"I was so nervous I chewed through a pencil while my men were crossing the open ground": Ukraine's six-month advance on the Oleksandrivka front
Dedicated to the reconnaissance troops who cleared wooded areas on the Oleksandrivka front
In late April, some servicemen from the 80th Air Assault Brigade who had spent the previous two years fighting in Sumy Oblast let slip to Ukrainska Pravda that they were being redeployed to a new "secret" front.
At the time, several possible locations were being discussed in military and press circles: Kupiansk, Lyman, and Stepnohirsk in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
A few days later, UP learned that the "secret" front was in fact the Oleksandrivka front – where Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts meet.
It would be hard to describe this front as "high-profile" or even particularly well-known: it is not centred on a major city such as Pokrovsk or Kramatorsk, and it has also been closed to journalists for the past few months. Yet it played a significant role in the context of Russia's spring-summer offensive campaign this year – an offensive that ultimately failed to materialise – as we will explain below.
In late April, fresh forces, including paratroopers, were being deployed for the defence forces' second offensive operation on this front. The first operation, on the Oleksandrivka and Huliaipole fronts, had taken place at the beginning of the year and enabled the Ukrainian military to breach the Russian defensive line and liberate eight settlements.
The second operation started in early May and was kept secret for a long time. Some said this was because the defence forces had not fully accomplished their mission, others that the operation was still underway and it was therefore worth waiting before announcing it.
A sergeant in the Air Assault Forces whom UP met in Pavlohrad a week before this article was published joked that the Air Assault Forces command would announce the offensive "when we've fallen back to the positions we started from".
What he meant was that the longer the operation went on, the harder it became for his brigade to sustain its pace.
The sergeant summed up the operation: "The overall plan and concept worked, but our forces aren't limitless, and after a month of active fighting, we started to have problems with personnel. Another factor working against us was extensive Russian infiltration: they were wandering around chaotically [remember this part of the quote, as we'll come back to it in the third section – ed.] in areas in our rear."
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy unexpectedly decided to announce the results of both offensive operations on 12 August. In a video he released about the Ukrainian military's work, newly appointed Commander-in-Chief Mykhailo Drapatyi briefs him on the results, with Air Assault Forces Commander Oleh Apostol, who commanded the operation itself, sitting next to him.
The key statistics cited by Drapatyi were as follows: between January and August, the defence forces liberated 26 villages across three oblasts, retaking 745 sq km of territory. That's almost equivalent to the area of Kyiv.
Even allowing for the possibility that the figure may be overstated and doesn't distinguish between territory that was "fully liberated" and territory that was "cleared of infiltrating Russian troops", the scale of the offensive is impressive. Most of UP's sources among company and battalion commanders regard the offensive as a success.
The concept, stages, participants and details of the defence forces' Oleksandrivka offensive have so far remained largely in the shadows.
To remedy that, UP spoke to former commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and around a dozen commanders and soldiers from four air assault and assault units that took part in the operation.
The operation at a glance
Name: Defence forces offensive on the Oleksandrivka front.
Time and place: January-August 2026 (still ongoing), at the junction of Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
Initiated by: Oleksandr Syrskyi, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from 2024 to 2026.
Commander of the offensive grouping: Air Assault Forces Commander Oleh Apostol.
Main Ukrainian forces: Air Assault Brigades (95th, 82nd, 80th, 79th and 78th) and assault regiments (425th Skelia Regiment and 1st Separate Assault Regiment).
Likely objective: Disrupt the Russian offensive towards Orikhiv and thereby protect the city of Zaporizhzhia; drive Russian forces out of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
Tactics: mechanised assaults and infiltration.
Result: The Russian offensive towards Orikhiv did not take place. Almost all of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast has been liberated from Russian forces, with the exception of the village of Dachne. Ukraine regained control of 26 villages across three oblasts.
The defence forces' Oleksandrivka offensive was intended to draw Russian troops away from Huliaipole and protect Orikhiv and Zaporizhzhia
Since early 2026, journalists had been closely following the defence forces' offensive actions on the Huliaipole and Oleksandrivka fronts without fully understanding what they were intended to achieve.
The emergency effort to save Huliaipole, the offensive towards Dobropillia-Solodke, the 95th Brigade's initial strike on the Oleksandrivka front and the deployment of fresh forces in May did not appear to form a single, coherent picture.
So UP put the question about the purpose of the Oleksandrivka operation to the man who initiated it – former commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. It was the defence forces' final offensive operation launched under his command.
In written responses provided to UP, Syrskyi said that in the second half of 2025, he and the General Staff officers working in the combat zone had identified the Russians' plan.
