In a video posted Monday, 21 soldiers identified as members of Ukraine’s 19th Army Corps said they are holding positions inside Kostyantynivka. Most spoke unmasked, with landmarks behind them, some of them geolocated within the city, the Kyiv Post reported. One speaker said the footage was shot on Saturday, a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin and General Valery Gerasimov announced the city had fallen.
That announcement came in a nationally televised meeting. Putin praised the Russian military for beating Ukrainian forces in open battle and pushing them out of the city, and said Ukraine’s total defeat was inevitable. Gerasimov is chief of staff of the Russian army.
Kyiv answered quickly. Most Ukrainian officials conceded the situation in Kostyantynivka is difficult because Russian infiltration is constant, but said the lines are holding. President Volodymyr Zelensky took a swipe at Putin’s rare public appearances and his habit of staying away from the front. If Russia truly held the city, he said, “Putin would have no problem” going there to discuss peace.
What commanders say
Oleksandr Rashevsky commands Liyut, a Ukrainian police special operations infantry unit. In a Tuesday comment on the brigade’s Telegram channel, he said his troops are deployed in the city and holding their ground. The Russians’ main tactic, he said, is to slip in groups of one to three men and hide until Ukrainian drones locate them.
“Kostyantynivka is one of the key directions for the enemy’s advance to the Kramatorsk-Slovyansk agglomeration. That is why they spare neither forces nor means,” Rashevsky told the magazine Obozrevatel. “We inflict significant losses on them, but the replenishment of personnel is constantly taking place, so the situation remains very tense.”
Oleksandr Onikolchuk, a Marine drone unit commander, described a messier picture in a Sunday interview with Ediny Novyny. “Factually, it’s a great big gray zone,” he said. Troops have to check “every building, every floor, every cellar.”
The independent group DeepState said in a Sunday analysis that Russian forces have reached the outskirts, begun to gain a foothold and infiltrated deep into the city, but that Kostyantynivka “remains under the control of the Defense Forces of Ukraine.” It called the Russian capture claims invented. The US Institute for the Study of War, in graphics published Monday, showed the eastern third of the city under clear Russian control and most of the rest disputed.
Drones and numbers
Combat video from Ukraine’s 28th Mechanized Infantry Brigade, published Tuesday, shows first-person-view drones running down individual Russian soldiers in open fields, wood lines, ruined buildings and dugouts. Bomber drones drop munitions, sometimes three or more on one target, and some strikes happen at night. Not all of the images could be geolocated to the Kostyantynivka sector. The brigade called Gerasimov’s claim “Fantasy TV.”
Ukraine’s General Staff reported 34 engagements in the sector on Tuesday and no ground lost. Kostyantynivka is an industrial center that had about 70,000 people before the war, and a key intermediate target in Russia’s campaign to take all of eastern Donbas.
Doubts on the Russian side
Some pro-Moscow voices are not sure either. Semyon Pegov, who runs the WarGonzo Telegram channel with 750,000 followers, reported Sunday that battles in the city were still going on. Pavel Gubarov, a former Donetsk region official who works with Russian authorities, called the Kremlin’s announcement “premature” and wrote, “Not a single source has unequivocally confirmed the news about the capture of the city.”
He compared it to Kupyansk. Late in 2025, Gerasimov and other officials repeatedly and falsely said the city of 25,000 was fully in Russian hands, until Zelensky traveled there in early December to record videos showing otherwise. “The analogy with Kupyansk may turn out to be accurate and there will be similar consequences,” Gubarov predicted.
