include this dimension: they are not merely heroic. They are also exhausted. And they continue anyway.

*Military analysis measures operational tempo in engagements per day, kilometers gained per week, equipment losses per month. These are real and necessary metrics. But they don't capture the subjective experience of being inside that tempo — of being one of the soldiers for whom the 22-minute average is not an average but a lived sequence of specific, terrifying moments. The portrait of these soldiers requires both the metric and the person behind it. The number tells you what happened. The person tells you what it cost.*

## The portrait of Lyman liberated in 2022: collective memory

### October 2022: when Lyman fell to Ukraine

The liberation of **Lyman** in **October 2022** was one of the most significant **Ukrainian** military achievements of that year. Coming in the wake of the successful **Kharkiv counter-offensive**, it demonstrated that Ukrainian forces could execute large-scale operational maneuvers against **Russian** positions — the same kind of encirclement and liberation that is now being applied, at smaller scale, to Shandroholove and the surrounding villages. For Ukrainians, the liberation of Lyman in 2022 is part of a living operational memory that shapes how commanders and soldiers think about what is possible.

The Lyman liberation also produced one of the war's more extraordinary diplomatic moments: the announcement of **Russia**'s annexation of Donetsk Oblast — of which Lyman is part — coincided almost exactly with the Ukrainian flag being raised over the city. The annexation decree that claimed Lyman as Russian territory was signed while Ukrainian soldiers were liberating it. This is the geopolitical absurdity at the heart of Russia's claim to these lands — a claim asserted in ceremony while denied in fact by the soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

### Memory as operational motivation

For the soldiers now operating 16 km from Lyman, the 2022 liberation is not ancient history. It is recent enough to be a personal memory for many of them — they may have participated in it, or served alongside those who did, or been motivated to enlist by watching it happen. This **institutional memory** of demonstrated success shapes the confidence with which commanders plan operations and the credibility with which they communicate objectives to their **troops**.

Lyman liberated in 2022 is also a reminder that what seems impossible at one moment in this war can become reality quickly when the operational conditions align. The city that **Russia** claimed as permanently Russian lasted weeks under occupation before Ukrainian forces cut its supply lines and forced a Russian withdrawal. The same logic — patient encirclement, supply line interdiction, pressure from multiple axes — underlies the current Shandroholove operation. **The soldiers know it works** because they saw it work before.

*There is a particular kind of courage that comes from institutional memory — the knowledge, built from collective experience, that something can be done because you have done something like it before. This is not arrogance. It is the earned confidence of a force that has learned its own capabilities through three years of the most demanding operational experience any army in the world is currently accumulating. The soldiers near Lyman know what their predecessors achieved. They intend to extend it.*

## The Donetsk government and the operational situation

### Administrative presence as a signal of operational confidence

The **Donetsk Regional Military Administration** has continued to publish operational situation reports even as the front line cuts through the heart of the oblast. The regularity of these reports — the June 21 morning assessment, the June 22 update, the ongoing documentation of the situation in communities both liberated and contested — is itself a form of operational statement. It signals that Ukrainian civil authority over the oblast has not been abandoned, that the administrative structures necessary for eventual full restoration are being maintained, and that **Ukraine** intends to govern Donetsk fully when the military conditions allow.

For the soldiers operating in the Lyman direction, this administrative presence has practical significance. It means that the villages they liberate will not exist in a governance vacuum — there are structures ready to provide services, document conditions, and begin the reconstruction process as soon as **security** conditions permit. The **integration of military and civil functions** in liberated territory is one of the less celebrated but operationally significant aspects of **Ukraine**'s approach to this war.

### The challenge of governing at the edge of the front

Governing communities that are partially liberated, partially contested, or within artillery range of active fighting presents extraordinary challenges. The **Donetsk Regional Administration** must coordinate humanitarian corridors, manage the needs of civilians who have remained in dangerous areas, communicate with communities that may have limited communications infrastructure, and maintain institutional continuity in the face of ongoing **Russian** efforts to strike administrative buildings and civilian infrastructure.

This is the work of civil servants who are also, in a meaningful sense, on the front line — not of kinetic combat, but of the administrative and institutional war for the right of **Ukrainians** to govern themselves in their own territory. The portrait of the Lyman counter-offensive includes them: the municipal workers, the regional administrators, the educators and medical personnel who are working to maintain **Ukrainian civil life** in conditions that would have overwhelmed most governance systems in the world.

