Kyiv’s forces retake over 600 km2 in southeastern Ukraine

Ukraine’s military command said its forces liberated 26 settlements in a push around Oleksandrivka in southeastern Ukraine, in an operation that ran for more than six months.

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Of the liberated settlements, 12 are located in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, 10 in the Donetsk region and four in the Zaporizhzhia region.

Kyiv authorities insist that the Oleksandrivka-direction counteroffensive was designed to blunt Russia’s spring-summer offensive and push Russian troops out of Dnipropetrovsk region, an area Moscow had been trying to carve into a buffer zone.

According to Ukrainian Airborne Assault Forces Command, Kyiv’s troops have liberated more than 745 km2 of territory.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which tracks the war through open-source mapping, gave a more conservative figure of roughly 626.69 square kilometres liberated across the Oleksandrivka direction and the northern edge of the adjoining Hulyaipole sector, while cautioning that its methodology “likely underestimates Ukrainian advances.”

The ISW analysts framed the operation as evidence Ukraine can still mount coordinated, mechanised counterattacks after more than four years of largely static, attritional fighting.

The US-based think-tank attributed the gains to several reinforcing factors: the maturing of Ukrainian command’s operational planning, a sustained campaign to suppress and destroy Russian air-defence systems, an intensifying mid-range strike campaign against Russian logistics, Ukraine’s edge in tactical drone warfare and the abrupt 1 February cutoff of Starlink connectivity for Russian units operating inside Ukraine.

The ISW said the fighting near Oleksandrivka has also had knock-on effects elsewhere on the map, forcing Moscow to choose between shoring up its defence there or diverting troops and equipment to offensives further along the front, a dilemma sharpened by Russia’s declining recruitment rate.

By way of comparison, ISW calculated that across the entire front line over the same six-and-a-half-month period, Russian forces lost roughly 233.74 square kilometres of ground even as they managed to seize or infiltrate only 382.98 square kilometres of new territory, a gap the ISW said makes Ukraine’s localised success near Oleksandrivka stand out all the more.