From: Transform Ukraine By Douglas Landro / October 27, 2025
Russian encirclement claims in Kursk crumble as Moscow’s own milbloggers accuse their generals of lying. Ukraine liberates settlements Russia claimed to control—another day where Kremlin propaganda meets ground truth.
The Day’s Reckoning
October 27, 2025, marked the 1,342nd day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin wore military dress uniform for only the third time since the invasion began. Before his assembled commanders, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov announced the encirclement of thousands of Ukrainian troops in Kursk Oblast. Strategic towns had been seized. Victory was at hand.
The Russian military bloggers didn’t believe him.
Within hours, the same pro-war commentators who chronicle Moscow’s campaigns began posting evidence that contradicted every major claim. Ukrainian forces weren’t encircled—they were advancing, liberating settlements in areas Gerasimov claimed Russia controlled.
In Kyiv, a Russian drone killed a mother and daughter in their apartment. Over Moscow, Ukrainian drones turned the night sky orange as they struck oil depots deep inside Russia.
The gap between what the Kremlin claimed and what actually happened on the battlefield had grown so wide that even Russia’s own supporters could no longer bridge it.
The General Nobody Believes
Valery Gerasimov stood before his maps, uniform decorated, delivering triumph to Putin. Russian forces had encircled 5,500 Ukrainian troops near Pokrovsk, he announced. The 2nd and 51st Combined Arms Armies had completed a double envelopment, trapping thirty-one battalions. Near Kupyansk, the 68th Division seized river crossings, encircling eighteen more battalions. Seventy percent of Vovchansk was under Russian control. Settlements fell—Yampil, Dronivka, Pleshchiivka.
It was masterful: unit designations, tactical details, the appearance of precision.
Russia’s own military bloggers knew it was fiction.
Within hours, the backlash began. Not from Ukrainian sources or Western analysts—from Russian citizens who followed the war obsessively, who had contacts on the front lines, who wanted to believe but couldn’t stomach obvious lies.
“Gerasimov is lying,” one prominent blogger wrote. A multi-kilometer corridor remained open near Pokrovsk. Fire control over supply routes wasn’t an encirclement. Ukrainian forces faced difficulties but weren’t trapped.
The bloggers described chaos. Russian troops had infiltrated between Ukrainian positions, creating an intermingled mess. One called it “100 percent chaos,” noting Ukrainians still held settlements Russia claimed cleared.
One observer assessed Gerasimov was “getting ahead of himself again”—Russian forces would have to actually accomplish what he’d already announced as completed. The exaggerated claims served a purpose: convince Trump that collapse was imminent.
Putin had made identical encirclement claims in Kursk last October, then March. Never achieved. Now Gerasimov recycled the same playbook.
Putin justified slow progress by claiming concern for safety. Russian forces “historically always treated defeated enemies with mercy,” he said.
The words rang hollow. Drone strikes deliberately targeting Kherson civilians. Murders in Pokrovsk. Executions of surrendering prisoners.
State television broadcast Gerasimov’s claims unchallenged. But in digital spaces where Russians discussed the war, credibility had collapsed.
The Kremlin’s own supporters had stopped believing their generals.
The Mother and Daughter: Death Comes Before Dawn
The explosion came in the hours before dawn on October 26, one of multiple detonations echoing through Kyiv as Russian Shahed drones slipped past air defenses. In Desnianskyi district, a nine-story residential building absorbed a direct hit. The blast destroyed entire floors. Fires climbed the facade in the darkness.
A mother and her nineteen-year-old daughter died together in their home. A third victim died elsewhere in the district as fragments from destroyed drones rained on sleeping neighborhoods. Thirty-two were wounded, including seven children. Two children were serious enough to require hospitalization.
Rescue workers navigated smoking rubble as residents emerged in nightclothes, disoriented, searching for family. Drone fragments struck another nine-story block where five people were pulled from damaged apartments. In Obolonsky district, debris hit a sixteen-story tower, shattering windows and sending glass cascading onto streets below.
Voice of Ukraine 