Dobropillya, a city in Donetsk Oblast, has become one of the many unyielding points on a vast and bloody map. It is not one of the names that received worldwide attention at the start of the full-scale invasion—not a Mariupol or a Bakhmut—but it belongs to the same geography of sorrow and defiance. Against the official narrative broadcast from Moscow, the city remains firmly under the control of Ukrainian forces, specifically the National Guard’s 1st “Azov” Corps and the units attached to it. Russian reports, repeated in state media, paint a picture of collapsing defenses, overwhelmed battalions, and surrounded garrisons. The accounts from the ground tell another story—one of a determined defense, a front line that has shifted but not broken, and a fight that is as psychological as it is physical. For the men inside Dobropillya, the war cannot be reduced to arrows on a commander’s map or claims read from a ministry podium. It is a life of damp trenches, drone frequencies, hurried supply runs in armored vans, and the constant awareness that the enemy is close enough to be heard at night. The city’s name now carries a weight of its own, a quiet symbol of resistance in a region that has been battered since 2014. The men who hold the city come from different corners of Ukraine, different backgrounds, different lives before the war, but they are bound together by the same simple conviction: that this ground is their land, and that the enemy will not take it while they are still breathing. In the words of those who command the defense, the situation is difficult but not desperate. The enemy attempts to describe an encirclement, yet the soldiers who are supposedly trapped continue to fight, move, resupply, and strike back. This is the reality that often gets lost in the fog of war.
Acting corps commander Nikita Nadtochiy offered a blunt assessment in an Azov video. “The enemy claims to have us surrounded,” he said, “but its assaults result in casualties even before they reach our positions.” There is something remarkable in that phrase—the idea that the battlefield begins long before the visible contact, that the killing happens in the approach, in the open ground, in the fields and tree lines that have been turned into a grey, churned moonscape. Russian assault groups, sent forward to test the defenses, are met with fire that has already been plotted, ranged, and rehearsed. The dead and wounded do not pile up at the barbed wire; they fall in the middle of nowhere, in the patches of scrub that once held wild grass, in the drainage ditches that were meant to provide cover. The commander’s words carry no hysteria. They are the observations of a soldier who knows that encirclement in a digital era can be a matter of interpretation. Maps may show a ring, but the ground does not. To encircle a city is not to control it. To surround a garrison is not to silence it. Nadtochiy’s tone suggests experience: he has seen such claims before, has heard the enemy announce victories that never materialized, has buried friends and continued the mission. The men under him continue to hold their sectors, rotate positions, and answer every attempt to advance with a combination of artillery, drones, and small arms. The claim of encirclement, repeated so often in Russian official statements, has become a kind of ritual—a way of declaring intent rather than describing reality. In a war where propaganda is itself a weapon, Nadtochiy’s quiet words are a counterweight to the noise.
Maksym Kravets, Chief of Staff of the National Guard of Ukraine’s 14th Operational Brigade “Chervona Kalyna,” described a specific and vicious feature of this stage of the war: small groups of Russian soldiers attempting to infiltrate the space between Ukrainian positions. These are not massed charges or armored columns of the kind that dominated the early months of the invasion. They are tighter, quieter, more desperate attempts—teams of infantry crawling through drainage channels, sheltering in ruined buildings, hoping to slip through gaps in the defensive grid. Kravets said these groups are being detected and eliminated. Behind that short sentence lies a web of surveillance: thermal imagers, observation drones, signals intercepts, listening posts, and the instinct of soldiers who have spent months learning every fold of this terrain. The space between positions, the so-called grey zone, is no longer empty ground. It is a hunting ground. When a small enemy team is spotted, the response is often surgical: a drone drop, a mortar round, a well-aimed machine gun burst from a position the enemy did not know was occupied. The human cost of such warfare is difficult to absorb. The Russians being killed are not abstract symbols. They are men, often conscripts, sent forward on missions that their own commanders must know are unlikely to succeed. But for Ukrainian defenders, the choice is simple: these men are coming to kill them or take their land. The elimination of infiltration teams, however grim, is the price of survival. Kravets’ words reflect a defense that is active, not passive—an awareness that the best way to break an encirclement is to kill the encirclement before it forms. It is also a reminder that the war is not fought in clean lines on a screen, but in the mud, the rain, the ruined cellars, and the tense silence between gunshots.
