Ukraine just wrecked Russia's plan to encircle the Donbas fortress belt
3 days ago · 28 September 2026Share
Ukrainian military personnel conduct anti-terrorist operations in eastern Ukraine. File photo.Ministry of Defense of Ukraine · CC BY-SA 2.0
Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps just finished phase three of Operation Vivaldi.
And Russia's plan to surround the Donbas fortress belt? Ukraine says that plan is dead now.
Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi announced it this morning. He commands the corps.
His troops took back three towns. Nove, Ridkodub and Katerynivka. Plus two more, Karpivka and Novomykhailivka, are back under Ukrainian control.
So what did it cost Russia? 2,000 troops lost, the corps says. Just in this phase.
And more than 250 Russian soldiers were taken prisoner.
Phase three alone took back 51 square kilometres. Since this offensive started in mid-September, Ukraine says it has recovered 176 square kilometres total.
Andrii Biletskyi says quote "a turning point for the entire operation".
That's the commander himself saying this is the turning point.
Now, Nove might sound small. It isn't.
The corps says Nove was a key logistics hub for Russian forces here. And the high ground around it means Ukraine keeps the initiative.
Here's the twist. The corps says Russia was misled.
Russian commanders thought the real attack was coming at Shandryholove and Zelena Dolyna. So they moved their reserves there. And the actual strike hit Nove instead.
How did Ukraine break through? Old Soviet BTR-60 armoured vehicles. Converted into unmanned kamikaze machines.
And whole Russian units surrendered. Officers, pilots, artillery crews. All of them.
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Battalion Donbas operates in the Donetsk region of Ukraine. File photo. Ліонкінг · CC BY-SA 4.0
This is chapter three of an operation two weeks in the making.
Biletskyi revealed phase one on 15 September. That cleared 75 square kilometres of Russian infiltration groups and won back another 10, including the village of Serednie.
Phase two came on 20 September. Another 40 square kilometres recovered. Shandryholove and Derylove liberated. Drobysheve fully under Ukrainian control.
In between, on 17 September, Biletskyi said the northern arm of Russia's encirclement plan had been routed and destroyed.
A day after that, the corps said Russia had pulled its elite drone unit, Rubicon, off the front line. Heavy losses, they said.
And that withdrawal matters a lot.
Rubicon is one of Russia's best drone units. Pulling it back suggests Russia can no longer compete with Ukraine's drones in this sector.
The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, said on 15 September that Ukraine's gains north of Lyman had already broken Russia's encirclement plan. Russia had been trying to surround the fortress belt — Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, Kostiantynivka — from north and south.
But not everyone agrees on how big the earlier gains actually were.
Independent trackers looking at phases one and two put the total anywhere from about 150 to around 240 square kilometres. And one open-source group says Ukraine's own figures for Russian losses in those two phases haven't been independently verified.
Russia hasn't directly disputed the phase three losses. Russian military bloggers have acknowledged forced tactical retreats in the area over the past two weeks. They're calling it repositioning, not defeat. Russia's General Staff has said nothing about today's announcement.
So what don't we know? How many of those 2,000 Russian losses were killed and how many wounded. Ukraine hasn't released its own losses from this phase. Nobody outside Ukraine's military has independently confirmed today's territorial claims yet. And there's no word on whether a fourth phase has even started.
But Biletskyi already said there's more coming.
When he announced the whole operation two weeks ago, he called its four stages seasons. He said quote "this is only the first of them".
Three phases in, and the one thing that hasn't survived is Russia's plan to close the ring around Donbas.
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