Lyman: The Battle That Refuses to End

By Matthew Parish

Sunday 4 October 2026

There are places in war whose military significance becomes almost inseparable from their symbolism. Lyman, a modest city in the north of Donetsk Oblast surrounded by forests, rivers, railway lines and ruined villages, has become one of them. Russia captured it in the spring of 2022. Ukraine retook it in the autumn of that year, in the aftermath of the extraordinary Kharkiv counter-offensive. Since then the Russians have been trying, by one route or another, to come back. In 2026 they came perilously close. Yet the most recent events around Lyman suggest something rather more complicated than the familiar story of inexorable Russian advance. For the moment at least, parts of this battlefield are moving in the other direction.

The significance of what has happened becomes apparent only if we remember how threatening the position around Lyman appeared earlier in the year. Russian forces had worked their way through the countryside east and north-east of the city, employing the methods that have become characteristic of the later stages of this war: small assault groups, infiltration through tree lines and ruined settlements, extensive drone reconnaissance and a willingness to expend substantial quantities of infantry for incremental territorial gains. By June, Ukrainian military analysts were reporting Russian infiltration attempts on Lyman’s eastern outskirts, while the situation around Yampil and Ozerne was described as difficult. The danger was not merely that Lyman itself might fall. A Russian breakthrough here could contribute to a much larger attempt to approach the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration and Ukraine’s remaining fortified urban belt in northern Donetsk Oblast.

Then the picture began to change. During September Ukrainian forces conducted a sustained counter-offensive in the Lyman sector under the name Operation Vivaldi, led by the Third Army Corps alongside other Ukrainian formations. By the end of the operation’s third phase, Ukrainian forces reported recovering Nove, Ridkodub and Katerynivka, while restoring control over Karpivka and Novomykhailivka. Open-source mapping by DeepState broadly corroborated the territorial changes. According to the Third Army Corps, another 51 square kilometres were recovered during this phase, bringing the territory regained during the wider operation to 176 square kilometres. Ukrainian military figures for Russian casualties and prisoners are considerably harder to verify independently and should therefore be treated as claims by the Ukrainian side rather than established facts.

The importance of Vivaldi lies less in the number of square kilometres than in what those square kilometres represent. Territorial statistics in this war can be deceptive. A field may be strategically meaningless while a village sitting across a supply road can matter enormously. The Ukrainian operation appears to have attacked precisely the vulnerabilities that Russian forces themselves have so often exploited: logistics, communications, reinforcement routes and the difficulty of maintaining scattered infantry positions under ubiquitous drone surveillance. Ukrainian forces reportedly struck Russian supply networks, drone teams and electronic-warfare equipment before the principal ground movements began. The subsequent advance forced Russian forces into a more difficult position around and west of the Zherebets River and disrupted, although it has certainly not eliminated, Russia’s attempt to approach Ukraine’s northern Donbas defensive belt.

There is another reason why the fighting around Lyman deserves attention. It provides an unusually clear illustration of how rapidly warfare in Ukraine is changing. Operation Vivaldi involved not merely infantry advancing behind artillery and drones but increasingly elaborate integration of unmanned systems into ground manoeuvre. Ukrainian forces have described the employment of heavy bomber drones to transport unmanned ground vehicles deep behind Russian positions. Ground robots were reportedly used for mine-clearing along routes towards Shandryholove and for remotely laying mines across potential Russian reinforcement routes. These are not technological curiosities added to an otherwise conventional battle. They are increasingly part of the battle itself.

The underlying logic is brutal but rational. Every task performed by a machine is potentially one less Ukrainian soldier exposed to Russian artillery, FPV drones or mines. Ukraine has fewer people than Russia and therefore has an especially powerful incentive to substitute technology for manpower wherever possible. A remotely operated vehicle clearing a road may be destroyed, but a destroyed machine does not leave a widow or grieving parents. The Lyman operations consequently offer a glimpse of a battlefield upon which drones are no longer principally flying cameras or improvised missiles. They are becoming components of combined-arms warfare, operating in the air and on the ground and participating directly in the preparation and execution of manoeuvre.

