Inside the pitched battle for Donbas where Putin loses a ‘brigade a day’
There is little left of the town of Rodynske. Shattered concrete and twists of charred metal mark the remains of buildings long since razed to the ground. The façades of those few still standing are pockmarked, battered by shrapnel and close to collapse.
“Our position is here,” says Lieutenant Colonel Vadym “Yankee” Krykun, commander of the 20th Lubart Brigade, pointing at a cratered building on his screen. “The enemy is firing on the building, and most of it is damaged. Two of our soldiers have broken legs, and one guy just fell. We have to plan for when it’s going to be quiet, then we can take them out.”
Rodynske is a satellite town of Pokrovsk, the key garrison city that fell to the Russians in February. The area is the scene of some of the most fierce fighting of the war.
President Putin’s summer offensive is in full swing, yet it cannot seem to gain momentum.
Ukrainian troops are engaging the Russians in firefights across the town. Krykun says: “If, at the beginning of spring, small arms engagements at positions were isolated incidents, now our fighters are destroying enemy infantry with firearms almost every day.”
Even with such close-quarters fighting, Russian artillery pounds the rubble around the infantry into dust. “What the enemy is doing is just ruining this building with artillery,” Krykyn says. “It doesn’t matter to them that they have their soldiers inside.”
A Donbas mining town that was home to about 12,000 people before the war, Rodynske sits astride a key road network on high ground about 10 kilometres north of the larger Pokrovsk settlement.
Wave by wave, Russian assaults swept over Pokrovsk last winter, handing Putin a pyrrhic victory that he could sell back home. At Rodynske that tide has been halted. Russian advances have slowed to a trickle, and even that is achieved at astonishing cost.
“The Russians have achieved some local tactical success, but the resources they’ve spent to achieve them are completely disproportionate,” Krykun says. “Their 9th Separate Motor Rifle Brigade, which was responsible for offensive operations toward Rodynske, was forced to withdraw for recovery — their personnel have been almost completely wiped out.”
The Russian army hopes to advance here to form the southern claw of a pincer movement that would close on the strategic logistics hub of Dobropillia, allowing them to flank the
Donbas“fortress belt” instead of assaulting the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk head on.
“Capturing the city of Dobropillia is critical for the enemy’s further offensive and the full occupation of [the] Donetsk region,” Krykun says. “The enemy is concentrating forces here, committing reserve units and redeploying combat-capable units from other parts of the front, trying to compensate for their losses and increase the intensity of offensive operations.”
By doing so they might avoid the kind of heavy casualties they are suffering at Kostyantynivka, the southern most tip of the fortress belt. So far they are failing.
Across the Donbas front line the Russian losses are horrific. “They are losing [the equivalent of] a brigade a day,” Krykun adds. “Just enormous losses of manpower.” A Russian brigade is typically comprised of between 1,500 to 4,000 men.
Western sources have backed Kyiv’s estimates of heavy Russian casualties. General Christopher Cavoli, who retired as Nato’s supreme allied commander in Europe last year, believes the Russians have been losing 30,000-35,000 casualties a month, more than they can replace on the battlefield. Kyiv aims to increase that to 50,000 by the end of the year, adding to what Cavoli counts as 1.5 million Russian casualties over the course of the war.
Putin’s recruitment campaign has become increasingly desperate as a result. The Kremlin has resorted to grabbing civilians from the street and forcing them to volunteer through violence and intimidation. Videos of police press gangs are starting to circulate on Russian social media channels. African soldiers are increasingly appearing within Russian ranks, some of whom say after capture that they were tricked into combat.
At Rodynske the Lubart Brigade has already seen the consequences play out on the battlefield. Krykyn says: “We see a deterioration in the training of their troops. They are often sent into the combat zone straight from the training ground, and the average life expectancy of such an infantryman is just two or three months from the moment he signs a contract.
“In order to compensate for losses in assault units, the enemy is forcibly transferring drivers, cooks, signalmen and so on. Being sent to the storm units is one of the most common forms of punishment for a serviceman, even for minor offences.”
Krykun’s brigade, Lubart, has evolved rapidly in parallel with the changing nature of the war. On the eve of the invasion they were a band of volunteers trained as partisans by former western special forces soldiers. By 2023 they were a special operations unit raiding the Russian-controlled bank of the Dnipro River at Kozachi Laheri, hiding in the tall reeds of floodplain swampland to ambush and capture Russian soldiers at close quarters.
When the leaders of the Azov Regiment were released from Russian captivity after being taken prisoner at Azovstal, Lubart joined the newly formed Azov Brigade as a battalion. In April 2025, when Azov formed a corps under Brigadier General Denys “Redis” Prokopenko, Lubart expanded to become a brigade.
They have never been afraid of a firefight, Krykun says, but they have adapted to kill their enemy in smarter ways, at a distance, with the help of artificial intelligence.
To the front of his command centre are desks divided by responsibility. Commanders for intelligence, counterintelligence, mid-range attack drones, air defence, artillery, connectivity, communications and liaison with neighbouring troops. They sit in online chats with their junior officers inside the Discord game server as the war plays out on the screens in front of them, intervening with commands as necessary.
Krykun introduces them. “That guy is from medical. He knows the condition of all the guys that are on the front lines. He’s like, this guy is under control, he’s getting worse and worse. These two guys, they’re responsible for controlling the drones.”
Live images from reconnaissance and strike drones are fed into an artificial intelligence system that identifies enemy targets within range that have not been selected for attack by other units.
“You put in the program, for example, armoured units,” Krykun says. “The AI gives you the target. If it’s our target, they just press and it strikes it. That’s it.”
The brigade’s mid-range drones have contributed to the ongoing assault on Russian supply lines by Ukraine across occupied territory.
“Previously they could feel safe at a distance of 40–50 kilometres from the line of contact and move freely at any time of day,” Krykyn says. “Now even a distance of 100 kilometres or more does not guarantee that a vehicle will reach its destination. We are already seeing the enemy has problems with fuel shortages and delays in the delivery of FPV drones to the front line.”
The Russians are also hitting Ukrainian lines hard with mid-range strike drones.
“We have 500 drones that are hitting our rear each day,” Krykun adds. “Now we need to have these mobile fire groups, guys with rifles or shotguns guarding it.” These soldiers are tasked with searching on the floor for remotely dropped mines while keeping an eye on the sky to bring down incoming drones. They train by shooting balloons dragged across the sky by drone.
Krykun’s team have become a close band of brothers who have stuck together through the heaviest of Ukraine’s battles, he says. They fought at Bakhmut, in the Serebriansky forest, during the 2023 counteroffensive and in defence of Toretsk, Kostyantynivka and Pokrovsk.
“Almost all the commanders we have in our brigade we made, we built them. Beginning from a soldier, then a company commander, then our staff officer at battalion level,” he says. “Those paper soldiers fresh out of academy, we don’t take them.”
All those battles have taken their toll, however. “I’ve lost a lot of friends along the way,” he says. “But everybody that’s still alive, they are with us. I think that’s our main strength, that we have a good communication and understanding. That’s what keeps us motivated — through all this geopolitics [and] talk of surrendering land — fighting though we’re exhausted. In 2026 we’re fighting for each other.”
