For years, Russia has built its entire story of this war around one simple idea: sooner or later, Russia will win.

After Ukraine’s dramatic successes in 2022, Russia mobilized hundreds of thousands of men, expanded military production, poured enormous amounts of money into the army, and gradually regained the initiative. The advances were painfully slow, sometimes measured in a few hundred meters at a time, but the front kept moving west.

That became one of Moscow’s most important arguments, both at home and abroad: Ukraine could resist, but time belonged to Russia.

Then, near Lyman, the front moved the wrong way.

Ukrainian forces counterattacked and liberated more than 200 square kilometers of territory, pushing Russian troops back from positions they had spent months trying to secure.

Russia was supposed to be the side that had adapted. Its army was larger. Its factories were producing for war. Its troops had years of combat experience. Ukraine, according to Russian propaganda, was running out of men and losing ground.

So how did Russia get caught unprepared again?

And what happens inside Russia when the battlefield suddenly contradicts the story that victory has become inevitable?

Today, we’ll look at what happened near Lyman, why it matters far beyond those 200 square kilometers, and how Russians reacted when Ukraine did something their entire understanding of the war said should no longer be possible.

Here’s our roadmap for today.

The Lyman Counterattack — what changed on the battlefield, why it matters tactically, and why even a limited Ukrainian advance shook Russia’s sense of inevitable victory.

The War for Self-Identity — how the invasion of Ukraine collided with Russia’s understanding of itself, its strength, and its place in the world.

The Russian Army’s Reporting System — how battlefield information travels upward, and why every level of command has an incentive to make bad news look slightly better before passing it on.

The Z Community — what happens when people who built their worldview around Russian military superiority suddenly receive information that no longer fits it.

Silent Decisions — how ordinary Russians respond to reports of a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Anti-War Russians — the hopes, fears, and uncomfortable calculations of people who want Putin’s system to fall but understand how dangerous that collapse could become.

The Lyman Counterattack

Over the summer of 2026, Ukrainian forces began quietly counterattacking north of the city. For months, very little was said publicly about the operation. Then Russian military bloggers themselves began sounding the alarm.

By early September, open-source researchers were reporting that Ukrainian forces had cleared much of a Russian salient north of Lyman—an area estimated at roughly 200 square kilometers. Russian sources acknowledged withdrawals from some forward positions, and some reported that Ukrainian troops had pushed Russian forces back toward the Zherebets River. The precise frontline is still difficult to establish, and reports of large Russian units being surrounded remain unconfirmed.

This is not another Kharkiv offensive. Ukraine has not broken the Russian front, and Russian forces are still putting serious pressure on Ukrainian positions elsewhere in Donetsk region.

But tactically, the operation matters.

The Russian salient north of Lyman was part of the pressure being applied toward the city and ultimately toward Sloviansk. By attacking its flanks, Ukraine has made that position much harder to maintain. Russian military bloggers themselves warned that Ukrainian gains there could disrupt the advance on Lyman and complicate Russia’s plans to approach Sloviansk from the northeast.

Strategically, the significance is more psychological.

For several years, Russians who support the war have been told that the direction of history has already been decided. Russia advances. Ukraine retreats. The only remaining question is how long Kyiv will continue resisting the inevitable.

Near Lyman, for at least a moment, the arrow moved the wrong way.

And that created a fascinating reaction inside Russia.

The War for Self-Identity

For centuries, people in Russia have lived with a very limited sense of personal influence over the state. The government is distant. Decisions are made somewhere above you. You adapt, endure, and try to protect your private life.

But there has always been a powerful form of compensation.

I may be insignificant as an individual, but I belong to a great country.

That feeling matters enormously. Greatness, importance, respect, fear—these are not abstract ideas in Russian political culture. They help people answer a very basic question: if my own life is modest and I have little control over what happens around me, then what makes me significant?

This is one reason Russians are so often taught to think in numbers and records. Russia is the largest country in the world. The Soviet Union put the first man in space. The Soviet people suffered the greatest losses in World War II.

None of this makes your apartment warmer, your salary larger, or your doctor better. But it creates a sense of belonging to something historically important.

And when the full-scale invasion began, the Kremlin plugged directly into that emotional system.

The message was not simply that Russia needed to defeat Ukraine. It was that Russia was reclaiming its rightful scale.

Ukraine, in this narrative, was not really a separate nation with its own political will. It was a fragment of the historical Russian world that had been pulled away by hostile forces. Bring it back, and Russia becomes larger, stronger, and richer. The humiliation of the Soviet collapse begins to reverse.

This is important, because most supporters of the war were not dreaming about censorship, mobilization, closed borders, or an economy increasingly organized around military production.

