Ukraine is entering winter with another demonstration of military brilliance, an exhausted population that still refuses to surrender, and Western partners who continue to mistake caution for strategy — effectively inviting Russia to test lines that have not been red for a long time and yet are crimson with blood.
Operation Vivaldi in northern Donetsk Oblast has been a triumph. The 3rd Army Corps has combined electronic warfare, air defense, aerial drones, and unmanned ground vehicles in an offensive around Lyman. Ukrainian forces say they have restored control over 125 sq km (48 sq miles), a significant advance in a war of attrition.
Ukraine even successfully reintroduced tanks, armored vehicles, and elements of mechanized maneuver into a battlefield increasingly dominated by drones and positional warfare.
There have been some stunning innovations, not least the use of heavy drones to air-drop kamikaze ground robots more than 10 km (6 miles) behind Russian lines, while electronic warfare and air defense teams worked to suppress Russian reconnaissance drones and conceal the direction of attack. Not for the first time, Ukrainian innovation signals a future war that many NATO officers acknowledge they are not ready to fight.
Robots also moved ahead of infantry as other unmanned ground vehicles cleared roads and laid mines. Around the village of Shandryholove, robotic systems cleared 30 km of routes in two nights, a job which would have taken two engineer companies a week under deadly enemy fire. Another robotic operation laid 400 meters of mines in two nights.
Change is coming fast at sea too. On September 12, an unmanned Ukrainian surface vessel won the world’s first drone-on-drone naval engagement by destroying an unmanned Russian boat in the Black Sea, an engagement that may come to be seen as similar in significance to the US Civil War engagement between the Monitor and the Merrimack in 1862.
In July, an unmanned surface vessel transported an armed ground robot to shore on the Russian-occupied Kinburn Spit, where it was deployed in combat under drone observation.
Operation Vivaldi has taken the experience from these missions and knitted together the tactics, hardware and techniques into a larger combined operation.
This is Ukraine’s real military revolution; it is less about inventing a wonder weapon than about relentlessly shortening the distance between invention, combat testing, failure, modification and mass use in an orchestral union on the frontline. In the first eight months of 2026, Ukrainian ground robots carried out more than 100,000 logistics and evacuation missions. A country invaded as the supposedly weaker neighbor is now writing the manual for the next generation of warfare.
Yet, however far Ukraine stretches the limits of military imagination, it still hasn’t persuaded the West to stretch the limits of its approach to Russia, as Thomas Kent recently wrote on CEPA’s Europe’s Edge.
Moscow has repeatedly been denied victory on the battlefield, yet Western policy has left Ukraine under pressure to trade concessions for a settlement its invader has not earned.
Ukraine survived the opening assault of the full-scale invasion, has preserved a functioning state under missile and drone attacks, rebuilt military units while fighting, and improvised a naval-denial campaign without possessing a conventional navy capable of matching Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
It turned cheap first-person view (FPV) drones into weapons, built increasingly sophisticated long-range strike systems, and developed methods for integrating commercial technology into kill chains at a speed many NATO procurement systems have struggled to even study. Then came last year’s Operation Spiderweb, which saw drones smuggled behind enemy lines in trucks to destroy Russian aircraft on the ground.
Some of these achievements have benefited from Western assistance; others were achieved despite the restrictions, delays, and political caution that came with it.
Amidst all this, it is vital for the West to remember that Russia is learning too.
The Everywhere War Tracker provides a picture of a sustained Russian campaign of sabotage, cyber operations, airspace, and maritime violations, and other actions across Europe.
A year ago, Russian hostile activity on the continent was still something most capitals preferred to discuss quietly, but now warnings that Moscow may test NATO’s Article 5 on collective defense come from NATO officials, national governments, and European security officials.
Operations such as Vivaldi are more than just Ukrainian battlefield successes; they are part of Europe’s forward defense, whether European leaders choose to describe them that way or not.
Moscow does not need to abolish NATO or dismantle the EU; it just needs to make them strategically hollow. An alliance which is frightened of responding to sabotage, drone incursions or attacks on infrastructure will lose much of its deterrent value.
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico has already said he will avoid joining the fight for NATO allies by all means necessary, reflecting existing divisions among less committed alliance members.
Nearly five years into Europe’s biggest war since 1945, discussions continue on Russian claims over land it has failed to win on the battlefield, including demands for Ukrainian withdrawal from territory Russia does not control, neutrality, plus limits on its armed forces and long-range capabilities.
At the same time, Kyiv’s NATO membership remains unattainable, and EU accession moves very slowly.
What some call realpolitik looks increasingly like strategic self-harm dressed up as prudence. The strategy of exhausting Russia through the exhaustion of Ukraine has exhausted itself.
Elena Davlikanova is a Senior Fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and Sahaidachnyi Security Center. Her work focuses on Ukraine, Russia’s domestic issues, and their effects on global peace. She is an experienced researcher and foresight expert with studies entitled ‘Russia-2032 Scenarios: A decade past the full-scale invasion’ and ‘The War of Narratives: The Image of Ukraine in Media.’
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.
