Two Way Street

Following the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv, Russian forces begin establishing deep, multi-layered defensive fortifications across southern and eastern Ukraine, prioritizing defense-in-depth to prevent future breakthroughs. Contemporaneous evidence of the turn comes from the east rather than the south: satellite imagery from Planet Labs, analysed by ABC News in October 2022, showed a fortified line under construction from just south of Russian-held Popasna in Luhansk Oblast — two rows of pyramid-shaped concrete blocks followed by a vehicle-trapping ditch near Hirske — with a planned length of some 120 miles, and a Janes analyst assessed the trenches were 'considerably larger and more sophisticated than most Russian trench lines seen throughout the war'. Russian media called that eastern line the Wagner Line; the name Surovikin Line attaches properly to the southern belts built across Zaporizhzhia from late 2022, which are the ones Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive met. The September 2022 start date recorded here remains approximate and is not yet tied to a contemporaneous primary source.

ISW documented three separate instances in this window of Russian sources publishing footage that does not show what it purports to show, and generalised the practice as a cognitive-warfare method for propagating claims of advances. On July 22 the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed the seizure of Blahodatne, southwest of Oleksandrivka, and published footage of a servicemember waving a flag there; ISW assesses the footage was filmed at a different location and edited to splice in overhead drone imagery of Blahodatne, and that Russian forces have only infiltrated to within 11 kilometres of the settlement — making not just seizure but recent entry unlikely. Geolocated flag-raising footage from Hrafske, northeast of Kharkiv City, published July 20, is footage ISW has reason to suspect was AI-altered; a Russian milblogger claimed the settlement's capture on July 22, and ISW recorded no confirmed advance there. And footage posted by the Kremlin newswire TASS purporting to show strikes on Ukrainian positions in Oleksiyevo-Druzhkivka was identified by a geolocator as filmed instead at Kostyantynivka and Kleban-Byk, roughly 10 kilometres from the current frontline, with some of it dating from around August 2025. The mechanism is what makes this a tactic rather than three errors: the claim of ground is made in imagery rather than in a communiqué, so it must be refuted frame by frame — and the refutation, unlike the claim, takes days of geolocation work. Three days later the practice was described from the Ukrainian side as a planned task rather than a by-product of capture. Ukrainian Joint Forces Task Force Spokesperson Colonel Viktor Trehubov stated on 25 July that Russian forces had claimed to seize Bilyi Kolodyaz in northern Kharkiv Oblast but that only isolated Russian infiltrators reached the settlement and raised a flag there; ISW's own framing of the episode is that Russian forces 'previously conducted a flag-raising mission for informational effects' — the flag-raising treated as the objective of the mission rather than as the marking of a captured place. Trehubov added that Russian forces are increasingly attacking in small groups in northern Kharkiv Oblast, which is the manoeuvre form such a mission requires: infiltration by a handful of soldiers is enough to produce the footage, and produces nothing else.

This timeline recorded in June that Russian assault formations had been driven down by drone-saturated defences from platoon-sized attacks through squad and fire-team to two-person infiltration teams, because concentrations of vehicles could not survive the approach. On 22 July Russian forces reversed that, briefly. Ukrainian National Guard Commander Brigadier General Oleksandr Pivnenko confirmed on 25 July that elements of the Russian 8th Combined Arms Army and 41st Combined Arms Army — including the 41st's 90th Tank Division — conducted a reinforced company-sized mechanised assault in the Dobropillya direction, advancing from Novoekonomichne and Vozdvyzhenka and attempting to enter settlements near Shakhove over roughly four hours. It was defeated the same way mass armour was defeated the first time: not by anti-tank guns or minefields but by drone crews watching the approaches, with the Phoenix border unit of Ukraine's Pomsta brigade named as the operators. The counter held, and the doctrine it had displaced was not restored — ISW records Russian forces continuing offensive operations in the Dobropillya tactical area on 23, 24, 25 and 26 July and not advancing on any of the four days. The scale of the destruction is less firmly established than the assault itself, and the distinction matters: geolocated footage published by Ukrainian units on 23 July independently shows strikes on a Russian tank and an armoured personnel carrier north of Novotoretske, a tank at Shakhove and a BM-21 Grad at Nove Paltavka, but the fuller tally of nine tanks, two armoured fighting vehicles and three Grad launchers comes from a Ukrainian State Border Guard Service release, reported by Ukrainska Pravda on 24 July, which ISW noted the same day 'appears to have since been deleted' from the agency's website — and which returns HTTP 404 to a direct request on 27 July, with no archived snapshot available. Ukraine's border guards said there had not been a breakthrough attempt of this scale in their area of responsibility for a long time; that is a local characterisation from an interested party, not a front-wide count.