*War is sometimes described as the breakdown of governance — the moment at which the state's claim to a monopoly on legitimate force is contested. But watching Ukraine, I see something different: governance as an act of war. The maintenance of administrative structures, the continuation of civil services, the insistence that Ukrainian law and authority apply even in contested territory — these are not parallel to the military campaign. They are part of it.*

## The civilian exodus from Donbas: the human face of war

### Thousands fleeing: the Boston Globe report of June 22

On **June 22, 2026**, the **Boston Globe** published a major report documenting the mass displacement of civilians from **Donbas cities** — the urban centers that **Russia** has identified as primary objectives in its current offensive. The report describes thousands of people fleeing through routes that are increasingly dangerous, carrying what they can, often leaving behind elderly relatives who cannot or will not travel. This exodus is both a humanitarian crisis and an operational indicator: civilians who have survived years of occupation or proximity to fighting are now deciding that the risk of staying exceeds the risk of leaving.

For the soldiers of the Lyman counter-offensive, the civilian exodus has a particular resonance. They are fighting partly to prevent the **Russian** advance from reaching more Ukrainian cities, to maintain the buffer between Russian forces and the population centers whose evacuation would represent the failure of everything the counter-offensive is designed to achieve. Every kilometer recaptured near Lyman is a kilometer between Russian artillery and another Ukrainian community. This is what "strategic depth" means at the human level: it is the distance between a soldier's position and the road a family needs to use to reach safety.

### The children of Donbas and the war's generational cost

Among those fleeing Donbas are children who have known nothing but war. Born in 2014, the year Russia first seized eastern **Ukraine**, or in 2022, the year of the full-scale invasion, they carry in their earliest memories the sounds of artillery, the vocabulary of evacuation, the geography of conflict. The **psychological and developmental cost** of this — the documented impacts of chronic trauma on education, cognitive development, and social formation — will be felt for a generation.

The soldiers near Lyman know this. Many of them have children of their own, in safer parts of **Ukraine** or abroad, for whose future they are fighting. The abstractness of strategic objectives — territorial integrity, sovereignty, international law — becomes very concrete when you translate it into the lives of children who deserve to grow up without the sound of explosions as background noise. **That translation** — from strategic imperative to human stake — is part of what motivates the soldiers of the counter-**offensive**. It is why they continue at a pace of 66 engagements per day.

*I have no easy words for children who grew up in Donbas over the past twelve years. No columnist's insight that adequately addresses what it means to have your entire childhood defined by a war you did not choose and cannot control. What I can say — what the soldiers of this counter-offensive are saying with their bodies and their discipline — is that those children deserve a future in which this stops. The counter-offensive near Lyman is, in some fundamental sense, about whether they will get one.*

## ISW and the operational context of June 23–24

### The analytical record: why ISW assessments matter

The **Institute for the Study of War** has produced daily assessments of the **Ukraine** conflict since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. These assessments — combining open-source intelligence, satellite imagery analysis, social media geolocation, and academic expertise — have become the most widely cited independent analytical resource for tracking the operational situation. Their documentation of the **June 23–24 advances** in the Lyman direction provides the evidentiary foundation for the operational picture presented in this profile.

ISW assessments are not perfect — they work from open-source information and cannot access classified **intelligence** that would provide a fuller picture. But their methodology is rigorous, their track record is strong, and their documentation provides the kind of contemporaneous, geolocated record that is essential for both operational analysis and eventual historical accounting. In a conflict saturated with propaganda and disinformation, the analytical discipline of ISW's work is a genuine public good.

### What June 23–24 tell us about the operational trajectory

The **ISW assessments of June 23 and 24** document not just the specific advances at Shandroholove but the broader operational pattern that those advances reflect: **Ukrainian** forces are **maintaining pressure** across multiple points in the Lyman sector simultaneously, creating a demand on Russian defensive resources that exceeds what can be met at any single point. This is classic **operational design** — not the application of overwhelming force at one place, but the sustained application of sufficient force at multiple places, forcing an adversary to make impossible prioritization decisions.