Russian forces intended to advance not only on the Pokrovsk front, but also on the Huliaipole front.
"The enemy's plan was to breach our defences along the Huliaipole-Dobropillia line and subsequently create a threat of encirclement for the Ukrainian grouping near Orikhiv," Syrskyi wrote.
"To thwart these plans, inflict maximum losses on the enemy and at the same time straighten the front line, an offensive operation was planned on the Oleksandrivka front, involving a grouping of Air Assault Forces and assault units supported by units and formations from other branches of the Armed Forces."
Servicemen of various ranks told UP they believe the defence forces could not attack Russian troops on the Huliaipole front head-on because of the high concentration of Russian forces there.
The decision was therefore made to draw some of those forces away to the neighbouring Oleksandrivka front.
Sudden and genuinely secret strikes seem to have been a strong point both for the previous commander-in-chief and for the paratroopers in general.
In response to follow-up questions, Syrskyi said: "This strike [on the Oleksandrivka front] went into the rear of the advancing troops and forced the enemy to redeploy forces from the main axis [towards Orikhiv]. They were even forced to pull some units of the 90th Division back from near Pokrovsk. The objective was to destroy the enemy's assault grouping."
The "Oleksandrivka offensive" actually consisted of two separate operations with a short break between them. The first was centred around Huliaipole, the second around the Komar-Velyka Novosilka area
The first Ukrainian offensive operation began in early 2026, north of Huliaipole, which the Russians had already captured.
The paratroopers and assault troops advanced in two directions – north-west and north-east of the town. It is now clear that the Ukrainian defence forces were attempting to squeeze the Russians from two sides. Both heavy equipment and small infantry groups were used for this.
The Ukrainian defenders advanced 9-11 km into Russian positions as a result.
"It was an infantry operation where everything depended on the soldiers' training," Anton Derliuk, Commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 95th Air Assault Brigade, told UP several months ago.
However, the maximum objective was not achieved.
According to information available to UP, at least one part of the plan envisaged the defence forces advancing another 10+ km deeper and reaching the Russian rear from the direction of the village of Uspenivka.
"We didn't have enough forces for that," one senior participant in the operation told UP.
Although the maximum objective was not achieved, the Ukrainian offensive grouping (as Dmytro "Perun" Filatov, Commander of the 1st Separate Assault Regiment, noted in an interview with UP) blocked the Russians' ability to advance, we now know, towards Orikhiv. It also narrowed the area under Russian control.
The first offensive operation also created the conditions for the next one – the recapture of part of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast that had been seized by the Russians in 2025.
The second offensive operation began on 5 May along an extremely wide stretch of the front line – over 50 km, roughly from Nove Zaporizhzhia in Zaporizhzhia Oblast to Filiia in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. Its aim was to push the Russians as far as possible out of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, most likely towards Komar and Velyka Novosilka.
Velyka Novosilka is a fairly large settlement and a strategically important logistics hub, and its fall 18 months earlier had opened the gateway for the Russians to two neighbouring oblasts at once – Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia.
For the second offensive operation on the Oleksandrivka front, reinforcements arrived from the 78th, 79th and 80th Air Assault Brigades.
A company commander from one of these brigades told UP: "The 95th had slightly run out of steam during the first offensive – they'd taken on a huge amount of work. After that, they needed reinforcements."
Several months later, the same commander would mention this in a conversation with UP, this time talking about his own unit: "The Hospis [medics from the Hospitallers medical battalion] came to us today, but I don't know what they're going to do or who they're going to evacuate. There's no infantry left [this mostly refers to soldiers that were wounded]."
So when the second offensive operation began, Apostol was commanding a large part of the strongest brigades from the 7th and 8th Air Assault Corps. According to UP's information, the 95th Brigade also came under his direct command.
One battalion commander who spoke to UP described Apostol as a competent and understanding commander. Soldiers could always call him and ask for help. He treated even "non-organic" assault units – those that were not directly part of his own formation – reasonably and fairly.
However, it is worth noting that not all assault troops accept the "authority" of the paratroopers. Some believe they can achieve better results if they operate more autonomously.
As usual, the defence forces' casualty rate in the operation has not been disclosed. Some of UP's sources claimed that it was "abnormally low". At least two units operating different types of unmanned systems that UP spoke to did not have a single person killed during the two offensive operations.
Some of our other sources, however, hinted that while the number of deaths was relatively small, the number of soldiers reported missing or AWOL was significant.
During the second offensive operation, the defence forces regained control of more than ten villages stretching along the edges of the three oblasts – Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk. Practically the entire territory of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast was cleared of Russian troops. The operation is still ongoing.
