Every day, the Ukraine Battlefield update newsletter offers a clear look at how the war is unfolding on the ground, highlighting key developments along the frontline and the shifting dynamics of the conflict.
The battle of a Russian Guards tank division in the Dobropillia sector may foreshadow the future of tank units.
Near Kostyantynivka, Russian forces have pushed dangerously far forward, putting the town in a tight encirclement.
Russian forces are struggling in the Zaporizhzhia sector and are writing about serious problems around Stepnohirsk.
The Ukrainian army continues its unsystematic reinforcement of the controversial Skala regiment – it has subordinated a “French” brigade to it.
Where Russian forces struck Ukrainian energy infrastructure during March.
Maps of the day – where Russia’s 90th tank division is fighting; Zaporizhzhia region; Kostyantynivka.
Videos of the day – after a long time, a video has appeared showing the destruction of a T-90M tank; Russian soldiers use a truck bed to launch Lancet drones; what a 10-kg bomb capable of piercing a one‑metre layer of concrete looks like.
The battle of a Russian Guards tank division in the Dobropillia sector may foreshadow the future of tank units. The Slovak government is seriously considering acquiring new tanks for its army. The original favourite was the German Leopard 2A8, but defence minister Robert Kaliňák said they were beyond the financial means of the state budget.
A compromise solution is therefore being considered. Here too, the favourite may change; originally it was the Swedish CV-90120 type. It is a modified CV-90 infantry fighting vehicle equipped with a new turret and a 120 mm tank gun.
As my colleague Vladimír Šnídl wrote from the Bratislava defence fair, arms manufacturer Michal Strnad, who is very close to Kaliňák, this week premiered his response in the form of the new CFL-120 Karpat. The Karpat combines a Turkish tracked combat vehicle from the company FNSS with an Italian turret from Leonardo.
Given Strnad’s connections in the Slovak government, this is a serious contender, even though the Swedish light tank is much further along in development and has the advantage of a common base with the CV-90 combat vehicles that our army has already ordered and whose production is under way.
But all this is happening at a time when the future of this weapon is being called into question. Tanks have almost completely disappeared from the Ukrainian front. One camp is convinced that this is a temporary retreat until designers and military strategists manage to respond to the changed character of the war. The other believes that investing in expensive heavy weapons in the drone era is throwing money away.
This debate inevitably awaits Slovakia as well. A contribution to it may be the current activity of Russia’s 90th Guards tank division. It bears the honorary title Vitebsk-Novgorod and was created in 2016 as part of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s effort to build a more modern army. These days it is fighting near Pokrovsk in the Dobropillia sector, and it is fighting in a way that is very far removed from textbook ideas of how a tank division should behave on the battlefield.
“The spring-summer offensive is often overlooked, but it is already under way. In the area of responsibility of the 7th airborne rapid-reaction corps, the enemy has deployed elements of the 90th tank division,” said the introduction to the corps’ official statement on Wednesday.
The corps first reported that the 90th tank division had arrived in the area already on 9 May. According to its intelligence reports, the Russian Guards division was massing in occupied Pokrovsk.
Since then, it has already joined the fighting; the unit is engaged around the village of Hryshyne and perhaps to the west of Pokrovsk around Udachne. On the 7th corps map, this is the area on the left. On the right is the axis of a direct attack on Dobropillia.
What does this have to do with the planned tank procurement for the Slovak army? When the Russian invasion began in February 2022, the Russian army’s 90th tank division had around 300 tanks of various T-72 versions, supported by numerous tracked BMPs and wheeled BTRs.
Three of the division’s regiments took part in several unsuccessful battles. They suffered heavy losses in the battle for Kyiv, after which part of the division withdrew to the village of Bohdanivka, where its members committed war crimes. In response to proven sexual violence by members of the unit against civilians, the European Union imposed sanctions on its then commander, Ramil Ibatullin.
Later, the 90th tank division failed to stop the Ukrainian autumn counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region in 2022, and then took part in the bloody fighting for Avdiivka, the beginning of which was also accompanied by heavy losses of armoured units.
As can be seen from this brief overview of the division’s participation in the invasion, it is one of the units that have been hit very hard. It was still fighting in tanks, however.
Today it is completely different. “Tanks are now rarely seen on the battlefield – they are neutralised by drones,” the 7th rapid-reaction corps wrote, and so the behaviour of Russian tank units has also changed; they are tank units mainly in name. “Mechanised breakthroughs have been replaced by a slow war of drones, FPV systems and reconnaissance operations,” the corps said.