A RUSI commentary by Fabrizio Minniti and Giangiuseppe Pili offers the frame this page has been missing — an account of why the tactical adaptations recorded on this timeline keep failing to add up to anything. Its thesis is that Russian learning is real but selective: 'What distinguishes the Russian case is not adaptation per se, but its pattern; that is, rapid at the tactical and technological level, terribly slow at the organisational.' The mechanism RUSI proposes is a throughput mismatch. Since late 2024 Russia has built what the authors call a distributed strike complex — drones, long-range fires and real-time reconnaissance in place of manned airpower — and its reach has outrun the command system meant to direct it: 'the ability to detect and strike targets at extended range has outpaced the system's ability to prioritise and synchronise effects across domains,' so coordination across land, air, electronic warfare and cyber 'remains uneven and unequally distributed across the lines' and localised tactical success does not convert into operational results. The authors are explicit that they attribute this to Russia's own architecture rather than to Ukrainian resistance, and they name two structural causes: the absence of a professional non-commissioned officer corps, which leaves the lieutenant as the lowest professionally trained leader and pushes senior officers toward the front to keep control, and what they call 'the corruption of information, not merely of money' — reporting tailored upward, logistics padded to conceal shortfalls, and personnel records that diverge from combat reality, in a system that punishes honest bad news. RUSI also revises the record in two places. It reads Russia's turn to artillery dominance and drone saturation as an operational logic of 'saturation, not surgical strike' and as 'adaptation from constraint as much as from insight'; and it argues the 2022-era Western consensus, while accurate about the visible failures, 'obscured the system's capacity to absorb losses, replace formations, and adjust tactics'. A Ukrainian brigade spokesperson in the Pokrovsk direction reported on 24 July that Russian commanders abandon communication with assault units when those units come under Ukrainian drone fire — a field report that matches RUSI's argument closely, though a Ukrainian unit describing Russian command behaviour is weak evidence for it, and it is recorded here as a claim rather than as confirmation.

The cheapest counter Ukraine found to Russia's one-way attack drones was another drone — an interceptor costing a fraction of a surface-to-air missile — and Russia is now attacking the arithmetic that makes it work. Russia has begun fitting Shahed drones with jet engines in place of propellers, raising their speed to as much as 500 km/h and compressing the window in which Ukrainian air defences can detect and intercept them. Yurii Cherevashenko, a senior commander in Ukraine's Air Force, told Reuters at the Farnborough International Airshow that 15 to 20 percent of the Shaheds Russia currently uses already carry jet engines. The Ukrainian and allied response is a straightforward speed race: SkyFall unveiled the P1-SUN Jetkiller at 370 km/h against 310 km/h for its standard P1-SUN, General Cherry is finalising a Bullet variant exceeding 400 km/h with a stated goal of 500, and the British-Ukrainian Firebolt Engineering's jet-powered Griffen exceeds 350 km/h. The production and kill figures attached to these systems are manufacturers' claims made at a trade show — the outlets carrying them note that such claims are difficult to verify independently — so what is recorded here is the speed contest, not the volumes. Independent of the vendors, there is dated field evidence that interception is working somewhere: the commander of a Ukrainian drone interceptor battery in the Oleksandrivka direction reported on 25 July that interception has made Russian Shahed, Geran and Gerbera drones less effective on that axis, and that Russian forces are conducting guided glide bomb strikes to compensate. That substitution is the part worth watching. Oleksandrivka now carries a two-week sequence of the same loop running to completion: Ukrainian jamming suppressed Russian drone tempo there on 23 July, interception degraded Russian drone effectiveness by 25 July, and the response was not a better drone but a different weapon.

Almost everything on this timeline describes drone warfare as improvisation — volunteer-built airframes, workshop modifications, units inventing counters in weeks. Russia is now converting it into establishment. Russian Navy Commander-in-Chief Admiral Alexander Moiseyev stated on 26 July that the Navy formed its first unmanned systems regiment within the Northern Fleet on 1 July 2026, that further such regiments are planned in the Northern Fleet during 2026, and that a similar structure will be incorporated into the Pacific Fleet in 2027. These naval regiments are separate from the dedicated Unmanned Systems Forces that Russia began forming in 2024 to centralise drone operations in support of its ground forces; ISW assesses the extension as evidence of 'the way the Russian military writ large is trying to integrate unmanned systems throughout the wider force'. The same assessment supplies an unusually direct answer to the question of whether a counter is working. Against Ukraine's strikes on vessels and ports in the Black and Azov seas, ISW records that Russian forces have relocated and dispersed ships, installed anti-drone netting, and introduced mobile task force units and aviation patrols — 'but have largely failed to defend against and adapt to Ukrainian strikes'. A named counter-measure suite with an institutional verdict attached to it is rare, and the verdict here is negative. It also sits awkwardly beside RUSI's assessment four days earlier that Russian adaptation is 'terribly slow at the organisational' level: creating regiments is organisational change. The two readings are not strictly incompatible — RUSI's claim concerns command culture and the delegation of initiative, ISW's concerns force structure, and a rigid hierarchy can stand up new units readily while still declining to devolve decisions to them. Whether these formations are given decision authority is what would settle it, and neither document answers that.