Operation Vivaldi: Has Ukraine Rediscovered the Art of the Offensive?

By Matthew Parish

Monday 5 October 2026

There is something appropriately musical about the name Operation Vivaldi. Modern warfare in Ukraine has acquired its own peculiar rhythm: drones circle overhead, artillery interrupts the silence, infantry move in tiny groups through treelines and ruined villages and electronic warfare systems compete invisibly across the electromagnetic spectrum. The great armoured manoeuvres imagined by twentieth-century generals have often been replaced by something more cautious, fragmented and technologically intricate. Then, occasionally, the rhythm changes. One side discovers a weakness, disrupts the other’s systems and begins moving forward.

Operation Vivaldi, conducted by Ukraine’s Third Army Corps under Brigadier-General Andrii Biletskyi in northern Donetsk Oblast, appears to have been one of those occasions. By late September 2026, Ukrainian forces claimed to have recovered 176 square kilometres, liberated three villages and restored Ukrainian control over another two. Reuters reported that the Institute for the Study of War regarded the operation as having achieved the operationally significant purpose of disrupting Russia’s attempt at a broad encirclement of the Ukrainian “fortress belt” in Donetsk. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office subsequently described three “seasons” of Vivaldi and said that the operation had forced Russia to redeploy reinforcements, thereby weakening other parts of the front.

Those are significant achievements. They deserve examination precisely because Ukrainian territorial victories of any appreciable size have become unusual in a war increasingly characterised by incremental movement measured in fields, treelines and ruined villages. Yet they also require caution. A successful counterattack is not necessarily a breakthrough. A breakthrough is not necessarily an operational collapse. An operational collapse is certainly not necessarily the beginning of the end of a war.

This distinction matters because an interesting recent essay by Robert G. Rose of the Modern War Institute at West Point makes an ambitious argument about Vivaldi. Rose sees the operation not merely as a local Ukrainian success but potentially as the prototype for something much larger: a method by which Ukraine might restore operational manoeuvre to a battlefield that drones, mines, artillery and ubiquitous surveillance have rendered increasingly static. His central insight deserves to be taken seriously. His extrapolation from it deserves rather more scepticism.

The essential achievement of Vivaldi was apparently not that Ukrainian soldiers suddenly became better at storming trenches. It was that the Third Corps attacked the Russian military system surrounding those trenches. According to the account presented by Rose, Ukrainian forces concentrated unmanned capabilities against Russian rear areas, attacking crossings, logistics, drone infrastructure and operators. Russia’s own drone capability was consequently degraded and its forward troops became progressively isolated. The Third Corps claims in particular to have badly damaged the Russian Rubicon drone unit operating on the axis.

This represents an important evolution in thinking about the drone war. Much commentary about drones still treats them as extraordinarily sophisticated flying artillery shells: cheap weapons capable of finding and destroying tanks, trucks and soldiers. Their more profound significance is that drones have become part of the nervous system of armies. They observe, communicate, identify targets, correct artillery fire, disrupt logistics and make concentrations of troops and vehicles extraordinarily difficult to conceal.

Destroying an enemy drone system therefore does something more important than destroying individual drones. It temporarily makes the enemy stupid.

That appears to be one of Vivaldi’s lessons. Ukraine did not have to destroy every Russian position. It had to interfere sufficiently with the systems connecting Russian positions together that the Russians became less capable of observing, supplying and coordinating them. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence’s broader “Drone Line” concept reflects much the same transformation: unmanned systems are increasingly treated not as supplementary weapons but as a continuous architecture of reconnaissance and destruction extending kilometres behind the front.

The idea is reminiscent of air superiority, although the analogy is imperfect. Twentieth-century armies understood that successful ground manoeuvre became vastly easier once the enemy’s aircraft had been suppressed. Ukraine may be discovering an equivalent principle for twenty-first-century land warfare: before achieving freedom of manoeuvre on the ground, an army may first have to achieve temporary freedom of action in the low-altitude drone environment and the electronic systems surrounding it.

Temporary is the important word.

Rose’s Modern War Institute essay proceeds from this insight towards a much grander proposition. Ukraine, he argues, should reproduce Vivaldi on a larger scale. Drone dominance would create a window in which Russian observation and interdiction were suppressed. Ukrainian infantry and unmanned ground systems could penetrate the resulting gaps. Mechanised formations could then exploit those penetrations before Russia established another defensive line. Multiple corps might ultimately conduct operations in depth reminiscent conceptually, although certainly not technologically, of Soviet “Deep Operations” theory developed between the world wars.

It is a seductive idea because it promises to solve the central military problem of the Ukrainian war. Both Russia and Ukraine have repeatedly demonstrated that they can penetrate opposing positions. What they have generally struggled to do is exploit those penetrations quickly enough to turn tactical success into operational collapse. Surveillance is too extensive, reserves arrive too quickly, vehicles are too vulnerable and supply lines extending through drone-saturated territory become extraordinarily hazardous.

The comparison with the great operational theorists of the twentieth century is therefore illuminating but also dangerous. Tukhachevsky, Triandafillov and Isserson thought about penetrating defensive systems and then attacking command posts, reserves, communications and logistics far behind them. Operation Bagration in 1944 demonstrated the terrifying potential of operational depth when an entire German army group effectively disintegrated under simultaneous attacks.

But Bagration involved millions of soldiers, thousands of tanks and aircraft and an enormous concentration of artillery. More importantly, the Soviet Union possessed vast reserves with which to exploit success. Modern Ukraine suffers from precisely the opposite problem. Every mechanised brigade concentrated for exploitation is a brigade removed from somewhere else on an enormous front. Every experienced infantry formation committed to an offensive risks casualties that may be exceptionally difficult to replace.

