Ukraine’s 3 Army Corps, acting under strict operational silence, has been conducting a counterattack in the Lyman sector for months. The cloud of secrecy has now been lifted, and Russian forces have lost a significant amount of territory. The operation, named Vivaldi, has so far officially cleared 75 sq km (29 sq miles), Ukrainian forces say. It is not yet over.
“In Vivaldi, as you know, there are four seasons,” Brig. Gen. Andriy Biletsky said on September 15. “And this is only the first . . . Good news is coming.”
Russia’s leadership had hoped to encircle Ukraine’s formidable fortress belt in western Donbas, but the northern salient has been reduced, with Russian warbloggers claiming it will extend the battle for Donbas by a year. Credible independent sources say the Ukrainian territorial gain is even greater.
Ukraine has also been making effective use of mid-range strikes to hit Russia’s rear, softening defenses, and then using troops to retake ground. Kyiv’s forces have benefited from Russian commanders falsifying reports about their progress, leading to a lack of reinforcements and allowing Ukraine to seize the initiative. The UAF says more than 1,500 Russians have been killed and wounded, and 12,000 drones destroyed along with hundreds of vehicles.
The key to the counteroffensive was Ukraine’s combined arms effort. Much like the surprise offensive into Kursk in 2024, it demonstrated that mechanized assaults and heavy armor are still important on the battlefield in the right circumstances.
The Lyman offensive shows Ukraine is improving its deployment of combined arms, a tactic it struggled to deliver during its unsuccessful counteroffensive in 2023. In the race to adapt, both sides have sought to develop the countermeasures and conditions required to restore maneuverability to the battlefield.
In July, a Russian mechanized assault in Maiak featured the Arena-M active protection system (APS), which had been modified to defend tanks against first-person view (FPV) drones. Dmytro Putiata, a Ukrainian veteran and drone warfare expert, said the Ukrainians had found the system hard to break down.
The system on just one tank “destroyed seven FPV drones,” Putiata wrote on Twitter/X. “In general, it took 15 to 20 FPV drones to destroy a tank (there were seven of them).”
Not every sector, or every terrain, is appropriate for the use of heavy armor, and commanders are having to adapt to different combat environments.
In the Donetsk-Dnipropetrovsk-Zaporizhzhia sector, Yurii, a drone operator with Ukraine’s 23rd Separate Mechanized Brigade, said tanks were scarce.
“The main focus right now is on small infantry groups moving on foot or on all-terrain vehicles, supported by drones as they advance,” he said in an interview. “In our sector, tanks are very rare because of the large kill zone extending in both directions.”
The concept of combined-arms warfare hasn’t changed, but the older doctrines for its use are becoming outdated.
“Tanks are used noticeably less often compared with previous years,” said Viktor, a tank operator from Ukraine’s 28th Separate Mechanized Brigade. “The survivability of the vehicles themselves has also declined because the enemy is using more advanced strike UAVs and sectors of the front have become more difficult for concealing vehicles.”
He said a wide spectrum of measures are being deployed to adapt to the drone threat and restore mobility, including improved electronic warfare systems, both on heavy armor and for soldiers, protective structures welded onto tanks, and monitoring of the sky and coordination with electronic warfare (EW) units to determine the best time to carry out a mission.
Kyiv is also deploying mobile counter-drone teams and scaling drone interceptor units to combat the threat.
The new style of Ukrainian combined assaults has produced important results, such as in Lyman, but a major breakthrough will still be very difficult. Much like Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, any limited breakthrough will face barrages of artillery and drones.
And the further forces move from supply routes, the greater the danger. Ukraine is also attempting to innovate by using heavy bomber drones to help ensure logistics in the sky.
“Despite the difficulty in ground operations maneuver observed in eastern Ukraine over the past few years, offensive operations are still possible in modern war,” wrote retired Australian General Mick Ryan. “But they need the intellectual effort to develop new techniques to make them viable and repeatable at scale.”
Both Kyiv and Moscow are making the “intellectual effort” and experimenting with how best to adapt to drone-saturated skies.
For its part, Ukraine is showing that mechanized maneuver remains possible but, as new technologies emerge, including autonomous systems, both sides will need better institutional adaptation, new doctrines, and the ability to quickly implement and learn from new technologies.
For now, Ukraine’s drone-led counteroffensives are leading the way, but we may soon see more tanks accompanying them.
David Kirichenko is a Ukrainian-American freelance journalist who has been covering Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine since 2022, and is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