The operational trajectory implied by these assessments — sustained Ukrainian pressure, progressive Russian positional erosion, the gradual compression of Russian defensive space in the Lyman direction — does not guarantee any specific outcome. Wars are not determined by operational trajectories. They are determined by the interaction of operational trajectories with political will, logistics, international support, and a hundred other variables that no model can fully predict. But the trajectory itself is real, and the soldiers creating it deserve the recognition that comes with understanding what they have built.

*Operational analysis can make war seem like a chess problem — positions, geometries, force ratios, depth. ISW's work is invaluable precisely because it gives a rigorous structure to what could otherwise be an incomprehensible fog of claims and counter-claims. But I always return from the operational map to the human question: who is on that square kilometer? What are they experiencing? What does it cost them to hold or take it? The best operational analysis is useless without that question alongside it.*

## The strategic perspective: Lyman and beyond

### Lyman as the key to the Donetsk-Luhansk junction

**Lyman** sits at the junction of the **Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts**, at a key railway node that historically served as a logistics hub for the entire Donbas region. Its strategic significance is not abstract — it is embedded in the physical geography of the area. Control of Lyman and its surroundings means control of the primary road and rail axes connecting the northern and eastern sectors of the front, and the ability to threaten Russian supply lines feeding operations further south and east.

This is why Russian forces fought so hard to retake the city after Ukraine liberated it in 2022, and why Russian operational planning in this sector consistently prioritizes the disruption of Ukrainian positions that threaten Lyman from the north and west. The **Shandroholove operation** is not geographically isolated — it is part of a broader Ukrainian effort to establish the positional conditions from which a serious threat to Lyman can be developed. Whether and when that threat matures into a liberation operation depends on factors that go beyond the bravery of the soldiers currently 16 kilometers away.

### General Syrskyi's June 22 statement: 600 km² since January

General **Valerii Syrskyi**'s announcement on **June 22, 2026** — that Ukrainian forces had reconquered **600 square kilometers since January** — was a carefully calibrated strategic communication. It was not a claim of decisive victory. It was a documented statement of territorial reclamation, delivered with the precision of a commander who understands that credibility depends on specificity. Six hundred square kilometers across the full front, over five months, translates to approximately **120 square kilometers per month**.

In the strategic context of a war against a force with Russia's territorial depth and manpower, 120 square kilometers per month is not a dramatic figure. But it is a **positive figure** — it represents net territorial gain, not loss. And in the context of the 7-to-1 ratio documented by ISW, it suggests a direction of travel that, if sustained, will cumulatively produce strategic results even in the absence of the breakthrough operations that media coverage tends to prioritize. **Accumulation is a strategy**. The soldiers of the Lyman counter-offensive are executing it.

*Strategy in long wars is almost always less dramatic than commentary about it. The decisive battle, the single breakthrough, the moment everything changes — these are literary conveniences that rarely correspond to how territorial conflicts actually resolve. What actually resolves them is cumulative pressure, sustained over time, at a cost that one side eventually decides it cannot continue to bear. Ukraine is building that cumulative pressure. 600 km² since January is what it looks like from a satellite. From the ground, it looks like Shandroholove.*

## The Donetsk front and its importance for reconstruction

### The connection between military position and reconstruction planning

Ukraine's long-term reconstruction — the rebuilding of its economy, infrastructure, and civil society after the war — depends not just on the eventual cessation of hostilities but on the military position at which hostilities end. The further east and south Ukraine's front line runs when peace comes, the larger the territory available for reconstruction, the more population returned to Ukrainian governance, and the stronger the economic foundations of the post-war state. Every village liberated today is a community that can begin its reconstruction tomorrow.

The **Donetsk front** is, in this sense, simultaneously a military front and an economic front. The soldiers of the counter-offensive are not just defending Ukraine's territorial claims — they are defending the material basis of Ukraine's future prosperity. The industrial infrastructure of the Donbas, the agricultural land of the eastern oblasts, the coal and mineral resources of the region — these are part of what Ukraine is fighting for, and what its reconstruction plans depend on recovering.

### International reconstruction commitments and their dependence on battlefield outcomes

The international community has made substantial commitments to Ukraine's reconstruction — at the **Ukraine Recovery Conference** and in bilateral aid commitments from the EU, the US, the UK, and others. These commitments are not unconditional. They depend on a security environment that allows reconstruction to proceed, which in turn depends on a front line that does not leave critical infrastructure within easy Russian artillery range.

