The World Strategist reports:
For months, Russian forces had been attempting an envelopment pushing toward the fortress cities from the south, trying to surround them from the southwest. Operation Vivaldi made that impossible. Ukraine's 3rd Corps struck north of Lyman with drones, ground robots and electronic warfare. They drove Russian forces out of the Lyman salient and advanced to the Zherebets River. The results were a disaster for Russia. Ukraine rendered Moscow’s plan to encircle the fortress cities “entirely unviable”. Russian Forces have become “acutely vulnerable to Ukrainian counterattacks and logistics interdiction." The human cost for Russia was enormous. But the greater damage was to Russia’s operational planning. “Either Russian commanders do not understand that the Lyman salient is lost or military leaders in Moscow are “privately aware of operational realities on the ground” - even as field commanders submit “fabricated reports to create an illusion of progress."The road from Kramatorsk to Kostiantynivka tells the story of this war in one stretch of asphalt. On one side, the shattered outskirts of a city that Russian forces have been trying to seize for months. On the other, the last major urban conglomeration in Donetsk Oblast still under Ukrainian control — a belt of four cities that Moscow has demanded be surrendered without a fight.
The Kremlin’s Holy Grail in the Donbas has been the “Fortress Belt” of Kostiantynivka, Druzhkivka, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk for four years. It is the backbone of Ukraine’s eastern defense, a 200-metre-deep labyrinth of trenches, wire, dragon’s teeth and minefields that has become the most fortified position in Europe.
February 2026: Pokrovsk is all but fallen, Myrnohrad is in Russian hands, and the struggle for the Fortress Belt is entering a new phase. But this is not the story the Kremlin wants you to buy. This is not a tale of inevitable Russian victory. It is a story of Ukrainian grit, tactical flexibility and a counteroffensive that has blown apart Moscow’s plans.
The New Battlefield Logistics, Attacks Not
The fight for the Fortress Belt is no longer mainly a battle of tanks and infantry. It is fought with drones, locomotives and bridges — a contest of supply lines that will determine whether Ukraine’s eastern defenses can hold.
Russian forces have changed their tactics. They are now waging a campaign that military analysts call battlefield air interdiction, or BAI, hitting the roads, railroads and bridges that feed Ukraine’s fortress cities in a systematic way, rather than massed frontal assaults that produced devastating casualties.
The goal is to cut off the Fortress Belt’s logistics. If they cannot be resupplied, they cannot hold.
This campaign is all over the place. Russian forces have been intensifying their strikes on Ukrainian locomotives — the trains that are crucial for transporting supplies to the front. In July 2026, Russian military command supplied its troops with 1,000 Molniya fixed-wing loitering munitions and ordered to intensify strikes on Ukrainian logistics in and near Kramatorsk. Major bridges are being hit. Geolocated footage from August 2 showed the aftermath of a Russian MLRS strike that heavily damaged the Cherivkovsky Bridge over the Kazennyi Torets River in Slovyansk, a critical logistics route linking Slovyansk to the H-20 highway and Kramatorsk.
Both Ukrainian and Russian sources have noted the negative effects. Nite logistics missions in Kramatorsk and Slovyansk are becoming challenging.
But Russia is not winning this logistical battle. It’s losing it because the U.S. has adapted faster.
Operation Vivaldi: Russia’s Plans Ruined by the Counterattack
On September 15, 2026 the Third Army Corps of Ukraine declassified the counteroffensive that changed the geometry of the entire Donbas front. They called it Operation Vivaldi.
The operation was not meant to reclaim the Fortress Belt, which was already in Ukrainian possession. To take away Russia’s capacity to surround it. And it worked.
For months the Russian forces had been attempting a grand envelopment, pushing toward the fortress cities from the south, trying to surround them from the southwest. The idea was to take the salient north of Lyman and push west to cut the roads and railroads feeding the belt. It was a gutsy design, something Russian military bloggers and Western analysts alike dismissed as unworkable. Operation Vivaldi would make that impossible.
Ukrainian forces under the command of the Third Army Corps and Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi struck north of Lyman with a combination of drones, ground robots and electronic warfare. They drove Russian forces out of Novoselivka, Oleksandrivka, Yarova and the outskirts of Koroviy Yar, and fully liberated Serednye. The advance to the Chornyi Zherebets River was just the first stage of a “multi-season campaign,” as Biletskyi termed it.
The results were a disaster for Russia Ukrainian forces have eliminated the Russian salient north of Lyman, rendering Moscow’s plan to encircle the fortress cities from both north and south “entirely unviable”. A leading Kremlin-aligned military blogger acknowledged Ukrainian counteroffensive momentum would dramatically slow Moscow’s expected push on Slovyansk. The blogger said the northern flank of the Russian Southern Group of Forces had become “acutely vulnerable to Ukrainian counterattacks and logistics interdiction missions”.
The human cost for Russia was enormous. The Third Army Corps estimated Russian losses at about 1,500 personnel casualties, the loss of more than 12,000 reconnaissance and strike drones and hundreds of destroyed armored vehicles.
But the greater damage was to Russia’s operational planning. “Either Russian commanders do not understand that the Lyman salient is permanently lost, or they are stubbornly trying to cut Ukrainian ground lines of communication into the Fortress Belt from the west,” ISW analysts said. Russian military leaders in Moscow are “privately aware of operational realities on the ground” — even as their field commanders submit “fabricated progress reports” to create an illusion of continual advances.