None of this means that the battle for Lyman has been won. Indeed the events of 2 and 3 October demonstrate precisely why triumphalism would be foolish. The Ukrainian General Staff reported eight Russian attacks in the Lyman sector during 2 October, directed towards Drobyshcheve, Lyman itself and Novoselivka. Its evening report had described fighting around Drobyshcheve and Lyman as continuing. Meanwhile fighting has persisted around Yampil, Ozerne and the approaches towards the Siverskyi Donets, and independent analysts assess that Russian forces continue offensive operations despite the Ukrainian counter-attacks.

This matters because Russia’s strategic purpose has not disappeared merely because one Ukrainian operation has succeeded in pushing parts of the front backwards. Lyman sits close to a network of roads, rivers, forests and settlements leading towards Sloviansk. Russian seizure of Lyman would therefore be useful not simply as a territorial prize but as part of a broader effort to place pressure upon the Sloviansk-Kramatorsk defensive area from the north and north-east. The Institute for the Study of War assesses the Russian objective in this sector as seizing Lyman and crossing the Siverskyi Donets in support of a wider attempt to envelop Ukraine’s fortified belt in Donetsk Oblast. Recent Ukrainian counter-attacks around Lyman, Yampil, Ozerne and farther east towards Sloviansk have complicated that plan.

There is an irony here. For much of the last two years commentary about the eastern front has concentrated upon Russian momentum. That emphasis was understandable because Russia repeatedly demonstrated an ability to turn overwhelming advantages in artillery, glide bombs, drones and manpower into slow territorial progress. Yet Lyman reminds us that the front is not a single mechanical object moving uniformly westwards. It consists of dozens of local contests involving different commanders, terrain, logistics, units, technologies and tactical circumstances. An army can be advancing around one city while being pushed backwards around another. On 2 October, for example, the heaviest Russian pressure was reported around Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk, while around Lyman the strategic picture included Ukrainian territorial gains and continuing counter-attacks.

The autumn may also change the tactical environment. Dense summer vegetation has helped small Russian infantry groups conceal themselves from aerial observation. As the leaves disappear, movement through the forests and tree lines around Lyman becomes easier for drone operators to detect. Yet that advantage cuts both ways: Ukrainian infantry and vehicles also become more visible. The coming mud, rain and eventually snow will impose further complications upon ground movement while doing remarkably little to diminish the importance of drones. The battlefield around Lyman is therefore likely to remain fluid even if the map sometimes appears static.

For civilians, of course, all these arrows and coloured patches on military maps disguise something appalling. Lyman has already been conquered, liberated, bombarded and threatened with conquest again. The settlements surrounding it have suffered the same miserable cycle. A village changing colour on an online map may represent a successful manoeuvre to somebody hundreds of kilometres away; to the people who once lived there it may mean another collection of shattered houses, mined gardens and abandoned streets. The peculiar horror of the Donbas campaign is that armies are repeatedly fighting over communities that the fighting itself progressively destroys.

Yet there is nevertheless a broader military lesson emerging from Lyman. Ukraine remains capable of more than passive defence. Where Russian logistics can be disrupted, where reconnaissance and unmanned systems can be integrated effectively and where local commanders can create uncertainty about the direction of an attack, Ukrainian forces can still recover territory. Operation Vivaldi does not reverse the overall strategic imbalance between Russia and Ukraine, nor does it guarantee that Lyman is safe. It demonstrates something narrower but important: Russian advances are neither automatic nor irreversible.

That may ultimately be why Lyman matters beyond the forests of northern Donetsk Oblast.

Modern wars are contests not only of territory but of expectations. Russia benefits whenever the world begins to imagine that every Ukrainian position must eventually fall, because fatalism can become a strategic weapon of its own. Lyman offers a corrective to that assumption. Earlier this year Russian soldiers were attempting to infiltrate the city’s outskirts; by the end of September Ukrainian forces were announcing the recovery of villages and substantial territory farther north. On 3 October Russian troops were attacking towards Lyman again.

So the battle continues. It would be premature to call Lyman either a Ukrainian victory or an impending Russian conquest. What we can say is that the initiative in this part of the Donbas has become contested in a way that appeared substantially less plausible several months ago. Ukraine has bought space, disrupted Russian plans and demonstrated new methods of conducting offensive operations in a battlefield saturated with drones. Russia, meanwhile, continues to attack and retains substantial resources with which to do so. The forests around Lyman are therefore becoming the setting for something larger than another struggle over a ruined Donbas town: they are a laboratory for the next stage of the war.