The Counteroffensive That Reclaimed Ukraine Started Here

Balakliia is a town of about twenty-seven thousand on the Siverskyi Donets River, seventy-five kilometers southeast of Kharkiv. Russian forces of the Western Military District captured it in early March 2022, and for the next six months held the town, its rail junction, and the road that carried supplies from Belgorod down to Izyum and the northern flank of the Donbas offensive. Ukrainian planners under General Oleksandr Syrsky had spent the summer letting the Kremlin believe the main counterattack would come at Kherson. At dawn on September 6, 2022, a mechanized Ukrainian force broke through Russian screening positions near the villages of Verbivka and Volokhiv Yar, north of Balakliia. The lead formations included the 92nd Mechanized Brigade, the 25th Airborne Brigade, and elements of the newly reconstituted Territorial Defense Forces, spearheaded by Special Operations Forces teams that had infiltrated the previous night. Ukrainian troops moved fast, past prepared Russian positions rather than through them, and were behind the town by nightfall. Russian units, thinly held and unreinforced, blew the bridges and pulled out. By the afternoon of September 8 Ukrainian forces had entered Balakliia, and by the evening of September 10 the offensive had taken Kupiansk and Izyum, the two rail towns that had anchored Russian logistics in the region. In six days the Kharkiv counteroffensive recovered about twelve thousand square kilometers of Ukrainian territory and more than three hundred and fifty localities. It was the fastest large-scale advance of the war to that point and it shattered the assumption, held in many Western capitals, that Russia could not be pushed off ground it had taken. Ukrainian intelligence and law enforcement teams entering Balakliia and the surrounding villages documented Russian filtration sites, including a torture chamber in the town's police station where locals had been held during the occupation. Mass graves at Izyum were exhumed later that month. Balakliia has been rebuilt slowly. Its rail station is running again, the bridges are back in service, and a memorial plaque at the town hall marks September 8, 2022, as Liberation Day. The counteroffensive that opened here established a template Ukraine would use for the Kherson right-bank withdrawal two months later and for the drone-and-artillery attrition of the years after: find the seam, break through, exploit fast, and keep the enemy's logistics guessing. The seam that opened at Verbivka on September 6 is still visible on the maps of the war.