The soldiers of the Lyman counter-offensive are, in a very direct sense, shaping the conditions under which international reconstruction commitments can be fulfilled. Every kilometer of territorial depth they create between Russian lines and Ukrainian cities is a kilometer of protection for the reconstruction projects that will determine whether Ukraine emerges from this war as a viable, thriving state or as a permanently damaged society dependent on indefinite international support. **The front line is an economic variable** as well as a military one.

*I have read the reconstruction plans. They are ambitious, detailed, and well-funded in principle. They assume a Ukraine that can attract investment, maintain governance, educate its children, and build a modern economy on the ruins of war. All of those assumptions depend on where the front line settles when the fighting stops. The soldiers near Lyman are working on the most fundamental precondition for everything that comes after. Their work is not separate from the economic future of Ukraine. It is its foundation.*

## The geographical and strategic context of the Lyman junction

### The railway, the river, and the forest: terrain that defines tactics

The terrain around **Lyman** is characterized by three dominant features: the **railway network** that historically made it a logistics hub, the **Zherebets and Siverskyi Donets rivers** that create both natural obstacles and natural defensive lines, and the extensive **forest cover** that provides concealment for both attacking and defending forces but severely limits the effectiveness of long-range direct fire systems. Understanding this terrain is essential to understanding why the Shandroholove operation takes the form it does.

FPV drones are particularly effective in forested terrain because they can navigate below the tree canopy — following terrain features that armor and artillery cannot engage effectively. The Ukrainian decision to build its counter-offensive around **drone-enabled infantry** rather than armored maneuver is not just a product of equipment availability — it is a doctrinal adaptation to the specific terrain of the Lyman sector. The soldiers executing this adaptation are not following a generic playbook. They have developed tactics specific to this ground, through hard experience in this environment.

### The strategic importance of controlling the Zherebets crossings

Ukrainian FPV drone control of all **Zherebets River crossings** in the Shandroholove sector is the operational achievement that makes the pincer maneuver possible. A river crossing under drone observation is not merely difficult — it is potentially suicidal. Any Russian attempt to reinforce positions on the Ukrainian side of the river, or to withdraw forces to the safety of the far bank, must pass through terrain that is under constant surveillance and within engagement range of drones that can be launched within minutes of an attempted movement.

This is a form of **area denial** that previous generations of military technology could not achieve at this cost and with this reliability. The soldiers who established drone control over the Zherebets crossings have effectively neutralized the river as a Russian defensive asset and converted it into a Ukrainian operational advantage. This reversal — transforming a terrain feature from obstacle to opportunity — is the kind of tactical thinking that characterizes the Lyman counter-offensive at its best.

*Military geography has always been about who controls the critical terrain. In previous wars, controlling a river meant holding its bridges with infantry and artillery. In this war, it means putting FPV drones over every crossing point and accepting that nothing moves without your knowledge and consent. The Zherebets River has not changed. The technology that determines who controls it has. And the soldiers who mastered that technology first are the ones currently holding the initiative.*

## Operational lessons of the Shandroholove battle for future counter-offensives

### What Shandroholove teaches about drone-enabled maneuver warfare

The **Shandroholove operation** will be studied in military academies for decades. It demonstrates, in a single contained tactical example, the core elements of what might be called **Ukrainian-developed drone-maneuver doctrine**: establish FPV drone dominance over critical terrain features; use that dominance to suppress Russian observation and reinforcement; conduct pincer maneuvers with assault groups that operate under drone cover; liberate objectives through encirclement rather than costly frontal assault. This doctrine minimizes the attacker's exposure to Russian direct fire while maximizing the disruptive effect of drone strikes on Russian defensive coordination.

The scalability of this doctrine — whether it can be applied to larger objectives, with more complex terrain, against deeper Russian defensive systems — is the central question for the next phase of Ukrainian counter-offensive planning. The Shandroholove operation suggests that the doctrine is sound at the small-unit level. **Scaling it** requires not just more drones and more trained operators, but the logistics, communications, and command-and-control architecture to coordinate drone operations across a larger operational area simultaneously.

