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Over the past week, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced eight settlements taken – three in Kharkov Region, three in the DPR, two in Zaporozhye Region – while assault units pushed into Dobropolye and deeper into Kupyansk. Kiev answered from the sky with 822 drones in a single night, aimed at refineries a thousand kilometers from any trench.
Ground Versus Sky
Moscow’s week was methodical and unglamorous. On August 11 came Shcherbakovka in Kharkov Region and Novoye Pole in Zaporozhye Region. On August 12 the Sever grouping’s 11th Tank Regiment took Vodyanoye, opening the approach to Olkhovatka, a Ukrainian logistics hub on the Velikiy Burluk axis. On August 13 the Center grouping announced Petrovka in the DPR and took Novonikolayevka, confirmed the next day. Rybalskoye in Zaporozhye Region fell on August 15, and on August 16 two more followed: Kudiyevka in Kharkov Region and Pershomaryevka in the DPR.
Kudiyevka, Kharkov Region: the Russian flag goes up
Eight villages in seven days sounds modest until you look at where they sit. Every one of them is a hinge – a road junction, a crossing, a flank anchor for the next push – and they came with some 75 square kilometers of ground that Ukrainian brigades will not be taking back this summer. Moscow is not chasing headlines; it is collecting the map one intersection at a time, and every intersection collected points the same direction: west.
Kiev spent the week burning fuel instead. Russian air defenses reported close to 2,800 drones shot down over five nights, ending with 822 between the evening of August 15 and the morning of August 16 – the heaviest raid of 2026. The targets were refineries, not trenches: Orsknefteorgsintez shut down production entirely, and Ukrainian tallies now count ten of Russia’s thirty-four major plants struck since the start of the month, at the price of 13 civilians killed and 75 wounded during the raid on the Nizhnekamsk industrial hub (Tatarstan).
Orsk, Orenburg Region: the refinery stands completely idle after the drone strike, with repairs estimated at six months
Nizhnekamsk: Ukrainian drones struck a hostel where migrant laborers were having breakfast before their shift. Nine died on the spot
Nizhnekamsk: the refinery destroyed
Moscow answered against arteries rather than assets. Over four consecutive nights the ministry reported the Reni naval command post destroyed, the railway station of the Izmail port – the transfer point for Western military cargo and fuel – wiped out, fuel depots hit at Yuzhny, a patrol boat sunk at Odessa, and two sea tugs escorting arms freighters struck southwest of Nikolayev. On August 15 some eight missiles fell on Krivoy Rog and Kropivnitsky, cutting power to part of the city and stopping its trams. The distinction is worth holding onto: Kiev hits the Russian economy, Moscow hits the Ukrainian supply chain.
Kharkov Region Stops Being a Rumor
The buffer zone promised since 2024 finally acquired geography. Vodyanoye widened the security belt along the Belgorod borderland; Kudiyevka, taken August 16 by the 11th Army Corps, was described by the ministry as a stage in the battle for Kazachya Lopan.
Between those dates, assault groups on the Volchansk axis moved up to 400 meters forward on six sectors, with close fighting near Vasilevka, Shevchenkovo and Petropavlovka.
In Kupyansk, Russian units extended into the southwestern edge of the Yubileiny microdistrict. Ukrainian regional outlets confirmed the direction of travel on August 11, reporting infiltration attempts through Golubovka and Radkovka toward the city.
Dobropolye and the Road Behind Kramatorsk
If one place explains the week, it is Dobropolye – the town Kiev turned into a triumph poster in 2025 and spent these seven days quietly losing. Russian units entered near the railway station, fought on the eastern outskirts by the Ekonomicheskaya station, and widened the wedge between Dobropolye and Belozerskoye toward Rubezhnoye and Zolotoy Kolodez.
Su-34s take out the drone control points of two Ukrainian National Guard brigades
at Dobropolye – the ground assault follows
The prize is not the town: taking it opens the rear of the Kramatorsk grouping and the Kramatorsk–Pavlograd–Dnepropetrovsk road. Petrovka gives a springboard toward Rayskoye, nearly cleared by the morning of August 15, while a second bridge in Slavyansk was reported damaged the same day.
