Along Donetsk’s frontline, a small counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops aims to help change perceptions about the war among Kyiv’s western allies
By Luke Harding
11 Oct 2025
The Guardian
As Donald Trump prepared to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August, Russia launched an offensive in eastern Ukraine. Small groups of soldiers pushed forward near Dobropillia and, meeting little resistance, they advanced 15 to 20 km and seized a chain of villages.
It is a small pocket of land, but one that has driven perceptions of the war in the last months. At the time of the Alaska summit, it was seen as proof that Russia had momentum; as Ukraine had taken back territory – albeit in the context of Russian advances elsewhere – it may have contributed to Trump’s dismissive assessment of Moscow’s military as a “paper tiger”.
Following Russia’s August breakthrough, a platoon of Ukrainian soldiers was sent to take back the villages of Hruzike and Vesele. The settlements were located at the top of a newly created Russian salient. It had two distinct prongs, thrusting deep into Ukrainian territory. The incursion was likened to a pair of rabbit ears, due to its shape when viewed on a frontline map.
First, ground robots equipped with machine guns trundled forward, firing towards concealed Russians. Loudspeakers urged them to surrender. Then, two Ukrainian tanks joined the battle. They shelled houses and a school painted with a colourful mural. The rounds shivered trees and rattled the sign on Vesele’s bus stop. “After that we went in and started clearing the area. Every house, bush and basement,” the platoon’s commander – call-sign Tarantino – said.
The operation to recapture Hruzike went smoothly. In one building, several dazed Russians meekly raised their hands. But Vesele was tougher. After filing down the main road, past broken and burning cottages, Tarantino’s eight-person outfit came to two final houses. From a cellar inside, Russians shot at him. “A bullet hit my helmet like a fist-punch,” he said. “I was alive, thank God. The helmet saved me. I rolled away as our guys returned fire.”
Another round struck Tarantino’s backpack, setting a power bank alight. He tossed the bag away and continued fighting. “Our drones arrived and destroyed the enemy. This was our first large-scale mission of this kind. Of course there was excitement but we had practised everything in training,” he said. Ten Russians were killed. There were no Ukrainian losses.
Since 14 August, when Vesele was retaken, Moscow has lost about half of its new pocket. Ukraine’s commander in chief, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said his forces had liberated 330 sq km (127 sq miles), with more than 170 sq km wholly secured from enemy troops. Russia suffered 3,520
casualties, with 1,988 killed. Some Russian troops were encircled, Syrskyi reported, with the operation against them ongoing.
Ukraine’s small counteroffensive goes to the heart of how the war is perceived. During their infamous February meeting in the White House, Trump intimated to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, that Russia’s victory was inevitable and told him he had “no cards”. After speaking with Zelenskyy in September at the UN general assembly in New York, Trump then said he believed Ukraine could take back all the land it has lost including Crimea, annexed in 2014 – and delivered his “paper tiger” dismissal of the Kremlin’s military forces.
Zelenskyy said in Kyiv that Trump had emerged from their conversation with a better understanding of what he called the “battlefield realities”. Russian successes on the ground were often fleeting, Zelenskyy maintained, with small assault groups quickly wiped out. “It’s a temporary presence,” he stressed and hailed the recapture of Vesele and Hruzike as “not a big victory, but proof we are not losing. That’s important,” he said.
It goes alongside Ukraine’s increasingly effective campaign to cripple Russian oil production, via drone attacks.
In many parts of the frontline, Russia continues to advance. Over the summer its army penetrated Dnipropetrovsk oblast and the north-eastern city of Kupiansk.
The senior officer of Tarantino’s 93rd Kholodnyi Yar separate mechanised brigade, Maj Evhen Liherko, said the Kremlin did not have enough forces to make significant headway. “They have some local success. This doesn’t much change the big picture,” he argued. “The Russians don’t have a clear plan. They move forward out of inertia.”
Since summer the Russians have switched tactics. Instead of using armoured vehicles that are vulnerable to drones, they deploy large numbers of small assault groups of four to six foot soldiers tasked with infiltrating Ukrainian positions, regrouping and then advancing further. “It’s easy to destroy them and hard to find them,” Liherko said. “If it’s a big attack it’s easy to see them and harder to kill them.”
At the brigade’s HQ, a screen showed live footage of the battlefield provided by surveillance drones. In the grey zone village of Yablunivka, two Russian soldiers in green uniforms could be seen running from a farmhouse. They hid in a patch of forest. “Zoom in!” a duty officer said. An artillery strike landed wide of their position, sending puffs of grey smoke above fields and smashed roofless cottages. The soldiers’ fate was unclear.
According to Liherko, the actual situation on the battlefield looks different from maps that show Russia surging forward. He drew an alternative diagram with several small blobs representing enemy troops. “It’s more dynamic. We stay in our position. They try and go forward,” he explained.
Sergiy, the head of the brigade’s tank unit, described the situation as “difficult but stable”. The 93rd’s senior sergeant, Vitalii Piasetskyi, said there were some encouraging signs that Russia’s military was beginning to struggle. It had less fuel because of Ukrainian deep strikes, and had
been forced to reduce its use of armoured vehicles and artillery. In September, the pace of Russian advances slowed down with 259 sq km captured, almost half August’s figure and the least since May. They were suffering large numbers of casualties.
According to Piasetskyi, Ukrainian morale was high. “Everything depends on the commander,” he suggested. He said former prisoners who were released from jail after signing a contract with Ukraine’s armed forces, under a scheme introduced in 2024, had proven to be tough and resilient fighters. “They come from a hard school. They are very effective,” he said. Of Tarantino, he added: “There is bravery and there is Tarantino. He’s on another level.”
When might the fighting stop? “The Russians are very deep in this war,” he said. “Our job is to maximise their losses. I don’t want to think about the end because I don’t want to be disappointed.”