Ukraine's Operation Vivaldi in the forests north of Lyman was already months old before Kyiv admitted it existed. When the Third Army Corps finally announced the counteroffensive on September 15, it released figures its own supporters immediately described as understated, showed footage filmed in spring and summer, and made clear that operational secrecy would continue. That silence was not an afterthought. Together with an electronic-warfare screen that blinded Russian drones, it was central to how the operation worked.
Silence as a weapon
According to Ukrainian military commentator Denys Davydov, who walked through the corps' first official release, the officially announced gains were deliberately "way smaller" than what open-source maps suggested, because operational security still applied. The Ukrainian mapping project DeepState, which works closely with the army, published the liberations of Seredne and nearby settlements only after secrecy was lifted for those villages, while continuing to delay other Ukrainian gains. Davydov said he was withholding information himself for the same reason.
What Kyiv did confirm was substantial enough: 75 square kilometres of previously occupied territory liberated in the corps' first accounting, quickly updated to 85 square kilometres as further villages were confirmed. The corps put Russian losses in the sector at at least 1,500 troops and some 12,000 drones. Those are Ukrainian official figures relayed by Davydov, not independently verified figures, and Davydov himself questioned how the drone total was counted. But the direction of travel was confirmed from the other side of the line: Russian military channels described the Lyman situation as critical.
An electronic wall over the forests
The second layer of the operation was invisible. The corps attributes much of its success to Ukrainian strikes that cut Russian logistics, at times on Russian territory itself, combined with infantry assaults, artillery and aviation. Above the treeline, electronic warfare jammed Russian surveillance and made standard radio-controlled FPV drones almost unusable, forcing Russian units back onto fiber-optic-controlled drones that cannot be jammed but carry their own limits.
That mattered because Vivaldi was, at ground level, a clearing operation. Russian infiltration groups had spent months seeping into the settlements, basements and ruined buildings north of Lyman, and Ukrainian infantry had to remove them village by village, at times with grenades dropped into dugouts where Russian soldiers refused to surrender. Doing that work under constant enemy drone surveillance would have been far costlier. With Russian eyes jammed, small Ukrainian groups could move, clear and hold ground that Russian maps still coloured as theirs.
What Moscow's own footage revealed
The secrecy cut both ways. Davydov noted that some of the clearest evidence of how far Ukrainian troops had advanced came from Russian artillery footage, shared by Russian units to show strikes on Ukrainian positions, which inadvertently confirmed Ukrainian presence well beyond the officially announced line. Russian commanders, he argued, practise their own operational security for a different reason: reporting lost ground means punishment, so setbacks surface through military bloggers long before any general admits them.
The corps commander, Andriy Biletsky, has hinted that the operation's name is a programme: like Vivaldi's Four Seasons, it is planned in four stages, expected to run through the winter into next spring. He has also corrected outside analysts who assumed the goal was simply to push Russian forces back across the Zherebets River, saying that is not the main objective. Russian channels have claimed Ukrainian crossings of the river and fighting further east, claims Kyiv has not confirmed.
Whether the later stages can repeat the first stage's surprise is the open question. Russia now knows the sector matters, has seen the jamming and the logistics strikes, and retains the manpower to feed new infiltration groups into the same forests. But Vivaldi has already demonstrated the combination Moscow struggles to answer: an offensive planned in silence, fought under an electronic screen, and revealed only when the ground has changed hands.
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