The map produced by DeepState, a Ukrainian group of military analysts, clearly shows how the operation created a huge "protected zone" in front of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. If the defence forces can hold it, it will protect Dnipropetrovsk Oblast from a ground war for some time.
It won't, however, protect it from guided aerial bomb strikes, unfortunately. This is an area where the Russians make particularly intensive use of them. As a result, settlements that are 30-50 km away from the line of contact – which might otherwise seem almost like the rear – are now impossible to live in.
The defence forces' advantages in this offensive were the element of surprise and the infantry's training. Their disadvantages were false information about the actual depth of the Russian advance, difficult terrain, and Russia's numerical superiority in terms of UAVs
In the previous two sections, we mainly presented the views of the military commanders who initiated both offensive operations and were responsible for carrying them out at the highest level. Now we'll look at how the operations were seen by the lower-level commanders and soldiers who directly put the plan into practice with their own feet, rifles and drones.
The first two or three weeks of both offensive operations were "extremely successful". In the initial stages, the Russians (a) didn't yet realise that the defence forces had launched a major offensive, and (b) were afraid to report it to their superiors.
"They saw these servicemen running around wearing the paratroopers' 'mohnatky' [a camouflage covering worn over the head] and spent two days arguing about whose 'mohnatky' they were," one paratrooper company commander told UP, laughing.
"It was only when we reached Myrne [10 km inside the Russian positions] that they realised something was going on. Up until then, they'd been sitting there without any communications or food," his fellow soldier added.
"The early days of the operation were not difficult. We found positions quickly, we could even drive to them, unload the equipment and get to work," explained Maksym Maslivets, commander of a UAV platoon in the Boryviter unmanned systems battalion of the 95th Brigade.
But the main reason why the Russians didn't understand what was happening was down to a tactic the Ukrainian forces were applying – infiltration.
The defence forces literally mirrored the enemy's modus operandi. Instead of carrying out frontal assaults, they quickly and imperceptibly seeped through the Russians' positions in small groups. This was aided by the good training of the Ukrainian paratroopers and assault troops.
"We had to advance as deep as possible without being noticed, bypass the wooded areas held by the enemy, establish a line, cut them off, and then capture those who remained on our side of the line," the paratrooper company commander we mentioned earlier explained.
When using these tactics, a large part of the work falls to traditional reconnaissance troops. They are the ones who later go in to mop up those same wooded areas where Russians cut off from their own remain in the Ukrainian rear, still posing a danger.
Sometimes these Russian forces can be taken out by explosives dropped from bomber drones (still a specific advantage of the Ukrainian military); sometimes they have to be cleared out by hand.
Clearing out enemy troops by hand is one of the most difficult and dangerous tasks in the current war. In the Air Assault Forces, this task is typically carried out by an elite brigade-level reconnaissance unit.
"Everyone ran through the wooded areas – and that was right, because that was how it was supposed to be, but then we had to sweep it all. All that fell on the reconnaissance troops," the commander of one reconnaissance unit told UP. "And we lost a lot of people doing that. Our greatest losses were in these small-arms engagements and from drones. As soon as the enemy detected us, they'd rain everything down on that position. One of our groups was hit by 12 Molniya drones within half an hour."
One of our sources for this article asked UP to mention, in the context of the Oleksandrivka operation, one of his brothers-in-arms, Junior Sergeant Volodymyr Shyshoholik. As part of a reconnaissance group of the 80th Air Assault Brigade, he cleared the wooded areas "that everyone had run through". He was killed with a weapon in his hands, aged 27.
In both the first and the second operation, Russian UAVs kicked in a few weeks into the operation. Rubicon, one of Russia's most effective units, was speedily redeployed to the Oleksandrivka front.
"Within three weeks the enemy realised that something wasn't right here, and both the Russian armies standing opposite us brought in their reserves," explained Andrii Serhiienko, commander of a strike UAV company in the Boryviter unmanned systems battalion of the 95th Brigade.
Service members told UP the Ukrainians had the edge in terms of the quality of the drone crews' work, but the Russians had it in terms of the number of drones.
After the second Ukrainian offensive operation began, the Russians set about intensively mining roads and planting ambush drones at junctions where vehicles would usually slow down.
To counter this, Ukrainian units had to form separate crews that would regularly fly over the roads, monitor them for ambush drones, and drop explosives on them.
Maksym Maslivets, the platoon commander from the 95th Brigade we mentioned before, told UP: "Mid-spring, Rubicon effectively cut off all our logistics routes. My vehicle was attacked by between 30 and 50 drones when it got stuck. And the challenges were compounded by the fact that there was a lot of rain that spring, which turned the field roads we used into mud. Everything got bogged down. There were times when nothing could get through – not Humvees, nor pickups, nor even Urals. And as soon as the enemy spotted that, they'd fire everything at it.