Even what is formally a tank division today does what all other units do, regardless of their name – it tries to get its infantry and drone operators as close as possible to the front line and attempts to push through wooded and built-up areas.
The Ukrainian corps said that the nature of the terrain, with riverbeds, the road network, and green belts, played into the Russians’ hands here. The 90th tank division operates together with the 76th airborne division (which also has a history of war crimes), specialised assault units, and operators from the ‘Rubicon’ unit.
“The enemy is trying to turn its numerical superiority in drones and infantry into constant pressure and fire control over supply routes,” the Ukrainians wrote. They did not mention tanks even once.
Of course, this does not mean that the era of tanks is definitely over. It is very likely that they will in time adapt to the new reality, but nothing in the Slovak defence ministry’s planned purchase so far suggests this.
Near Kostyantynivka, Russian forces have pushed dangerously far forward, putting the town in a tight encirclement. “In Kostyantynivka, the Russian armed forces are fighting in the urban area and trying to encircle it from the south. The situation is being complicated by the actions of the Ukrainian armed forces in Chasiv Yar, where conditions for our units have significantly worsened over the past month,” the Russian Telegram channel Two Majors wrote on Wednesday morning.
Russian problems in Chasiv Yar are well known; Russian Z-channels have been openly acknowledging them for several weeks. The rest of the message also gives the impression that nothing new has happened near Kostyantynivka. This time, however, Ukrainian and independent sources brought significantly worse news than the Russians themselves.
Ukrainian analyst Petrenko stated that Russian infantry managed to advance up to 4.4 km in depth and reach the village of Molocharka on the north-eastern edge of the town. He also published a video showing drones bombing Russian troops there and saving the situation, but according to him the pressure on the town was nonetheless increasing “on the flanks as well as in the eastern districts”.
The place where Russian forces broke through, according to Petrenko’s map:
A better overall view of what is happening in the town is provided by the reliable analytical account Playfra, which on Wednesday published a map marking the routes along which Russian forces are trying to advance around the town and directly into it. On the eastern flank, it almost completely matches Petrenko’s verbal description.
At the very top in the centre of his map, the arrows showing the direction of Russian attacks reach as far as the aforementioned Molocharka.
As always, it is important to remember that the presence of a soldier at a specific point does not yet mean that his army controls it. Given the video published by Petrenko, it is very likely that the Russian group was eliminated, but even such a large one-off leap still represents a dangerous development.
An even better overall picture is provided by a Russian map from Rybar. It also captures the much-mentioned Chasiv Yar (though not the fighting near Molocharka).
At this scale, practically the entire Kostyantynivka battlefield is visible. You can find Chasiv Yar in the centre on the right. Russian forces are trying to push between it and Kostyantynivka because a direct assault on either place is not working. On the contrary, in Chasiv Yar the Ukrainians are strengthening their presence and from there they are protecting the eastern approaches to Kostyantynivka.
In the western part of the occupied Zaporizhzhia region, Russian forces are struggling and are writing about serious problems around Stepnohirsk. “It is very difficult in the Zaporizhzhia sector,” Russian commentator Yuriy Kotenok wrote on Tuesday.
Nor is this, like the Russian problems in Chasiv Yar, anything new. Fresh details about this sector were provided by the OSINT group Unit Observer.
Its analysts explained that the Ukrainian command reinforced the sector with elements of the 153rd mechanised brigade and the 128th mountain brigade, which are fighting for the villages of Stepove and Male Shcherbaky, while in Stepnohirsk itself units of the ‘HUR’ and soldiers of the former International Legion are attacking.
The list of Russian units is impressive – the 7th, 98th, and 104th airborne divisions, the 11th airborne brigade and the 19th and 42nd motorised rifle divisions. Even here we are certainly not talking about full-strength formations, but only about parts of them. Nevertheless, this is a high concentration of elite airborne units which, according to the Unit Observer account, “still cannot regain the initiative as the battle for Stepnohirsk enters its seventh month.”
The Ukrainian army continues its unsystematic reinforcement of the controversial Skala regiment – it has subordinated a “French” brigade to it. In Ukrainian military circles, the priority replenishment of assault regiments at the expense of other units, where this deepens the problem of manpower shortages, is often criticised. Most recently, this trend has reached a new level.
The best-known, but at the same time most controversial and most criticised, 425th Skala assault regiment was given under its command the 155th Anna of Kyiv mechanised brigade.
