The counterattck north of Lyman is a small area in the grand scheme. And if you’re looking for signficance, you shouldn’t over react to the push-pull of front lines in small sectors.
But - there is maybe a story behind the story here. Several stories.
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The closest you’re going to get to The Truth and an honest insight of Russian thinking and awareness is probably an aggregate of similarly timed and themed milblogger Telegram channel freakouts.
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There’s a brittle chauvanism to the Russian invasion mindset that doesn’t respond well to ANY step backwards. That’s a very inflexible way to fight a near-peer war of conquest. It also indicates a weakness - Ukraine doesn’t have to fully expel the Russians to 2014 or 1991 borders for Russia to consider it a defeat. They treat every retreat like an irreversible loss with shrieking hysterics, searching for scapegoats. And usually at the opeational command level, which is kind of dumb. The failure may manifest there, but the real blame is several layers higher in the chain of decision makers.
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Ukraine remains capable of coordinated manueuver warfare. This is after a period where it seemed both sides seemed to accept that mutual drone mass has made zone operations fairly moot. And maybe it is - but that lapses in that drone mass coverage create opporutnity that conventional thinking considered a thing of the past. Ukraine isn’t in a mere “hold on” phase - they are capable of offensives, and they may be growing stronger as Russia’s man-intensive horde war approach is weakening.
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Taking several steps back - the Russian anxiety reacting to a localized rollback at least implies a palpable fear of a ‘turning point’. One that is past ‘culmination’, where you stop advancing, and instead suggests you’re at a point where you start to lose significant pockets that would require limited reserve strength you might not even HAVE to try to get back. That could create a dangerous domino effect both on the physical front lines, and in the collapsing confidence of a slow-but-inevitable strategy of grinding ever forward over a presumably weaknening ukraine.
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For all the talk of a September mobilization, it hasn’t happened yet. And the first fresh conscript, whose combat effectiveness is highly debatable, wouldn’t arrive to reinforce failing fronts for several months from this sentence if mobilization were announced. Nor is there much certainty that mobilized conscripts would be any good as assault forces in the first place to underwrite Russia’s “grind forward, meat bags” strategy. How many more pocket collapses might happen before those conscripts who have less support, less equipment and poorer leadership even arrive at the front to replace the low-funcntioning grunts that are currently being blasted into canned pasta in charred piles of timber and blasted concrete right now?
In short - they are not moving forward and are starting to move backwards. Slowly, then quickly.
That all implies a collective fear among Russky milbloggers that they understand their entire position and philosophy is very fragile. There’s lots of examples in history where a small local defeat reinforces a wider fear that the entire approach to the war is pointless.
It’s very possible that a few collapsed pockets clustered together makes Russia finally accept defeat and screw off home.
The courage that the Ukrainians show every day is truly historic stuff. Slava Ukraini.
Your 4th point is I think the pivotal, first paragraph explaining the outcome of this war on future Wikipedia pages. Mass drones have made death cheap, precise and personal. I think this is the crux of why Russia cannot ever “win” this war - because their strategy is 20th century thinking. Namely - infestation until the other side gives up and goes away and accepts that the land turns from blue to red, like you’re in a video game, just by putting a body there. The biggest problem with that strategy is that Ukraine can use drones to kill Russian occupiers on a nearly infinite basis as long as they can make and deploy drones.
There is no ‘pacifying’ the exclusion zone that drones can cover. That distance, which technology continues to make larger and larger. The russian strategy of pushing small infiltration teams into soft areas until the Ukrainians retreat a bit technically moves Russians forward, but it doesn’t work as an occupation and pacfication strategy at all. It only works if Ukraine gives up and says the land is yours and agrees to stop killing your troops. And why would they do that? If you’re Ukraine, knowing that Russia will never honor a peace long term anyways, the best strategy is to keep the russian army bleeding until it dies. The only way to prevent the next war is to stop Russia’s capability to fight it.
Russia’s theory of victory depends on men and metal. Ukraine’s depends on being able to deploy machines and trade tiny slices of land until Russia leaves. This is what defeatists who say ‘Ukraine can’t push the russians out’ don’t accept. Russia is a 20th century army fighting a 21st century war with 7th century brutality, and Ukraine doesn’t have to push them out. They have to make it impossible for them to stay.
And they’re doing a great job of it.