Ukraine's Third Army Corps has described in detail how its troops stormed Russian positions village by village across the woodlands north of Lyman in the opening phase of Operation Vivaldi, clearing 75 square kilometres of Russian infiltration and liberating a further 10 square kilometres of northern Donetsk region. The operation, run for weeks under a strict information blackout before it was publicly acknowledged on September 15, is the clearest evidence yet that Kyiv can still seize the initiative on a chosen sector rather than simply trading ground.
Storming the forest villages
According to the corps, the first phase centred on a string of settlements on the approaches to Lyman. Ukrainian units liberated the village of Seredne in Kramatorsk District and cleared Russian infantry from Novoselivka, Oleksandrivka and Yarova, as well as the outskirts of Korovyi Yar. The Ukrainian monitoring project DeepState has marked the ground around Seredne as liberated on its battlefield map and records Russian units being pushed back from positions near Shandryholove as well.
This was close-quarters forest fighting, not a mechanised dash. Infiltration groups from Russia's 20th and 25th armies had spent months seeping into the treelines and basements of the sector, and the corps says its first task was to eliminate those pockets before they could harden into a new front line. Drones and ground robotic systems moved ahead of the infantry during the assaults, while artillery and unmanned systems struck Russian command posts, communications hubs, supply crossings and reserves behind them. The corps says the assault force drew on the 60th and 66th mechanised brigades, the 125th heavy mechanised brigade, the 3rd Assault Brigade, its 3rd reconnaissance battalion and 25th drone regiment, alongside the KRAKEN special-purpose battalion, the Artan unit of military intelligence, the DOZOR border detachment and Special Operations Forces.
The logistics cut behind the assault
The corps attributes much of the phase's effect to what happened behind the Russian front. Ukrainian drone units worked the supply routes feeding the Lyman sector until, by the corps' account, Russian troops were forced to relocate their fuel and lubricant depots out of Ukraine altogether, into Russia's Voronezh region, and to dismantle a supply pipeline. Biletsky has estimated Russian losses in this phase at roughly 1,500 soldiers from the 20th and 25th armies, more than 12,000 drones, and hundreds of armoured vehicles, artillery pieces and other vehicles. Those figures are Ukrainian military estimates and have not been independently verified, but Russian military bloggers have acknowledged Ukrainian counterattacks in the Lyman sector and have criticised the Russian command for masking territorial losses with fabricated reports of success.
Corps commander Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky has cautioned against reading too much into the map. Open-source speculation that Ukrainian troops aim to reach the Chornyi Zherebets River is premature, he said, noting only that the operation is named after Vivaldi's Four Seasons and that the first phase is just the first of four.
Why Lyman matters
Lyman is not an obscure crossroads. The town sits on the approaches to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, two cities in Ukraine's fortress belt that remain among the Kremlin's principal objectives in the east, and the sector had seen months of static, positional fighting before Vivaldi. Every village cleared north of Lyman pushes Russian artillery and drone teams further from those approaches and gives Ukrainian units better ground from which to defend them. The corps says follow-on fighting has since brought the total area under Ukrainian control in the first two phases to 125 square kilometres, 50 of them previously occupied, with Shandryholove and Derylove liberated and full control established over Drobysheve — again, corps figures that await independent confirmation.
What happens next will test whether a phased, drone-led offensive can be sustained through the autumn. Russia retains the manpower to feed new infiltration groups into the forests, and each cleared village must be held and supplied. But Vivaldi's first phase has already changed the question in the north: the issue is no longer only how fast Russia can advance toward the fortress belt, but whether its command can explain how ground it claimed to control had to be stormed back, one forest village at a time.
Watch our latest video coverage here: https://www.youtube.com/@CapitolInvestigates