I want to tell you about a city that used to make glass.
Not weapons, not steel — glass. Windows, bottles, mirrors. Kostiantynivka, in Donetsk Oblast, sits on the Kryvyi Torets River, and about 67,000 people lived there before Russia’s full-scale invasion. By the spring of 2026, only2,500 remained — mostly elderly people who had decided that dying in their own homes was preferable to leaving them.
On the evening of 3 July, Vladimir Putin appeared in military uniform at a command post and announced that Russian forces had “completely captured” Kostiantynivka. Flag photos circulated on Russian Telegram channels and the Kremlin called it an important strategic achievement. But there was just one problem — the city had not fallen.
Ukraine’s General Staff called the announcement a fabrication, stating that units of the Eastern Grouping were continuing defensive operations inside Kostiantynivka.
“Of course, that is not true. It is just another Russian lie, an attempt to generate some kind of a news story. If Kostiantynivka were under Russian control, then perhaps Putin would have no problem meeting me there to find a diplomatic way to finally end this war.” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed it on social media.
DeepState, the Ukrainian OSINT monitoring project, continued to show Russian forces present in parts of the city but not in control of it.
The Institute for the Study of War went further. It assessed that Putin had likely staged the late-night meeting to shape Western coverage ahead of the US July 4 holiday — a choreographed announcement in a documented series of inflated battlefield claims ISW describes as cognitive warfare. The institute had already flagged several of the Russian flag-raising videos from Kostiantynivka as likely AI-altered.
The last link in the chain
Picture four cities strung along a single road running north through a valley in eastern Donetsk Oblast: Kostiantynivka, then Druzhkivka, then Kramatorsk, then Sloviansk. Analysts call this chain the Fortress Belt — the last fortified line between Russia and control of the whole oblast.
Kostiantynivka is the southernmost link, the gate. Kramatorsk, at the far end, is the nerve center of everything Ukraine still holds in Donetsk: the headquarters, the logistics, the main hospital. Everything flows through that one road.
Putin has stated openly that full control of Donetsk is a central war aim and a precondition for any ceasefire. As of April, his own spokesman put roughly 18% of the oblast still outside Russian hands.
A false announcement of Kostiantynivka’s capture serves that narrative directly — it moves the claim of precondition from aspiration toward apparent fact, in Western news cycles, before the ground truth catches up.
“Inside” is not the same as “captured”
Russian forces first entered Kostiantynivka in October 2025. Through the winter and spring they ground forward block by block, and by June they were pushing in from several directions at once. Ukrainian military sources reported 100–250 Russian troops operating inside the city — not on the outskirts, inside. As of 23 June, Ukrainian soldiers still outnumbered Russian ones within the city limits.
But inside is not the same as captured.
ISW’s June assessments put Russian forces in control of or infiltrated into roughly 37% of Kostiantynivka — and that single city accounted for 77% of all Russia’s June gains across the entire front. What Russia has achieved, at enormous cost, is to turn the city into a continuous gray zone where neither side holds clean ground.
What Russia has achieved, at enormous cost, is to turn the city into a continuous gray zone where neither side holds clean ground. The advances are real — and not liberation.
The city sits inside what reporters described as a kill zone ruled by drones. The road north is so exposed that the wounded and the dead are carried out on foot — evacuation vehicles cannot use it.
According to ISW, Russian forces seized or infiltrated just over 30 square kilometers across the entire front in June 2026 — compared to roughly 481 square kilometers in June 2025. Russia’s rate of advance has fallen to one-sixteenth of last year’s pace, at nineteen times the casualties per kilometer.
Once Ukrainian counterattacks are subtracted, Russia ended June with a net territorial loss.
Why drones are not enough
In 2026, Ukraine’s long-range drones have hit oil refineries on the outskirts of Moscow and choked Crimea’s supply lines with mounting intensity. Those are real achievements, and they have bought Ukraine military, political, and symbolic momentum.
But Kostiantynivka is where that advantage runs out. Russia’s method here is to funnel very small infantry groups — the ones who survive the approach — into the city, moving under summer foliage and through basements and rubble.
This tactic could be very useful because in an open field, a drone sees everything, but in a ruined city, the equation is older and grimmer: infantry, cellars, building by building.
The drone that dominates the steppe is far less decisive in a stairwell.
Pokrovsk was the rehearsal
The world has seen this method before, in Pokrovsk, the city to the west of Kostiantynivka that Russia spent months taking in early 2026 — no lightning assault, just small groups seeping in, logistics strangled, and eventually a choice between mounting losses and withdrawal.
But Pokrovsk also showed the ceiling. After Russia took it, it could not convert the capture into a breakthrough. Russian forces sit in the ruins eyeing tens of kilometers of mined, fortified, drone-patrolled terrain stretching between them and the next major objective.
The people who stayed
For months, reporting from inside the city documented how it dies without surrendering: the elderly carried down darkened stairwells, water hauled up by hand because the utilities are gone, evacuees who know they will not come back.
Vladyslav Samusenko, who runs a small evacuation group, walked eight kilometers into the city to carry out an elderly couple — a woman and a paralyzed man. “There are many bodies there, in the backyards and on the streets,” he told DW. “You can smell them when you walk past a house.”
Those who remain live, in the words of a 28th Brigade spokesman, “in basements, burn wood, and scavenge garbage, like in the Middle Ages.”
The negotiating table, not the battlefield
Watch what Russia did in the 72 hours after it declared Kostiantynivka taken. It proposed a six-hour ceasefire on 6 July, framed as humanitarian — an offer to hand over the bodies of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. The assault continued throughout: Russia’s own pattern of using ceasefires as operational cover, documented across 26 violations between 2014 and 2020.
When Zelenskyy challenged Putin to meet him in Kostiantynivka if it was truly under Russian control, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov replied that Kostiantynivka was “already a part of Russia” and that Moscow’s standing invitation for Zelenskyy to come to the Russian capital remained open.
If Kostiantynivka were under Russian control, Putin would have no problem meeting me there.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Zelenskyy’s answer was not only a denial. In one sentence, he turned the lie into a verification test — and Moscow, which insists any summit be held in the Russian capital, failed.
Every day the city holds, the precondition Putin needs goes unmet — which is why, when Kostiantynivka would not fall, he announced that it had.
The fight for it now runs on two fronts: the streets where a few thousand people are still trying to survive alongside Ukrainian soldiers trying to hold on, and the coverage in Western capitals where pressure to end this war is being measured out.
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