Ukrainian military successes and Russian narratives clashed this week, as Moscow’s assertion of inevitable victory flew in the face of facts on the ground.
Ukraine steadily took back control of almost all of its northern city of Kupiansk after isolating Russian forces within it, belying Russian claims to have seized it.
Russian forces were also unable to dislodge Ukrainian defenders from the eastern city of Pokrovsk to back up Moscow’s claims of total control.
And Moscow attempted to deny Ukraine’s successful use of an underwater unmanned vehicle to severely damage a Kilo-class submarine, despite visual evidence.
Ukrainian forces operating in the northern Kharkiv region said they had cut Russian logistics to Kupiansk, surrounded a vanguard of 200 Russians inside it, and cleared Russian forces out of forests north of the city on December 12.
Geolocated footage showed Ukrainian forces advancing in the city the following day and taking back the southern suburb of Yuvileynyi, pushing Russian troops to the northern and western suburbs.
The Russian position had become more precarious by Monday. Ukrainian forces said they prevented reinforcements from entering the city through a gas pipeline, a tactic Russia had used in the siege of Chasiv Yar, and the isolated Russian troops were being supplied solely by drone. Ukraine’s General Staff said its forces were still repelling Russian attacks on Friday.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence insisted it had control of the situation. “Units of the Zapad Group of Forces exercise reliable control over all districts of liberated Kupiansk,” it said on Monday, claiming that Ukraine’s efforts to enter the city from the south were being suppressed.
“The only thing that can be said for sure is that the Russian Armed Forces are still holding part of the centre and north of Kupiansk, but most of it is already either in the grey zone or under the control of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” wrote a Russian military reporter on the Telegram messaging app.
On Wednesday this week, Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskii, Ukraine’s Army commander-in-chief, told a Ramstein-format of Ukraine’s allies that his forces had taken back 90 percent of Kupiansk. At the same time in Moscow, Russian Defence Minister Andrei Belousov was telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that “the enemy is unsuccessfully trying to regain” the city.
“The Russian Defense Minister, Belousov, continues to lie that Russia controls Kupiansk,” wrote Andrii Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, on Telegram. “In reality, most of the city is controlled by the Ukrainian Defense Forces, which are continuing to clear it of Russians. However, all of Putin’s officials, from [commander-in-chief Valery] Gerasimov, who was the first to lie about controlling the city, to Belousov, continue to lie in the presence of Putin himself.”
Contrary to the available evidence, Belousov also insisted that Russia had seized Pokrovsk, which Russia calls Krasnoarmeysk, and was on the cusp of vanquishing neighbouring Myrnohrad, which Russia calls Dimitrov. Both towns are in the eastern Donetsk region, and are almost surrounded by Russian forces to the north, south and east.
“Russian soldiers continue to inflict fire damage on Ukrainian troops in Dimitrov, the last stronghold of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in Krasnoarmeysk agglomeration,” Belousov told Putin.
But Syrskii told allies that Ukrainian forces had regained about 16 square kilometres (6 square miles) in the northern part of Pokrovsk and 56sq km (22sq miles) west of the city. “Logistics in Myrnograd are complex, but the operations continue,” he wrote.
Russia had claimed complete control over Pokrovsk on December 2 and was sticking to its story.
Submarine and oil refinery explosions
A third point of contention was Ukraine’s successful use of an underwater unmanned vehicle (UUV) to strike a Russian Kilo-class submarine on Monday (December 15), in what is considered the first such attack in military history.
Video of the Russian fleet at anchor in the port of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea shows a huge explosion in the stern section of the submarine.
Ukraine’s State Security Service later claimed credit for the attack.
However, Russia’s Defence Ministry said: “Not a single ship or submarine as well as the crews of the Black Sea Fleet stationed in the bay of the Novorossiysk naval base were damaged as a result of the sabotage.”
The ministry published footage of what it said was the attacked submarine, in which it appeared undamaged above the surface, but the video did not show the stern section.
Ukraine’s long-range strikes against Russia scored other successes, on which Russia did not comment.
Ukraine struck the oil refinery in Yaroslavl, northeast of Moscow, on December 12. On Sunday, Ukrainian drones struck the Afipsky refinery in Krasnodar Krai and the Uryupinsk oil depot in Volgograd, causing explosions in both locations. They also struck the Dorogobuzhskaya power plant in Smolensk.
United States and Ukrainian negotiating teams met for two days in Berlin on Sunday and Monday. Russian officials said they would be briefed next week on the results of those talks.
But even as it claimed to be interested in ongoing peace negotiations, Russia clearly signalled that it plans to continue aggressive operations next year.
“The key task for the next year is to maintain and increase the pace of the offensive,” said Belousov in Putin’s presence on Wednesday, at an expanded meeting of the Defence Ministry Board.
“It wasn’t us who started the war in 2022; it was the destructive forces in Ukraine, with the support of the West – essentially, the West itself that unleashed this war,” Putin said. “We are only trying to finish it, to put an end to it.”
Putin said “the goals of the special military operation will certainly be achieved,” and “Russia will achieve the liberation of its historical lands by military means,” suggesting there was little room for compromise on Moscow’s side.
Putin’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov signalled the same thing in an interview with ABC on Tuesday. He said Europe and Ukraine expected a “deep and very wrong” revision of Russian peace proposals, and ruled out conceding seized Ukrainian land.
“We are not able in any form to compromise on this, because it would be, in our view, a revision of a very fundamental element of our statehood, set forth through our constitution,” Naryshkin said.
Russian losses outpace recruitments
Russia has attempted to give the impression that it has inexhaustible manpower with which to prosecute the war it started in Ukraine.
Belousov said almost 410,000 Russians volunteered for military service, exceeding expectations for 2025.
That translates to 32,800 per month. “Data from the Ukrainian General Staff on Russian losses indicate that Russian forces suffered an average of 34,600 casualties per month between January and November 2025 – suggesting that Belousov’s recruitment numbers are not quite replacing Russian losses,” wrote the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggested most of these casualties were deaths. “[Putin] spends around 30,000 soldiers’ lives on the front every month. Not wounded – 30,000 killed each month… We have drone footage confirming these deaths,” he told Dutch parliamentarians.
Syrski also doubted Russian recruitment quotas were sufficient.
“The number of Russian troops has long been around 710,000,” he wrote on Telegram. “However, the enemy has not been able to increase this figure, despite active recruitment in Russia, because our soldiers are ‘reducing’ the number of occupiers by a thousand every day through deaths and injuries.”
