Since January, analysts and soldiers confessed that something was happening on the southern front of Ukraine, but the entire operation was under strict radio silence. Two assault units involved posted a couple of videos, but immediately deleted them, leaving geolocation experts without data. On August 14, seven months later, President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed the magnitude of the advance: 745 kilometers liberated (25 kilometers deep), 26 towns recovered and 10,000 Russian casualties. Translated on a map: Ukraine has pushed Z troops out of the Dnipropetrovsk region, something that seemed impossible.
In a war where the fronts have hardly moved for months, any advance is significant and offers valuable information about the state of both armies. Why has Ukraine been able to liberate that territory in this war of swarms of killer drones? kyiv has taken advantage of several negative circumstances for Moscow and has taken advantage of them: the cutting of the Starlink signal for the Russians inside Ukraine opened a window of opportunity, because hundreds of Russian positions isolated from the rest were left without communication.
The occupying troops had entered the Dnipropetrovsk oblast in June 2025, trying to open a new front to surround the city of Zaporizhia and threaten important towns such as Pokrovske or Pavlograd. For months the Russians advanced through a territory full of rivers. But they were reckless in not consolidating these advances or their logistics.
In February, from the city of Pokrovske (not to be confused with Pokrovsk, in the Donetsk region), already semi-destroyed by Russian guided bombs, the Russian advance was experienced in panic. There were still, at that time and with the Russians just a stone's throw away, a handful of neighbors stuck in their basements. Ukrainian troops, especially members of Kharkiv's 92nd Brigade, saw that the Russians were overextending themselves. One of the officers confessed to this reporter in a bunker full of screens: "There are villages where there may be one or two Russians placing a flag, but the entire territory is a gray area and we will recover it."
No reservations on that front
The operation is relevant because it removes the Russians from one of the regions through which they planned to advance. Right now, the invading troops occupy the entire Crimea and Lugansk region, part of Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and a small strip in Kharkiv, but not Dnipropetrovsk.
Another reason that explains this liberation of land in a context of paralysis and general exhaustion is that Russia has sent all its reserves for the definitive conquest of the Donbas, but may be undersupplying fronts that it considers secondary like this one. Vladimir Putin has ordered his generals to accelerate the capture of the rest of Donetsk by the end of this year, a remote possibility, taking into account the very slow pace of advance (and the enormous losses) suffered by the Russian army on this most defended front.
Moscow has been trying for many months to close its jaws on the Ukrainian fortress of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, two cities increasingly unlivable due to the presence of drones and the launching of Russian guided bombs. The fall of Siversk months ago seemed to advance that conquest, but once again the Russian soldiers once again collide with line after line of defense. In the south, they have been stuck for several months in Konstiantinivka, a large gray area in which both armies have underground positions, sometimes isolated from the rest and fed by drones. In the north the situation is the same in Limán. In this context, thinking about total conquests of a territory is a fantasy.