This story says everything about the problems, emergency stopgaps, and unsystematic interference by higher command.
First, a regiment is nominally a smaller formation than a brigade. Moreover, the structure of the Ukrainian army is traditionally built on brigades as the basic units, which after the 2025 reform began to be grouped into corps.
Second, although Skala is officially designated as a regiment, in practice its strength is several times greater and in reality it is closer to a division. A regiment should have three to four battalions; Skala has as many as 15. If it were manned to full authorised strength, it could have up to 10,000 soldiers instead of roughly 2,000, which is what it should have as a regiment.
This situation is the result of Olexandr Syrskyi’s favouring of assault units. The outcome is a state in which a unit that is, on paper, lower in the hierarchy commands a higher-level formation.
Third, the 155th mechanised brigade was formed in 2024 as one of the so‑called 150-series brigades. As such, it was supposed to be a showcase unit. Its training took place in France and its equipment consisted mainly of French heavy hardware. Only its tank battalion was equipped with Leopard 2A4 tanks originally from Poland.
However, already during training in France several dozen soldiers deserted from the brigade, and after it returned to Ukraine as many as 1,700 personnel left. Nevertheless, the brigade was immediately thrown into the fighting near Pokrovsk, where it is still operating. From a disastrous beginning it gradually became a combat-capable unit, but at a high cost.
“Members of the 155th brigade were sent into repeated, senseless assaults near Pokrovsk ordered by Syrskyi, during which the unit suffered heavy losses and lost much of its equipment,” the Ukrainian website Militaryland wrote. Thus, a unit that was originally supposed to be the best of the 150-series brigades became a formation used to put out fires on a sector of the front where some of the bloodiest fighting of this war took place.
This is also the likely explanation for why the brigade became subordinate to the “regiment”. The 155th mechanised brigade is now a brigade only in name, and its actual strength is significantly smaller.
Nothing good awaits it under the 425th assault regiment, however. Its conditions were already criticised in early April 2026 by defence minister’s adviser Serhiy Sternenko, and they are also being investigated by the office of the military ombudswoman, because in Skala there have been repeated cases of ill-treatment of soldiers and, given its employment as an assault unit, it has also suffered heavy losses.
Where Russian forces struck Ukrainian energy infrastructure during March. Seven power plants and 54 transformer substations in a month: That is the tally of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power grid during the third month of the year.
Videos of the day
A 10-kg bomb carried by a heavy drone that can penetrate a concrete layer up to 1 metre thick.
Drone operators are a priority target. In this case, Russian soldiers hid the launch ramp for their Lancet attack drones on the bed of a truck. Of course, this is no guarantee of anything, because drones behind the front line also strike such targets, but this solution at least gives the crew increased mobility. Normally, they first have to unload the ramp before launch and position it in the field.
For a long time, there had been no video showing the destruction of a tank from either army. Since tanks have mostly become almost defenceless prey for drones, their numbers on the front line have dropped sharply, and the number of recordings of their activity has fallen accordingly. This Russian T-90M is one of the exceptions. The fact that it really is Russia’s most modern and most capable tank is confirmed by detailed overhead footage from the 39th second, which shows the characteristic shape of this version’s turret.
What the losses are
On Monday (4 May), some categories of equipment were removed from the list, so the overall figures fell sharply compared with previous weeks. A week later, there was a further reduction in the total Russian losses. No update on Wednesday.
By Monday morning, Russia had demonstrably lost 23,439 pieces of heavy equipment (on Tuesday (5 May) it was 23,650). Of that, 18,444 (18,618) pieces were destroyed by the Ukrainians, 971 (976) were damaged, 1,197 (1,206) were abandoned by their crews, and 2,827 (3,182) were captured by the Ukrainian army. This includes 4,390 (4,394) tanks, of which 3,293 (3,292) were destroyed in combat.
Ukraine lost 11,539 (11,219) pieces of equipment, of which 8,737 (8,708) were destroyed, 666 (661) damaged, 665 (666) abandoned and 1,185 (1,184) captured. This includes 1,422 (1,420) tanks, of which 1,087 (1,085) were destroyed in combat.
Note: Neither side regularly reports its own dead or destroyed equipment. Ukraine publishes daily figures on Russian personnel and equipment losses, which cannot be independently verified. In this overview we use data from the Oryx project, which since the start of the war has compiled a list of equipment losses documented exclusively by photographic evidence.