Putiata on Army Corps Reform and Why the Front Held

Dmytro Putiata ranks army corps reform first among three reasons Ukraine's front stabilised in spring 2026, ahead of the answer to Russian infiltration and the middle strike campaign. Dmytro Putiata, a veteran sergeant of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, also blames lost ground near Sloviansk on the 11th Army Corps, not on Russian innovation.

He gave the list to Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, in mid-May 2026. He hedged it: the situation was much better than a year earlier in many parts of the front, and the front had stabilised, "maybe temporary." And he put "maybe" on his first reason. What makes the list worth reading is the order. In a war usually explained through drones, the first thing he reached for was how the army is commanded.

Why does army corps reform come first?

Because where Ukraine lost ground, Putiata says, the cause was usually Ukrainian command. Around Sloviansk there were continuing problems because the 11th Army Corps "didn't manage to deal with" several kinds of issue. Russia's advances there, in his view, did not come from inventing something new, nor from more drone operators or more drones. They came from internal problems Ukraine has had, frankly, since the beginning of the war.

The counterexample is Pokrovsk. There, he says, the 7th Rapid Reaction Corps commands motorised brigades that are not organically its own, and still does the job as it should. Some corps manage it even when the brigades they command are not their own.

That is the detail that makes the reform concrete. A corps does not need to own its brigades to command them well. Where it fails, the failure is the headquarters, not the design.

Hear Dmytro Putiata on corps reform at 6:03.

What happened to Russia's spring offensive?

It did not come in the usual form. Russia's offensive season, Putiata says, normally runs from April to late October. By the end of spring 2026, nothing extraordinary had happened, and not because something bigger was being prepared. On the contrary, Russia had decreased its appetite for the encirclement and destruction of Ukrainian forces it had pursued for years.

Instead it regrouped, much of it in reaction. Ukrainian counteroffensive actions forced Russia to send two marine divisions that had been its reserve, and they achieved little. Forces were moved from the Pokrovsk direction towards Ocheretyne and from the Novopavlivka direction towards Pokrovsk, which Putiata expected to be the next main focus.

How did Ukraine learn to handle infiltration?

This is Putiata's second reason, and Lee fills in how it happened. Russia's big adaptation of 2025 was infiltration: instead of sending a platoon of 30 or 40 men at once, send them one or two at a time over a day. Many die, but after three or four days a squad may be behind the Ukrainian line. For an infantryman who suddenly has Russians behind him, that feels like encirclement.

Brigades adapted in two steps, Lee says. First, they learned that Russians behind a position do not make it untenable, as long as it can be resupplied by drones. Second, they turned reconnaissance battalions and SSO assault units into dedicated counter-infiltration groups, often better trained than regular infantry. The infantry hold, and these groups come up to clear the Russians behind them. Third Corps did the same.

A brigade intelligence officer described the result to Lee as two boxers in a clinch. The front is no longer a clean line, and the fight becomes about who can keep their infantry supplied. Russia sustains its infiltrators with Molniya drones and supply drops; Ukraine resupplies its infantry with Vampire bombers. Knock out the other side's drones and its infantry become unsustainable.

The weak points were quiet sectors. When Russia went back on the offensive at Huliaipole in January, Lee says, territorial defence brigades that had seen little fighting did not know how to respond to the first infiltration groups behind them and were pushed back quickly, until assault regiments were deployed and stabilised the situation. Putiata's word for those brigades was stagnation.

Infiltration was only half of Russia's 2025 adaptation, Lee says. The other half was better drone employment, which first showed in Kursk. Russia's Rubicon centre, officially created in August 2024 and scaled that autumn, picked a stretch of the main road to Sumy, about 300 metres long, and knocked out any vehicle that tried to use it, much of it with fibre-optic FPVs. Putiata adds that neither side yet has a real doctrine for using its different types of drones, and that some Russian ideas in 2025 were smarter than they looked: "thanks to God, they're not scaling this."

Two depths of middle strike

Putiata's third reason is that Ukraine is "finally" conducting middle strike operations, and he divides them into two bands. From about 25 or 30 kilometres out to 55 or 60, the targets are trucks, radar systems and air defence. Deeper, they are ammunition depots, fuel depots, headquarters and buildings where Russian drone operators and reserves live. The full campaign is in Ukraine's middle strike campaign.

Will the answer to infiltration hold?

Putiata adds the test himself. The answer will be properly tried in summer, when tree lines give attackers cover again, and he expects that Russia will not have the success it had a year earlier. Lee explains why winter had helped the defender: bare trees, better thermal optics, frozen ground that is hard to dig into, and infiltrators who are often not physically fit enough to survive in the cold.

Who now commands those corps, and what he has to change, is in what Drapatyi must fix.