The Battle of Lesnaya was one of the major battles of the Great Northern War. It took place on October 9 [O.S. September 28] 1708 between a Russian army of between 26,500 and 29,000 men commanded by Peter I of Russia, Mikhail Mikhailovich Golitsyn, Aleksandr Danilovich Menshikov, Christian Felix Bauer and Nikolai Grigorovitj von Werden and a Swedish army of about 12,500 men commanded by Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt and Berndt Otto Stackelberg, at the village of Lesnaya, located close to the border between the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia. The Swedes were escorting a supply column of more than 4,500 wagons for their main army in Ukraine.

The Great Northern War (1700–1721) was a conflict in which a coalition led by the Tsardom of Russia successfully contested the supremacy of the Swedish Empire in Northern, Central and Eastern Europe. The initial leaders of the anti-Swedish alliance were Peter I of Russia, Frederick IV of Denmark–Norway and Augustus II the Strong of Saxony–Poland–Lithuania. Frederick IV and Augustus II were defeated by Sweden, under Charles XII, and forced out of the alliance in 1700 and 1706 respectively, but rejoined it in 1709 after the defeat of Charles XII at the Battle of Poltava. George I of Great Britain and the Electorate of Hanover joined the coalition in 1714 for Hanover and in 1717 for Britain, and Frederick William I of Brandenburg-Prussia joined it in 1715.