The fantasy was to become something like the United States in the Russian imagination: a country so powerful that it can ignore constraints, set the rules, pressure weaker states, and force the strongest countries in the world to negotiate with it as an equal.

The war was supposed to restore status.

Ukraine, of course, entered this war with the opposite understanding of itself.

For Ukrainians, the central issue is precisely that they are a separate nation. They do not want to be absorbed into Russia, reunited with Russia, protected by Russia, or represented by Russia. The insistence that Ukraine is not truly separate is exactly what Ukrainians are fighting against.

So this war is not about territory. It is a collision between two incompatible identities.

And if you look at the war from the perspective of a committed pro-war Russian, this creates a serious psychological problem. Ukraine is not supposed to be able to defeat Russia. How could it?

Russian propaganda has spent years describing Ukrainians as confused Russians, artificial nation-builders, Western puppets, extremists, or simply people who have forgotten who they really are. At the same time, Russia is described as historically powerful, militarily formidable, and destined to prevail. And the people who accept this worldview tend to consume media that constantly confirms it.

They hear that Russia is winning, Ukraine is running out of men, and Europe is exhausted. And when information appears that contradicts this picture, many simply avoid it.

The defeats of 2022 were easy to explain away: Russia had gone in unprepared and needed time to mobilize.

But now it has had that time. The army has expanded, factories are producing for the war, and Russian troops have years of combat experience.

So if Russia has adapted and Ukraine is supposedly getting weaker, how did a Ukrainian counterattack near Lyman happen at all?

That is a much harder question—because this time, “we just weren’t ready yet” no longer works.

The Russian Army’s Reporting System

To understand how something like the Lyman counterattack can happen, we need to look at the way information moves through the Russian army.

For many officers, this war is an extraordinary career opportunity. Military budgets are enormous. Promotions come faster. Command gives access to money, equipment, contracts, and connections that would be difficult to acquire in civilian life.

The obvious downside is that you can be killed. But senior officers are not usually the ones crawling through tree lines toward Ukrainian positions. Russia has plenty of low-value assault infantry for that.

The greater personal danger is losing your position.

Once you fall out of favor, you lose access to resources, and there may be nowhere equally profitable to go. Worse, you may become the convenient target of a corruption investigation or be blamed for military failures.

So the most important task is to keep your superior satisfied. And your superior has exactly the same problem with his superior.

That changes the purpose of reporting. Suppose you were ordered to capture a village. Your troops reached the outskirts, planted a flag, filmed themselves there, and then withdrew because the position could not be held.

You can report failure. Or you can report that Russian forces entered the settlement and established positions. The second version is much safer.

At the next level, that may become: Russian troops are consolidating control. One level higher: the settlement has been liberated.

Russian military bloggers themselves often complain about what they call krasivye doklady—“beautiful reports.” Each level makes the news a little better before sending it upward.

This does not stay inside the army.

Once the Ministry of Defense announces another captured village, state television repeats it. Maps are changed. Military commentators begin discussing the next objective. Another small success becomes proof that Russia is steadily advancing and Ukraine is collapsing.

The problem is that these reports can also shape real military decisions. If headquarters believes that a position is already secure when it is not, the next operation is planned on the wrong assumptions. Reinforcements may not be sent. Ukrainian forces may be stronger than expected. A vulnerable flank may simply disappear from the official picture because, according to the reports, everything there is fine.

And the incentives encourage everyone to participate. The village itself is not particularly important to the officer writing the report. What matters is surviving the war with more money, a higher rank, and a better position than he had when it began.

For a while, the system works beautifully. The commander looks successful. His superior reports progress. Moscow receives encouraging numbers. State television gets another victory. Viewers hear that the Russian army is moving forward.

But there is one problem. Sooner or later, reality knocks on the door.

The Z Community

The most interesting reaction came from Russia’s own pro-war information space.

They support the war, want Russia to win, and normally spend much of their time documenting Russian advances. But over the past few days, their language around Lyman has changed noticeably.

Yuri Podolyaka, whose Telegram channel has almost 2.7 million subscribers, acknowledged that Ukrainian forces were “moving forward” and trying to cut Russian logistics around Lyman. Rybar, with more than 1.5 million subscribers, wrote about growing evidence that the situation was deteriorating.

The reaction from Two Majors, another major Z-channel with about 1.16 million subscribers, was even more revealing. The channel wrote that Ukrainian forces had been counterattacking for months and that the situation had long required attention from the central command. It warned against what Russians call zakrashivat kvadratiki v dolg—essentially coloring territory on the map “on credit,” claiming advances before they really exist—and against sending beautiful reports upward. Then it asked why no systemic changes had followed, calling the answer rhetorical.

Look at what is happening here.