### The limits of drone-centric tactics and the unresolved challenges

Drone-centric tactics have limits that honest assessment requires acknowledging. Drones are vulnerable to **electronic warfare** — and Russia has invested heavily in jamming systems that can disrupt drone control links, GPS navigation, and video feeds. The effectiveness of FPV drones against targets that have electronic warfare protection is significantly lower than against targets that do not. As Russia identifies the tactical signature of Ukrainian drone-maneuver operations and adapts its electronic warfare response, the effectiveness of the current approach will face pressure.

Ukraine's answer to this challenge — the development of **AI-assisted autonomous guidance** for drones that can navigate without GPS or real-time human control — is itself a step toward the autonomous weapons domain that raises the ethical questions discussed in parallel coverage of this conflict. There is a direct line between the military problem the soldiers at Shandroholove are solving and the technological trajectory that ends in autonomous weapons systems. The soldiers on the front do not control that trajectory. But understanding it requires looking at both ends of the line.

*The soldiers at Shandroholove are not thinking about weapons ethics. They are thinking about how to cross the next kilometer without losing another teammate. That is exactly as it should be — it is the job of policymakers, ethicists, and columnists to think about the larger implications of the technologies those soldiers need to survive. But this division of responsibility is only workable if the policymakers and ethicists actually do their part. The frequency with which they do not is a failure that falls on them, not on the soldiers.*

## Conclusion profile: these soldiers who change geography

### The slow accumulation of a new map

The portrait of the soldiers of the Lyman counter-offensive is not a portrait of heroes in the conventional sense — though they are. It is a portrait of professionals who have mastered an extraordinarily demanding craft under conditions that most people cannot imagine, in service of goals that extend far beyond their individual survival. They are **changing the geography of Ukraine**, village by village, river crossing by river crossing, pincer maneuver by pincer maneuver. They are building a territorial reality that, if sustained, will determine the shape of the peace that eventually follows.

Sixteen kilometers from Lyman. Sixty-six engagements in a day. A 7-to-1 territorial ratio. **Podubne liberated. Voskresenka liberated. Shandroholove liberated via pincer.** Six hundred square kilometers reconquered since January. These numbers are the signature of a force that is not merely surviving — it is advancing. The soldiers who produced these numbers deserve, at minimum, to be seen clearly: for what they do, for what it costs, and for what it means to the future of a continent.

### What the West owes these soldiers

The soldiers of the Lyman counter-offensive fight with **Western weapons, Western intelligence, and Western financial support** — but ultimately with Ukrainian will, Ukrainian ingenuity, and Ukrainian bodies. The ratio of what they contribute to what the West contributes is not symmetric. They give everything. The West gives what it decides it can afford politically. This asymmetry is not a reason to diminish Western support — it is a reason to increase it, and to do so with the urgency that the situation demands.

General Syrskyi's 600 square kilometers will become 700, then 800, if the support holds and the momentum continues. The soldiers near Lyman will be the ones who make it happen — who execute the pincer maneuvers, who operate the FPV drones over the Zherebets crossings, who advance through forested terrain under fire toward a city that was liberated once before and will be liberated again. They do not ask for admiration. **They ask for the means to finish what they have started.**

*This war forces all of us to choose: between the comfort of silence and the discomfort of truth. Every day that passes without a response proportionate to Russian aggression is another day Ukraine bears alone the burden of a battle that determines the future of the entire West.*

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [ISW — Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 24, 2026](https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-24-2026/)

- [ISW — Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 23, 2026](https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-23-2026/)

### Secondary sources

- [Donetsk Regional Administration — Operational situation in Donetsk region, morning of June 21, 2026](https://dn.gov.ua/en/news/operational-situation-in-donetsk-region-as-of-the-morning-of-june-21)

- [RBC-Ukraine — Russia intensifies offensive in Kharkiv region, June 2026](https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russia-intensifies-offensive-in-kharkiv-region-1782230840.html)

- [Boston Globe — Thousands fleeing as Putin bombs Donbas cities he most covets, June 22, 2026](https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/22/world/thousands-are-fleeing-putin-bombs-donbas-cities-he-most-covets/)

- [ISW — Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 20, 2026](https://understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-20-2026/)

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Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/portrait-contre-offensive-a-lyman-les-soldats-ukrainiens-qui-encerclent-l-imposs