Russia Continues Its Assault On The Donbas City Of Kostyantynivka: The Russian military has continued its assault on the strategic city of Kostyantynivka in the Donbas Oblast of eastern Ukraine, a key stronghold of Ukraine’s eastern “fortress belt.
The city has increasingly become a contested combat zone due to both heavy shelling and localized infantry infiltrations.
T-80 Tank Russian Army. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
The city is important to Putin’s army because it is a primary gateway to the Kramatorsk-Sloviansk metropolitan area. Its capture is viewed as a critical step in the Kremlin’s wider objective of seizing the entirety of Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Putin Claims The City Is About To Fall
Russian President Putin claimed on Sunday that Russian forces were close to capturing the city, but the Ukrainian 19th Army Corps has disputed that.
Fighting is taking place inside the city. Small groups of Russian soldiers are attempting to infiltrate the outskirts, senior Ukrainian commanders said last week, suggesting close-quarters assaults could follow.
The Washington, D.C.-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) posted on Sunday that Ukrainian soldiers have reported that they kill about 90 percent of Russian infiltrators in the Kostyantynivka region.
T-80 Tank from Russian Army. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
A Kremlin-affiliated Russian milblogger disputed Putin’s announcement and acknowledged that it is far too early to talk about the Russian seizure of Kostyantynivka as Ukrainian groups continue to operate in the central part of the city.
Ukrainian Supply Lines Being Threatened
Euromaidan Press reported that Ukrainian supply routes are under heavy pressure, with artillery, drones, and guided bombs hammering the road running north out of the city, soldiers in the area said.
Reuters recently traveled with the “Predator” rifle brigade of the National Police, tasked with guarding the route from drones and remotely dropped mines.
Strands of fiber-optic cable used by first-person-view (FPV) drones lie tangled in anti-drone netting strung over the road. Ground robots now haul most of the food, water, and supplies into the so-called kill zone, while soldiers race past on quad bikes.
The road is too dangerous to transport the dead and wounded in a normal vehicle. “Everything happens on foot,” said 34-year-old serviceman Oleksandr Kosmin.
Russian Pincers Closing In On the City
Kostiantynivka is the southernmost of four fortified cities that form the spine of Ukraine’s defense in industrial Donetsk Oblast.
Russia’s continued attacks aimed at encircling the city through pincer moves keep raising the cost of defending it, said Ukrainian analyst Ruslan Mykula of the DeepState open-source mapping group.
Russia’s manpower edge is driving the push, even though Ukrainian mid-range drone strikes on its logistics have worn down its fighting power, some analysts have pointed out.
“The effect (of mid-range strikes) hasn’t been so great that it would have forced the Russians to suspend their offensive,” said Emil Kastehelmi of the Black Bird conflict analysis team in Finland.
“So even though Russia has been taking increasingly heavy losses in the rear, they are still able to continue their offensives, at least in certain sectors.”
Occupying Kostiantynivka would provide Russian forces a foothold from which to move north along the belt, now the central axis of their campaign.
But any advance would likely be long and bloody for its forces, in a possible echo of other costly sieges of eastern cities like Pokrovsk and Avdiivka. Putin has wanted to seize all of the Donbas since 2014, when Russian troops disguised as separatists tried to seize much of the region.
“Kostiantynivka is the gateway to the Kramatorsk metropolitan area,” Serhiy Khominsky, press officer for the 100th Mechanized Brigade, said. “That is why it is absolutely clear that the enemy has committed enormous forces and resources to capturing the city and is trying to achieve some success there.”
The City of Kramatorsk Is Key To The Entire Donbas
Kostyantynivka is a key objective in Russia’s goal and a gateway to the rest of the Donbas region. Russia has yet to achieve one of its strategic goals in the invasion, but they continue to attack in the Donbas Oblast, trying to gain any leverage that it can.
Kostiantynivka acts as the southern anchor of the Kramatorsk area. If Kostiantynivka falls, Russian forces would be able to push towards Ukraine’s strongholds in the east, the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, and move closer to seizing Donbas completely, one of the Kremlin’s key objectives in this war.
There are conflicting views on how serious the situation is in the city, and while it may not be as serious as the Russians claim, it is probably more serious than the Ukrainians care to admit.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the Washington-based think tank, posted that “the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and other Russian sources continue to aggrandize the extent of Russian advances within Kostyantynivka as part of an ongoing informational effort intended to falsely paint the city as falling imminently and to inflate Russian military capabilities.”
TASS reported that Russian troops are enveloping the settlement of Kostyantynivka in the Donetsk People’s Republic, strategically important for the Ukrainian army, from all sides after liberating Artyoma, according to military expert Andrey Marochko.
“The liberation of the settlement of Artyoma – also called Dolgaya Balka [the Ukrainian name] is a strategic success of the Russian Armed Forces because we are enveloping Kostyantynivka from all sides; moreover, on a very broad front,” Marochko said.
Kostyantynivka Has Been Under Attack Since 2022
Russia has been targeting Kostyantynivka with missile strikes and shelling since the full-scale invasion in February 2022.
However, it has been an active, sustained battleground and front-line city since the Russian military launched an intensive offensive aimed directly at taking the city in October 2025.
The city serves as a major logistical and railway hub near the front lines, which has made it a target for Russian forces, and it has been repeatedly bombarded with devastating missile and rocket attacks. Early Russian missile and drone attacks caused mass-casualty losses and damaged the city’s market and residential areas.
However, in late October of 2025, Russia launched an all-out effort to take the city, mounting a concerted push toward its perimeter and gradually infiltrating the outskirts via neighboring villages.
The fighting has been characterized by a slow-moving, bloody, urban street-fighting campaign, with Russian troops attacking in small infantry groups. Each side has been using FPV drones, artillery, and glide bombs to attack the other.
Russia has suffered over 910 casualties in the fighting (395 killed, 515 wounded), as the bloody fighting for the city continues. The population of the city was once close to 70,000, but now numbers less than 2,000 as Russian bombardment operations target civilians as well as troops.
About the Author: Steve Balestrieri
Steve Balestrieri is a National Security Columnist. He served as a US Army Special Forces NCO and Warrant Officer. In addition to writing on defense, he covers the NFL for PatsFans.com and is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America (PFWA). His work was regularly featured in many military publications.