The argument is no longer simply about whether Russia lost several villages. It is about whether Russian commanders themselves know what territory they actually control.

That problem became almost absurd in nearby Sviatohirsk. Russian authorities announced that the city had been captured. Then an apparently AI-manipulated video circulated as evidence of Russian presence there. Ukrainian commander Andriy Biletskyi responded by filming himself walking openly around the Sviatohirsk Lavra.

Rybar did not try to defend the Russian version. It called the episode another example of false reporting and warned that fictional territorial gains are dangerous because commanders may start planning real operations using a false picture of the battlefield. In its words, without punishment, this kind of deception can eventually produce “strategic consequences.”

Even Alexander Kots, a prominent pro-war correspondent who explicitly rejected panic, acknowledged on September 11 that Russian troops around Lyman had, at least temporarily, shifted onto the defensive while Ukraine was attacking across a broad front. His reassurance was no longer that Ukraine could not advance. It was that the Ukrainian advance was expensive, limited, and could eventually be stopped.

That is a significant change.

When people have invested heavily in a narrative they cannot easily abandon, they rarely blame themselves. Instead, they try to explain what went wrong and look for someone else to blame.

More and more often, the scapegoats are incompetent generals, dishonest reports, or particular units. The war itself remains unquestioned.

Sometimes the doubt climbs higher. People ask whether the president even knows what is really happening. But they often avoid using his name. He becomes Uncle Vova or simply the Main One.

That is much more dangerous for the Kremlin than losing another patch of forest. Once the central myth begins to crack, it stops giving its supporters what they wanted from it in the first place: a sense of importance, strength, and belonging to something formidable.

Instead, they are left looking like people who believed false maps, trusted false reports, and cheered for victories that may never have happened. Nobody wants to identify with that.

And unfortunately for Putin, even his most loyal supporter will ultimately care more about his own emotional needs than about Putin himself.

Silent Decisions

When news of a Ukrainian counterattack reaches an ordinary Russian, the conclusion may be very simple: this war is not ending anytime soon. The president wants to continue, and the Ukrainians are still capable of fighting.

That realization changes behavior. A man considering a military contract may hesitate. A family with an adult son starts listening more carefully to mobilization rumors. A business owner who has postponed leaving Russia may decide that waiting another six months is becoming too risky.

Individual decisions like these eventually add up.

We can already see signs of greater caution in the way Russians handle their money. In the first half of 2026, individuals transferred about 1.3 trillion rubles abroad. In the second quarter, they withdrew 554 billion rubles more in cash than they deposited. And the demand for cash accelerated further in the summer: the amount of cash in circulation increased by more than one trillion rubles in July and August alone.

We can see that people are preparing for uncertainty rather than assuming that normal life will soon return.

That is how attitudes change in practice. People do not necessarily wake up one morning and admit that the propaganda was false. They simply stop counting on the government to deliver the outcome it promised and begin making their own arrangements.

And from that point on, it is increasingly everyone for themselves.

Anti-War Russians

For anti-war Russians, a Ukrainian success creates a very different emotional reaction.

There is relief, sometimes even joy. But the feeling is rarely simple.

People who want Putin’s system to collapse also understand that political collapse in Russia has never been a neat process. A military defeat does not automatically produce democracy. It can produce a palace coup, a struggle among security services, regional instability, or simply another authoritarian ruler who blames Putin for losing the war and promises to fight it more competently.

So even people who desperately want Ukraine to win may watch events near Lyman with two thoughts at once.

The first is: good. Russia can still be pushed back.

The second is: what happens inside Russia if this continues?

That question becomes especially uncomfortable because many anti-war Russians still have relatives, property, friends, or elderly parents inside the country. They may hate the regime and still fear what a serious state crisis would do to ordinary people.

There is also the problem of expectations.

Since 2022, Russian opposition circles have repeatedly searched for the event that might finally break the system. Mobilization. Prigozhin’s mutiny. Economic pressure. Ukrainian attacks inside Russia. Each time, some people hoped that the shock would become politically decisive.

And each time, the system absorbed it.

That experience has made many anti-war Russians much more cautious. They no longer assume that a battlefield setback will suddenly bring crowds into the streets or split the elite.

A Ukrainian counterattack near Lyman matters because it weakens the sense that Russia’s advance is inevitable. The more realistic hope now is that such setbacks accumulate. Another failed offensive. Another lie exposed. Another general blamed. Another family deciding that the war will not end soon. Another businessman moving money abroad. Another officer wondering whether his superior is lying to Moscow. Another supporter quietly losing interest. 

None of these events look revolutionary on their own. But they accumulate. And what they begin to make inevitable is not Russia’s victory, but change itself.

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