What helped us was that a few weeks into stage two of the operation, we were supplied with better drones that could fly 25-30 km rather than 10-15. This enabled us to reach the enemy further away and to work from a safer place."
Regarding the particular challenges of this offensive, our sources singled out three key aspects.
1. Lies from their own side about the actual depth of the Russians' penetration. Unfortunately, at the start of the second offensive operation Ukrainian troops were faced with the fact that the real line of contact was not the same as the one plotted on the map.
Russian troops had infiltrated 2-10 km deeper than they had been told. So before the main offensive operation started, Ukrainian forces had to finish mopping up their own rear or, worse still, find out that there were Russians in their rear after advancing. This is the "chaotic infiltration" by the Russians that we mentioned in the introduction to this article in the words of the paratrooper sergeant.
One participant in the operation told UP: "As soon as we came in, we were told: 'Everything's fine here, go forward, towards Maliivka.' We take the analysis, we look at where the enemy was last detected, and it was in the Velykomykhailivka Forest [a couple of kilometres into the Ukrainian forces' rear – UP], beyond the crossing – the enemy had crossed the river and was sitting there!"
UP is aware of a similar situation in at least three areas:
- the settlement of Andriivka-Klevtsove (formerly named Iskra) in Donetsk Oblast, which the 80th Brigade passed through. There was up to a platoon of Russians in Iskra;
- Kolomiitsi and Oleksiivka in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which the 95th passed through. There were also Russian drone pilots in Oleksiivka;
- the forest east of Velykomykhailivka in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, which the Skelia regiment passed through.
2. In some sectors of the offensive, practically all the wooded areas had been cut down or mined, forcing the Ukrainian troops to advance across open terrain for long stretches at enormous risk.
One of UP's sources described his unit's offensive zone as one where "nobody was intending to advance". It was only suitable for static defence.
One commander who took part in the operation told UP: "I was so nervous I chewed through a pencil while my men were crossing the open ground. All the wooded areas had been either mined or cut down for a kill zone. Nobody was intending to advance there, I don't know why they [the Ukrainian units that had previously been holding the sector] did it. It f**ked things up for us so badly. Zaits [commander of the 20th Corps – UP], who arrived when the offensive was already underway, wouldn't have allowed that – he's a very sensible guy."
Incidentally, three of UP's sources in the defence forces said that Sviatoslav Zaits, the commander of the 20th Corps, who comes from the Air Assault Forces, is being considered as a candidate for Commander of the Ground Forces. His place in the 20th Corps may be taken by the current commander of the 141st Brigade and former commander of the 59th Brigade, the young Lieutenant Colonel Bohdan Shevchuk.
3. The advance was complicated by a long logistics chain (more than 10-20 km) and by the rivers that cut across the Oleksandrivka sector in several places at once (particularly the Vovcha River).
Some of the servicemen UP spoke with were convinced that the command had not taken the brigades' logistical capabilities into account – some lacked unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), while others faced such intense enemy activity that bringing anything up to their position was practically impossible.
"In our case, for instance, neither quad bikes nor the armoured vehicles that delivered supplies could drive the distance required. We went on our own two feet, and on UGVs when we had them. The logistics were tough," the paratrooper sergeant told UP.
"My infantry used to walk 20 km, and that was only to the line of contact. And after that you still have to conduct assaults, to work," another battalion commander added.
The servicemen assigned a separate role in this operation to logistics and transport across the river. To cross the water bodies, temporary crossings were set up where possible, and boats were used. In one of the videos passed to UP, two paratroopers can be clearly seen crossing the river, to the sound of explosions, on an inflatable boat with their equipment and moving on further to clear the wooded areas.
There were also those who swam across the river, with dry clothes then dropped to them by drone.
"The crossings, the pontoons, would be destroyed within half an hour of being set up – it wasn't worth it," one of the commanders told UP. "I didn't want to send my men there. So ours swam across. It was wet, but we dropped clothes for them from drones straight afterwards. We tried to look after our people."
***
The operation on the Oleksandrivka front is ongoing. However, the key surges have probably already been made. The Russian offensive on Orikhiv has been thwarted (for now), Dnipropetrovsk Oblast is practically free of Russians, and for the paratroopers and assault troops, new tasks and sectors await.
Olha Kyrylenko, UP
Translated by Myroslava Zavadska, Tetiana Buchkovska and Anastasiia Lipara
Edited by Teresa Pearce