Through the first half of 2026 Russian assault formations were driven down by drone-saturated defences from platoon-sized attacks through squad and fire-team to two-person infiltration teams, because concentrations of vehicles could not survive the approach. On 22 July Russian forces reversed that, briefly. Ukrainian National Guard Commander Brigadier General Oleksandr Pivnenko confirmed on 25 July that elements of the Russian 8th Combined Arms Army and 41st Combined Arms Army — including the 41st's 90th Tank Division — conducted a reinforced company-sized mechanised assault in the Dobropillya direction, advancing from Novoekonomichne and Vozdvyzhenka and attempting to enter settlements near Shakhove over roughly four hours. It was defeated the same way mass armour was defeated the first time: not by anti-tank guns or minefields but by drone crews watching the approaches, with the Phoenix border unit of Ukraine's Pomsta brigade named as the operators. The counter held, and the doctrine it had displaced was not restored — ISW records Russian forces continuing offensive operations in the Dobropillya tactical area on 23, 24, 25 and 26 July and not advancing on any of the four days. The scale of the destruction is less firmly established than the assault itself, and the distinction matters: geolocated footage published by Ukrainian units on 23 July independently shows strikes on a Russian tank and an armoured personnel carrier north of Novotoretske, a tank at Shakhove and a BM-21 Grad at Nove Paltavka, but the fuller tally of nine tanks, two armoured fighting vehicles and three Grad launchers comes from a Ukrainian State Border Guard Service release, reported by Ukrainska Pravda on 24 July, which ISW noted the same day 'appears to have since been deleted' from the agency's website — and which returns HTTP 404 to a direct request on 27 July, with no archived snapshot available. Ukraine's border guards said there had not been a breakthrough attempt of this scale in their area of responsibility for a long time; that is a local characterisation from an interested party, not a front-wide count. A week later Vikram Mittal published a frame-by-frame reading of the released Ukrainian footage in Forbes, and it turns the episode from an outcome into a method. The Russian vehicles advanced widely dispersed rather than in dense columns — spacing that lowers the chance of the whole formation being identified and struck at once, and stops one destroyed vehicle creating a bottleneck, while keeping the vehicles close enough to hold communications. Most of the tanks carried no extensive anti-drone armour: no unravelled steel-cable screens, only a small canopy with a thin steel plate over the commander's hatch, likely for standoff protection against munitions dropped by heavy bomber drones. Mittal reads the omission as a deliberate trade — heavier modifications cost speed and manoeuvrability, and Russian crews have reported transmission failures after relatively short movements — an assessment, with the crew reports relayed rather than confirmed. The armour was not the whole force. Numerous two-person motorcycle teams operated independently of it, with further infantry in commercial trucks, and the advance was preceded by Gerbera and Lancet drones attempting to suppress Ukrainian drone operations. Most motorcycle teams did not try to outrun the drones; they dismounted quickly and dispersed into nearby vegetation, a drill previously shown in a Russian Ministry of Defence post about Russian training. Because Ukrainian drones concentrated on the vehicles, many of those soldiers kept advancing on foot. The defeat mechanism was layered and pre-emplaced rather than improvised. Reconnaissance drones detected the advancing force and directed a rapid response; the Border Guard Phoenix unit employed FPV drones, heavy bomber drones and artillery; minefields had been laid in advance along the likely approaches and the bridges toward Ukrainian positions had already been damaged; and when Russian forces tried to restore the crossings with pontoon bridges, Ukrainian tactical aviation destroyed them. The drone and artillery element is confirmed by released footage; the pontoon-bridge destruction rests on Ukrainian accounts. On scale, Mittal corrects the claimant: the First Corps Azov described the attack as involving 'two armies and a tank division', but 'the assault element visible in the released footage appears much smaller, likely a reinforced company-sized force' — while still, in his judgement, among the largest Russian mechanised assaults of the past year. Parent formations and force size are different claims, and Mittal does not dispute Pivnenko's identification of the units. The equipment tallies remain unsettled: Azov reported seven tanks, six armoured fighting vehicles, one BM-21 Grad, one Tornado-S launcher, three pieces of specialised equipment and 47 light vehicles destroyed with more than 150 Russian casualties, while Ukrinform, relayed by Mick Ryan, reported tanks and a Sarma launcher destroyed for a claimed 123 Russian dead. Both are Ukrainian claims, neither is independently confirmed, and they disagree on the casualty figure and on the launcher type. What the episode was an instance of is now clearer. ISW states that Russian forces 'continue to rely on their aviation overmatch into 2026, even as Russian infantry tactics have switched from larger-scale infantry attacks and mechanized assaults to mostly small group infiltrations', and the scale reported since suggests what the phrase now denotes in practice: the State Border Service reported a reduced platoon-sized mechanised assault near Artilne on 29 July consisting of one armoured vehicle and ten infantry, and a Ukrainian unmanned systems servicemember in the Slovyansk direction reported on 28 July that Russian forces rarely conduct large-scale mechanised assaults and mostly operate in groups of one to two. Mittal expects a limited number of mechanised assaults to continue alongside infiltration as the primary method: infiltration yields only incremental gains but maintains constant pressure, whereas a mechanised assault offers the possibility, though not the guarantee, of a breakthrough — and Russian commanders have incentive to keep experimenting while Russian leadership demands offensive operations rather than a transition to defence. He offers three non-exclusive explanations for why this assault was mounted at all — that enough infiltration sites had been established to support it, that Ukraine's counter-infiltration effort had drawn drone reconnaissance and rapid-response teams away, or that the armour was a diversion covering the motorcycle teams — and settles on none. ISW does not describe 22 July as the start of a trend, and hedges its own reference to it twice.