Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps has revealed one of the most audacious innovations of the war so far: Soviet-era BTR armored personnel carriers converted into unmanned, remote-controlled bombs and driven straight into Russia's most heavily fortified positions in the city of Nove, cracking open a defensive belt that Moscow believed was impregnable.
The tactic, dubbed by observers as the "zombie car" offensive, was the spearhead of the third phase of Operation Vivaldi in the Lyman direction of Donetsk — a campaign that Kyiv says has retaken 176 square kilometers and yielded more than 250 Russian prisoners, entire units surrendering together with their officers.
Driverless armored vehicles smash into Nove's defenses
According to Ukraine's 3rd Army Corps, the corps converted Soviet BTR-60 armored vehicles into self-driving kamikaze systems, packed them with explosives, and unleashed them against Russia's strongest fortifications. Footage released by the corps shows the converted vehicles racing across muddy terrain and barreling into the barracks in Nove, which Russia had turned into a key logistics hub for its forces in the area.
Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, the corps' commander, said the idea was to spare Ukrainian infantry the deadliest part of the assault. Instead of soldiers fighting their way through prepared defenses, the machines went first — rolling into Russian positions and detonating, shattering fortifications that had withstood conventional attacks.
The Institute for the Study of War, which tracks the same stretch of front from geolocated footage, reported that the corps used BTR-80 armored personnel carriers converted into vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices to break through Russian defenses and destroy heavy fortifications. Biletskyi says his unit is the first in the world to use such a tactic — a claim that Western defense analysts have not disputed as they dissect the footage.
A feint that fooled Russian commanders
The armored battering rams did not strike alone. Biletskyi described a deception operation designed to misdirect Russian commanders: Ukrainian forces feinted from Shandryholove, northwest of Lyman, toward Zelena Dolyna to the northeast — drawing Russian attention and reserves to a false objective while the real blow fell on Nove, on the northern flank of the Russian grouping in the area.
The misdirection worked. Caught off guard, Russian units committed their reserves to counterattacking the feint and missed the actual strike, allowing Ukrainian assault groups to roll into positions that had been softened by the unmanned vehicles. Entire Russian units — including officers, pilots and artillerymen, in Biletskyi's account — surrendered in full rather than face the encirclement.
Biletskyi estimated that roughly 2,000 Russian troops were wounded or killed in the latest phase of the operation, a figure announced by the Ukrainian side and not independently verified.
Shaping the drone war before the breach
ISW analysts flagged something arguably more significant than the explosions themselves: Ukrainian forces drove the armored carriers all the way to heavy Russian fortifications without coming under Russian drone strikes. In a war where unmanned aircraft punish every vehicle movement, that fact points to an extensive Ukrainian shaping campaign that neutralized or otherwise negated Russian drone defenses and electronic warfare systems.
According to the assessment, Ukrainian forces conducted extensive shaping operations and an intermediate-range strike campaign to achieve what analysts call tactical drone overmatch — blinding Russian eyes in the sky before the manned and unmanned assault groups moved in. It is the same playbook of deep preparation that has defined Operation Vivaldi: in earlier phases, the corps airdropped small unmanned ground vehicles as far as nine miles behind Russian lines, flying more than 15,700 missions against command posts, shelters, logistics hubs and river crossings.
The result was not only tactical. Russian ultranationalist military bloggers, usually eager to spin Ukrainian successes, responded to the Nove debacle with an unusual theme: that the pervasive culture of lying inside the Russian military was harming frontline troops and facilitating Ukrainian advances — a rare public admission from within Russia's pro-war camp that the reporting system itself is part of the defeat.
A new stage of robotic warfare
Ukraine has made no secret of where it thinks this is heading. "Wars are won by infantry, but we protect our infantry, so the robots go to the enemy first," the 3rd Army Corps said when it announced the unmanned systems' debut earlier in the campaign. The corps has said the operation recaptured five villages and three settlements in northern Donetsk, with Biletskyi reporting 51 square kilometers liberated in the third phase alone.
Moscow, which demands the surrender of all of Donetsk — a province it occupies at roughly 80 to 85 percent — has offered no public accounting of the Nove losses. What is clear is that the "zombie car" tactic has given Ukrainian commanders a way to crack the most fortified positions on the front without paying the blood price such assaults have traditionally demanded.
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