Pavlo Yatsyuk, the head of the National Guard’s “Omega” Special Forces Center, put numbers to the grinding reality. Since the beginning of 2026, Omega troops have eliminated nearly 1,500 enemy personnel, nearly 1,000 pieces of military equipment, 3,700 enemy UAVs, and about 100 artillery systems. These figures are stark, almost numbing in their scale. But each one represents a concrete deletion from the enemy’s order of battle. Nearly 1,500 enemy personnel is more than a battalion, more than a collection of names in a casualty report. It is a generation of trained soldiers removed from the fight. Nearly 1,000 pieces of equipment means tanks, armored personnel carriers, logistical vehicles, and other machines that will never roll again. The 3,700 UAVs may deserve special attention. In this war, the drone has become the deadliest scout, the eye that guides artillery, the assassin that drops a grenade through an open hatch. To destroy 3,700 of them is to punch holes in the enemy’s ability to see, to hide the sky from his gaze, to make his own operations stumble into darkness. About 100 artillery systems—guns, mortars, launchers—means the Russian gunners who shell Ukrainian towns and trenches are being silenced one by one. Yatsyuk’s report is not a boast. It is a ledger of a brutal, daily grind. It is the work of specialist teams who stalk the enemy’s strongest assets, often at great personal risk. This is the kind of attrition that can change the course of a war, but it is measured in blood as well as numbers. Behind each destroyed system are exhausted Ukrainian specialists—operators, repairmen, forward observers—who have spent countless hours in the fight, staring at screens, listening to static, waiting for a target to appear. They, too, are part of Dobropillya’s story, even if their names never appear in a news report.
Dmytro Semenyuk, commander of the 425th Separate Assault Regiment “Skelya,” offered a more personal perspective. “The enemy is being eliminated in advance,” he said. “It has become safer to move between some positions. I’m not talking right now about the drones, which are present in very large numbers in some areas, but even our units are managing to achieve success and push the enemy further away from our land.” There is a quiet pride in this statement, but also an honest caution. Semenyuk acknowledges the drones—the ever-present eyes that make every move on the battlefield a calculation. Yet even with those threats, the situation has improved enough that moving between positions is less deadly than it once was. That is an enormous statement, because in positional warfare, movement is life. Ammunition, food, water, replacement troops, and the wounded all require movement. A force that cannot move is a force that is slowly dying. A force that can move, even with difficulty, is a force that intends to stay. Semenyuk’s phrase “push the enemy further away from our land” is not a grand strategic slogan. It is the measured hope of a commander who has seen his unit do the impossible week after week. The enemy’s map may show a ring around Dobropillya, but Semenyuk and his men are pushing the ring outward. They are converting what the enemy calls an encirclement into a killing zone. They are not merely surviving; they are reclaiming a few more feet of Ukrainian soil at a time, and in a war like this, a few feet are enough to start changing the shape of the line. His words also carry a deeper meaning: the defenders are not waiting for rescue. They are the rescue. Every small advance, every cleared tree line, every destroyed drone is a step toward making the enemy’s position untenable.
All this context matters because of what happened before. On September 22, the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that its forces had surrounded a Ukrainian Armed Forces defensive stronghold in Dobropillya and were continuing an offensive toward Oleksandrivka. Russian military propaganda specifically named the “Skelya” unit and the 4th and 15th National Guard brigades, saying they were trapped in the “encirclement.” It was a familiar script: announce the ring, apply pressure, wait for the collapse that never comes. But the reports from Ukrainian commanders and soldiers—the video statements, the unit insignias seen in fresh footage, the casualty figures from Omega—tell a different story. The “trapped” units are alive, communicating, coordinating, and inflicting losses on the attacking force. The soldiers of Skelya, Chervona Kalyna, the 4th and 15th brigades, and the Azov Corps are not prisoners in their own trenches. They are defenders who have turned the battlefield into a furnace. The Russian claim of encirclement, repeated so confidently, has not been followed by a decisive breakthrough. Instead, there are reports of failed assaults, of infiltration teams eliminated, of drones and artillery systems destroyed. Humanizing this story means remembering that behind every phrase of military jargon is a person. On the Ukrainian side, there are soldiers who have not slept, who have lost friends, who still choose to stand. On the Russian side, there are conscripts and regulars who have been sent into a war they may not understand, into a meat grinder ordered by men far away. The war in Dobropillya is a tragedy in every direction. But for those who believe in Ukraine’s right to exist, the fact that the city remains in Ukrainian hands is not just a tactical detail. It is proof that ordinary men, armed with courage and a brutal recognition of what is at stake, can withstand the machinery of a larger state. The encirclement that was announced has not happened. Dobropillya is not yet free of war, but it is not lost. And the men who hold it continue to do exactly what they promised: they stand.