Home › Security › Strikes and a ground push: Ukraine, 10 February 2026
Strikes and a ground push: Ukraine, 10 February 2026
Summary
A retrospective on a day of civilian deaths in Sloviansk, a Russian advance near Kupiansk, and an arrest linked to the shooting of a Russian general.
What did the war look like on 10 February 2026? It showed in a Russian airstrike on Sloviansk, in Donetsk Oblast, that killed two people, and it followed a large-scale attack on Ukraine the day before.
A night of drones and missiles
On 9 February, Russian forces launched a large-scale attack using drones and ballistic missiles. At least six people were killed and dozens injured. The dead included a 10-year-old boy and his mother in Kharkiv. The Sloviansk strike on 10 February added two more deaths to the toll of Russian attacks on civilians.
As of 2026, the UN-documented civilian death toll in the war stood at around 16,000, while an estimate put the figure as high as 40,000. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine has said that Russian forces exposed civilians to unnecessary and disproportionate harm by using weapons with wide-area effects, among them missiles, heavy artillery shells and multiple launch rockets, in populated areas.
Movement on the ground near Kupiansk
On 9 February, Russian troops launched a mechanised assault east of Kupiansk. They captured the towns of Petropavlivka and Stepova Novoselivka. The assault belonged to the wider Kupiansk offensive, a series of engagements around the city and along the Oskil river in Kharkiv Oblast. Russian forces aimed to capture Kupiansk and territory along the river.
Offensive operations in that direction restarted after an attack on Kupiansk in late November 2024. They intensified after Russian forces established several bridgeheads on the western bank of the Oskil in early 2025. The advance of 9 February thus came after more than a year of fighting on that axis.
An arrest abroad
A separate development concerned Russia itself. On 8 February, a 65-year-old man accused of shooting and critically injuring lieutenant general Vladimir Alekseyev on 6 February was detained in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. He was then deported to Moscow.
What the day showed
The events of 8 to 10 February pointed in several directions at once: long-range strikes that reached cities such as Kharkiv and Sloviansk, a ground assault in the north-east, and a case of violence against a senior Russian officer that ended in an arrest abroad and a swift deportation. The strikes on civilian areas and the push near Kupiansk were part of the same pattern of continuous pressure on Ukraine.