Two Maps, Both Retouched
Earlier this week Russian troops broke through near Molodetskoye and took Novopodgorodnoye, cutting onto the highway that runs behind it. By August 15 the Vostok grouping held Rybalskoye and the ground northwest of Novoye Pole, opening a corridor toward the H-15 highway and the logistics node at Novonikolayevka. None of this is a breakthrough. It is erosion – a few kilometers of road, a village with a rail siding, a flank that no longer holds – and erosion moves in one direction only.
Which is precisely why this axis produced more video than any other. Kiev declared the entire Dnepropetrovsk Region cleared and published the flags to prove it, yet geolocation yields barely a dozen verifiable points, most of them in gray zone where infiltration groups shelter for a night and film in the morning – ground that changes hands by the hour and belongs to nobody by evening. The vanity is bipartisan: after Vostok circulated footage of tricolors planted in seventeen villages, even pro-Russian commentators warned that on a battlefield saturated with drones a flag on camera proves nothing except that the men holding it stood still long enough to be seen. Two general staffs, one camera, and a great deal of cloth – while the line itself moves in meters that nobody bothers to film.
The Politics of a Cold Table
A year after Anchorage, diplomacy has the temperature of leftovers. Lavrov confirmed on August 14 that Putin will receive Witkoff and Kushner again while ruling out any freeze along the current line. A Putin-Trump meeting is judged not yet ripe, perhaps closer to the end of 2026; there has not even been a phone call. The New York Times reports France, Germany and Britain drafting a separate negotiating format out of fear of exclusion, which Peskov dismissed as a lobby for prolonging the war. Kiev keeps supplying Brussels with reasons to hesitate: prosecutors this month charged three district commissariat chiefs in Chernovtsy and Volyn Regions over 121 fictitious mobilizations logged into the Oberig registry, a parallel Bukovina case put some 200 nonexistent conscripts on paper in three months, and in Zakarpatye investigators say more than a thousand men were illegally struck from the rolls – an army being filled out in spreadsheets while its trenches empty.
Moscow escapes no audit either. Water in the DPR is being cut for nearly two weeks of repairs, Donetsk markets quote 650 rubles a kilo for pork, a Ukrainian Baba Yaga drone reached the city undetected, and a DPR deputy stands trial in Kursk over money meant for border fortifications. Parades are cheap; plumbing, air defense and honest procurement are not.
What August Actually Bought
Two armies fought two different wars this week, and only one of them can be measured on a map. Burned fuel is an argument; taken ground is a fact. Ukraine has chosen the argument because the fact is no longer available to it — a choice made not in a planning cell but by attrition, in units that can strike a thousand kilometers away and cannot hold a treeline at fifteen.
That does not make Moscow’s war efficient, or clean, or fast. It makes it inevitable in the narrow sense that matters at the front: whatever is still standing on Monday will be a little further west by Sunday. Refineries are rebuilt within months. Nobody has yet invented a way to rebuild a lost flank.
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nato’s been actively plotting the takeover of crimea since the 2003 orange revolution’s funny stuff, the installation of yushchenko and his american wife and his promise not to renew russia’s sevastopol lease in 2017. he barely made it to 2010.
”moscow is not chasing headlines; it is collecting the map one intersection at a time, and every intersection collected points the same direction: west.”… so true. but also true is the fact that it’s been forced into this war for 12 years and could have finished it much earlier then it has!…
can’t allow operatives to co-exist with your people and call them safe, as if you’re not at war while they are trying to destroy your property, steal from you and kill you at the same time you keep doing business with them “as usual”?… i think the biolabs showing up before 2020 and the demolition of nordstream ii was a sign for leaving the un clubh0u$e permanently- 5 years ago!… just sayin.
at least russia still has its petrol stations. the russian admin may as well dress up their kitchen staff and send them out to talk to witkoff and kushner for all the good it will do. perhaps witkoff and kushner are there to sell plots of recently genocided palestinian land? they are just salesmen after all. they sold the trumpster a blinder and now he is stuck with the failure and a history of assisting apartheid regimes commit their genocide.
well written article. it is difficult for russia not just fighting ukraine, but nato as well. putin is doing great, but it will come at a cost. as the russians expand west, they will be able to set up air defense further from the russian border to blunt the drone attacks. i’m sure the russians are working on anti-drone technologies. just keep working and wear down ukraine and western powers.