World News
Ukraine declares the Oleksandrivka offensive complete after retaking 745 square kilometres
By Staff Writer | 16 August 2026
President Volodymyr Zelensky says an operation running from January to August returned 26 villages across the Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions to Ukrainian control. An independent assessment puts the recovered ground lower, at least 627 square kilometres, while missile attacks on Ukrainian cities intensify.
Ukraine has declared the end of a counteroffensive that its president says recovered 745 square kilometres of territory and 26 villages in the south east of the country. The announcement, made on 12 August, closes an operation on the Oleksandrivka axis that ran for roughly eight months and was led by the Air Assault Forces with other attached units.
From January through August of this year, our warriors of the Air Assault Forces and other units carried out an effective offensive operation in the Oleksandrivka sector. Thanks to the active operations of our troops, significant losses were inflicted on the occupation contingent
Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine
The recovered villages sit across the Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. On the Ukrainian account the operation removed almost all of the ground Russia had taken in Dnipropetrovsk since its forces entered that region in June 2025, and pushed the line back over the regional boundaries of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia.
The figures, and whose they are
The president put Russian losses in the operation at no fewer than 9,550 soldiers killed and more than 6,600 wounded, and said prisoners taken during the advance add to the pool available for future exchanges. Those figures are the Ukrainian government's own and have not been confirmed by any independent body.
The Institute for the Study of War, which assesses territorial control from geolocated open source information, put the ground recovered in the area at a lower figure of at least 627 square kilometres, and assessed that across the whole front Russia has suffered a net loss of 233 square kilometres this year.
The gap between the two territorial figures is a matter of method rather than contradiction: the institute counts only what it can place on the map from open sources, and describes its own figure as conservative. On either number, the operation stands out in a year in which movement anywhere on the front has been measured in single villages.
What it cost behind the line
The ground was recovered under an intensifying missile campaign against Ukrainian cities. Combined attacks by drones and ballistic or hypersonic missiles struck Kyiv on 8 and 11 August, cut power across Odesa on 9 August, and hit the city of Zaporizhzhia on 11 August, killing at least nine people across those strikes as stocks of interceptor missiles for air defence run down.
Russian offensive pressure has not stopped either. Through June and July, Russian assaults continued out of Pokrovsk towards Dobropillia and out of Chasiv Yar towards Kostiantynivka in the eastern Donetsk region, where fighting remains heaviest.
A completed operation with a stated figure attached is a rarity in this war, and both sides know the number will be argued over. What is not argued is the direction of movement in the south this year, and it runs against the side that had been advancing.