Vladimir Putin’s war with Ukraine isn’t going as well as he says it is.
Open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysts have blasted holes in Putin’s claims of Russian victories, pointing particularly to a Ukrainian counterattack that was purposely kept under wraps for months.
A Ukrainian counteroffensive launched north of Lyman in May was described by Russian assets as a failure, with one Russian Telegram channel saying Ukraine’s forces were “eliminated,” according to The Telegraph.
However, a deliberate blackout of information by independent war monitors and Ukrainian forces hid the truth from Moscow for months: the counterattack was a success.
Kyiv’s forces were able to push back a growing Russian bulge over the Ukrainian city of Lyman—recapturing as much as 77 square miles of territory, according to The Telegraph.
“I think this is the most important attack of the year,” Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst and co-founder of the Black Bird Group, told the outlet.
The Ukrainian army has yet to acknowledge the attack, and French OSINT analyst Clement Molin only recently revealed it.
Putin himself appeared unaware of the incident, despite saying earlier this month during a visit to Kyrgyzstan that he had a “pretty objective” understanding of what was happening on the frontlines.
The Russian president claimed on Sept. 1 that Moscow had captured 14 settlements within the last month, “including… as of yesterday, the town of Sviatohirsk," according to The Telegraph.
But OSINT analysts, including Phil Cowin, who runs the UA Control Map, considered Putin’s assessment to be “rather amusing.”
Cowin and Molin found in their assessments that Ukraine was firmly in control of Sviatohirsk, after witnessing the counterattack led by the 3rd Army Corps progress in real time over the last few months.
The army unit purposely blocked the publication of footage from the ground since the operation began, and the OSINT community took the hint and followed suit, according to Cowin.
“Usually you’d see more drone footage, more video,” Cowin said. “But suddenly around Nove it goes dark—and the Russians weren’t posting any footage of their own attacks as they didn’t want to show the Ukrainians advancing.”
Days after Putin’s speech, the 3rd Army Corps’ commander Andriy Biletsky shared a video of himself strolling peacefully through Sviatohirsk, in an attempt to put to bed any question of Russian control over the town.
“Take off your clown noses and colorful wigs,” Biletsky said in the video, addressing the Kremlin. “There aren’t any Russian soldiers here.”
Kremlin-connected war bloggers blamed local forces for Moscow’s blunder rather than Putin, with the Telegram channel Rybar saying that the miscalculation was due to “systematic lies in reports to higher-ups.”
“Of course, the Russian units and the commanders of the units understand that the Ukrainians are making progress as they have to order strikes,” Kastehelmi told The Telegraph. “But at some point the reality on the ground transforms, as it moves up the echelons, and the high command is increasingly detached from the realities on the ground.”
