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Russian military bloggers have acknowledged that Ukrainian forces have gone on the counterattack around Lyman in eastern Ukraine, with some claiming that Russian troops have been forced to withdraw from forward positions as the situation for Moscow deteriorates.
One Russian military blogger said Ukrainian forces had been counterattacking in the area for months, while accusing Russia’s military command of presenting an overly optimistic picture of the frontline.
According to the Washington-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Russian bloggers criticised what Russian military commentators call “beautiful reports,” referring to exaggerated or false battlefield accounts sent up the chain of command, and argued that the practice should be “absolutely forbidden”.
Ukraine has not publicly detailed the operation.
According to open-source analysts, the counteroffensive began a few months ago and has been conducted under tight operational secrecy.
The precise scale of Ukraine’s counteroffensive remains unclear.
ISW said it still had limited publicly available evidence to determine the full extent of Ukrainian progress, but assessed that its mapping likely underestimated Ukrainian gains around Lyman.
Putin’s Sviatohirsk claim unravels
The increasingly critical accounts come days after Ukrainian forces publicly disproved one of Vladimir Putin’s claims about Russian advances in the area.
On 1 September, Putin claimed that Russian forces controlled Sviatohirsk, a town about 15 kilometres north-west of Lyman in the Donetsk region.
Russia’s Defence Ministry subsequently claimed the town had been captured, but provided no credible evidence.
Six days later, Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, commander of Ukraine’s Third Army Corps, published a video of himself in central Sviatohirsk, demonstrating that the town remained under Ukrainian control.
Russian military bloggers subsequently acknowledged Ukrainian control of the town. One Kremlin-affiliated blogger said there was no credible evidence that Russian troops had captured it.
ISW said a Russian source had earlier circulated archival and doctored footage purporting to show Russian control of Sviatohirsk.
The dispute has fuelled unusually open criticism among Russian military bloggers of inaccurate battlefield reporting within Moscow’s armed forces.