The Survival Infrastructure Ukraine’s Defense Network
Meanwhile, as Russia tries to break Ukraine’s supply lines, Ukraine is reinforcing the physical defenses that make the Fortress Belt one of the toughest positions in modern warfare.
The defensive network is massive in size. Ukrainian forces have built lines up to 200 meters wide — not isolated trenches, but an extensive system of engineering defenses designed to repel large-scale offensive operations. The design is multi-layer.
Barbed wire and anti-personnel wire belts
anti-tank ditches, some two meters deep and up to three meters wide.
Soil embankments excavated to create defensive berms
Concrete Dragon’s Teeth tank traps
Approach routes mined with landmines“The excavated soil has become a defensive berm,” The Economist said. Then more wire. A second anti-tank ditch and berm. Then another strip of wire. In some places there is a third ditch, “dragon’s teeth” and mines.
Drones are always on the watch for these defenses, making any Russian attempt to break through very costly. Without such defensive lines, “the situation could have developed very differently, to Ukraine’s disadvantage,” said Viacheslav Shutenko, commander of the drone battalion of the 44th Mechanized Brigade.
The fighting is so close it makes the stakes clear. Kramatorsk itself is under growing drone and missile attack, with the nearest Russian positions only 17 kilometers away. And if Kostiantynivka is taken, then Druzhkivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk would be at risk.
But the Fortress Belt has been held, not because Russia has not tried, but because Ukraine has made it nearly impossible to take.
The Human Dimension: Soldiers and Cities Under Attack
But beneath the maps and the statistics are real people — soldiers who have been holding positions for months and civilians living in cities Russia is seeking to make unlivable.
Kostiantynivka, with a pre-invasion population of some 78,000, has been under pressure from Russia for months. ISW analysts say Russian forces have entered at least 12.69 per cent of the city. DeepState says the city is being “razed to the ground and turned into ruins.”
In July, Russian military bloggers posted that Kostiantynivka had been captured. UK Defense Intelligence, however, assessed that only about half the city was in Russian hands. Ukrainian officials rejected the claims, saying the situation was “difficult” but that troops were defending the town.
The fighting doesn’t cease. The highest number of engagements in the Donetsk region was recorded on one day at the end of September in the Pokrovsk and Kostiantynivka sectors. The Russians carried out 22 attacks on the Kostiantynivka axis alone.
For troops on the front, it’s become a war of attrition, a grinding matter. An officer fighting in the battles around Pokrovsk painted the picture bluntly: Russian forces, he said, “are no longer trying to break through Ukrainian defenses with large-scale frontal assaults.” Instead, he said, they are “trying to get as many personnel and resources into Pokrovsk as possible,” collecting troops, equipment, command posts and drone operator stations within the city to transform it into a logistics hub for future offensives.The officer said their main effort was focused on Hryshyne. “They’re entrenched in the southern part of the settlement and they’re advancing toward the center. They try to get around it by open fields and through the industrial zone in the northwest”.
This is not a war of great breakthroughs. It is a war of inches, fought by tired soldiers on both sides, in cities slowly ground to rubble.
The Strategic Equation Why Does the Fortress Belt Matter?
Russia’s BAI campaign and its slow advances have not materially changed the strategic equation. In the east, the Fortress Belt is the most defensible position for Ukraine. And ISW says Russia is “functionally incapable” of seizing all of Donetsk Oblast by military means in 2026.
The numbers tell the story. In August 2026, Russian forces consolidated or captured 90.35 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, compared with more than 500 square kilometers in August 2025. Russia’s pace of advance has dropped more than 80 percent year over year.
In the meantime Ukrainian forces have been retaking ground. They recaptured over 745 square kilometers in Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts in the winter and spring of 2026, not counting more recent gains.
And Russia’s losses increase. Even the Kremlin’s own military bloggers now say that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will “significantly slow down” Moscow’s planned drive on Slovyansk. Russian commanders “have been trying to hide high casualty rates by hastily assembling emergency assault detachments from untrained replacement personnel” in a desperate effort to regain lost ground, one blogger said.
The Fortress Belt won’t be taken. It is going to be the graveyard of Russia’s Donbas ambitions.
Conclusion: A new beginning, not an end
The war for the Fortress Belt has entered a new phase. Russia is no longer trying to storm the cities, it is trying to strangle them. Ukraine isn’t just defending. It’s pushing back, hitting Russian logistics, and destroying Moscow’s operational plans.
The war in Donbas is not over. It could be years before it’s over. The fortifications are formidable, but they are only as strong as the soldiers who man them, and the supply lines that sustain them. Russia will keep attacking bridges and trains and roads. Ukraine will continue to defend, to adapt and to counterattack.
But one thing is clear: the story of an inevitable Russian victory in the Donbas is a false one. The Fortress Belt is secure. Operation Vivaldi has broken the plan of encircling Russia. And the data — on territorial gains, on casualties, on logistics — tells a story of a Russian military grinding forward at its slowest pace since the early days of the war.
Kramatorsk-Kostiantynivka road is open. And the Fortress Belt remains as long as it does.
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