Just two weeks earlier, Kupiansk had been declared “liberated” by Russian forces—a claim publicly repeated twice by President Vladimir Putin.
With peace talks once again stalled, both sides are now seeking to strengthen their positions as much as possible during the winter campaign.
Kupiansk has endured an especially grim fate during Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. The city was occupied in the first days of the invasion and spent seven months under Russian rule, marked by brutal occupation practices, including makeshift torture chambers set up in basements.
In September 2022, during Ukraine’s first major counteroffensive, Kupiansk returned to Kyiv’s control. From then until the renewed Russian push in the Kharkiv direction, it remained relatively safe—as much as is possible in wartime.
The situation deteriorated sharply in late summer and early autumn 2025, when Russian forces broke through Ukrainian defenses and, from September, began infiltrating the city in large numbers.
On November 20, Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov informed Putin that Russian troops had taken control of Kupiansk.
On December 2, Putin went further, saying the Ukrainian garrison had been “blocked” and that Russian forces had begun to “eliminate it,” even inviting foreign journalists to visit the city to see for themselves.
Kupiansk, he said, consists of two parts: the larger city center on the right bank of the river and a smaller section on the left bank—both, he claimed, fully under Russian control.
Regardless of what report the Russian president received, the situation on the ground appears more favorable to Ukraine. This is supported, among others, by the DeepState monitoring platform, though it does not yet describe the city center as fully liberated.
Whatever the next developments, any Ukrainian success on the battlefield now carries significant weight: it boosts public morale and demonstrates that the army—despite severe manpower shortages and pressure along the entire front—remains capable of conducting effective tactical offensive operations.
That said, the broader dynamics of the war remain unchanged. Ukraine is still largely on the defensive, and the situation around the Pokrovsk conurbation—especially in Myrnohrad, which Ukrainian analysts say has fallen into operational encirclement—is extremely difficult.
Ukrainian military assurances that the situation is “under control” clash with footage released by Russian propagandists, including Vladimir Solovyov, who on Friday filmed a report from central Pokrovsk.
Once Pokrovsk falls, the main weight of the Russian advance will almost certainly shift toward Kostiantynivka—the “gateway” to the last major Donbas cities still held by Kyiv: Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.
Within the next month, fighting is also likely to begin for Huliaipole in the Zaporizhzhia region.
A tactical success in one sector therefore does little to alter the overall—and in some areas already critical—situation along the rest of the front.
“War is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means,” wrote the 19th-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz. Russia’s invasion fits this logic perfectly: its aim is to force the opponent to accept the aggressor’s will.
Both sides—even before Donald Trump came to power—have subordinated military operations to political objectives. A clear example was Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive, whose long-anticipated launch dominated public discourse for months, at the expense of operational secrecy.
The same logic applies today. Russia and Ukraine alike are trying to strengthen their negotiating positions as talks once again approach a potential endgame—for the fourth time.
Playing to the mood of the US president, both sides want to present themselves from a position of strength. Yet the liberation, encirclement or destruction of Russian units at one of the hundreds of points along the front, while important for collective security, does not bring a strategic breakthrough any closer.
Leon Pińczak
The author is a security and international affairs analyst at the Polityka Insight think tank in Warsaw.