The contemporary battlefield also punishes concentration in ways that Isserson could scarcely have imagined. Rose himself provides a striking example. A Russian force preparing an attack in July was reportedly detected and struck while still 70 to 120 kilometres from the front, losing more than sixty vehicles before reaching Ukrainian positions. The lesson cuts both ways. If Ukrainian surveillance can discover Russian concentrations at such distances, there is no obvious reason Russian reconnaissance cannot attempt precisely the same thing against Ukrainian exploitation forces.

This is the central paradox of Vivaldi. Drone dominance may be necessary to restore manoeuvre, but assembling the forces necessary for manoeuvre creates exactly the sort of target that drones are exceptionally good at discovering.

Nor is drone superiority likely to remain permanent. Every technological advantage in this war has generated a countermeasure. Commercial quadcopters produced electronic warfare. Electronic warfare encouraged frequency hopping and autonomous guidance. Jamming contributed to the development of fibre-optic drones. Improved interception encouraged faster drones and increasingly sophisticated guidance systems. The battlefield is not moving towards some final technological solution. It is undergoing accelerated Darwinian evolution.

Russia will therefore study Vivaldi just as carefully as Ukraine does. Russian commanders will disperse launch sites, duplicate communications, conceal operators, decentralise logistics and develop methods of striking Ukrainian drone infrastructure. Units will learn not to depend upon a single network whose destruction renders an entire formation blind. What worked spectacularly once may work less spectacularly twice and not at all the tenth time.

Indeed, the Ukrainian Third Army Corps’ own account offers a less romantic and perhaps more valuable explanation of Vivaldi. Its public materials emphasise resilient communications, redundancy and preparation. The Corps says, for example, that backup communications were established before the offensive and that damaged communications were restored unusually quickly. This is not the language of miraculous technological breakthrough. It is the mundane vocabulary from which successful armies have always been constructed: communications, logistics, training, redundancy, competent staff work and commanders who understand what their neighbouring units are doing.

That may ultimately be Vivaldi’s most important lesson.

Ukraine’s military has sometimes suffered from extraordinary differences in quality between formations. Some brigades have acquired formidable reputations for innovation, leadership and tactical competence while others have struggled with command, personnel management or integration of new technology. An army cannot conduct operational manoeuvre merely by possessing several brilliant formations. It requires competent institutions between those formations and above them.

Here the transition towards a genuine corps structure may prove more consequential than any particular drone. A corps commander capable of coordinating infantry, artillery, electronic warfare, reconnaissance, logistics and unmanned systems across a substantial section of the battlefield can create effects that individual brigades cannot. Vivaldi suggests what happens when these capabilities are orchestrated rather than merely accumulated.

The musical metaphor therefore becomes unexpectedly useful. An orchestra does not become better merely by purchasing more violins. Someone must ensure that the violins, cellos, trumpets and percussion are playing the same composition.

There is nevertheless a deeper problem with the Modern War Institute thesis. Rose argues that Ukraine ultimately requires a sufficiently dramatic battlefield victory to alter Russian perceptions of the war and that Russia may need to confront something approaching military collapse before the Kremlin changes its calculations. This may be true, but it risks confusing a desirable outcome with an available strategy.

Military history is filled with plans for decisive battles that failed because the enemy declined to collapse according to schedule. Russia has absorbed catastrophic losses in Ukraine while continuing the war. It abandoned northern Ukraine in 2022, lost most of Kharkiv Oblast later that year, withdrew from Kherson west of the Dnipro and endured the destruction or severe degradation of numerous formations without producing the political collapse in Moscow that outsiders periodically anticipated.

The Russian state has one characteristic that should never be underestimated: an extraordinary capacity to absorb failure while redefining failure as success.

Even a Ukrainian penetration of 50 or 100 kilometres would therefore not necessarily produce the political consequences its architects desired. Russia might withdraw, reorganise, mobilise additional troops and continue fighting. The geography of Ukraine provides enormous strategic depth. Unlike Germany in 1944, Russia would not face several gigantic armies converging simultaneously upon its homeland while its industrial capacity was being physically destroyed from the air.

There is also a danger in believing that Ukraine needs one enormous battlefield decision. Perhaps it does not. The very search for a decisive breakthrough contributed to some of the difficulties of the 2023 counteroffensive, when Ukrainian forces attacked deeply prepared Russian defences under conditions in which neither air superiority nor adequate suppression of Russian reconnaissance existed. A military strategy founded upon repeating Vivaldi everywhere might inadvertently recreate the intellectual error it seeks to escape: imagining that a technique demonstrated under favourable local conditions can simply be enlarged until it becomes strategic victory.

The alternative interpretation of Vivaldi is less dramatic but potentially more powerful. Ukraine need not necessarily produce another Operation Bagration. It may instead need to produce hundreds of small Vivaldis.

That means identifying sectors where Russian forces have become overextended, attacking their drone infrastructure and logistics, creating temporary local superiority, recovering tactically useful territory and then refusing battle once the advantage disappears. It means forcing Russia continually to redeploy reserves. It means making Russian commanders uncertain about where the next attack will occur. Above all, it means recovering the initiative without gambling Ukraine’s increasingly precious soldiers upon a single gigantic offensive.

There are signs that Vivaldi has already achieved something of this kind. Reuters reported that the operation disrupted the Russian attempt to widen the encirclement of the Donetsk fortress belt, while Ukrainian authorities say Russian reinforcements had to be shifted towards the threatened sector. That matters because contemporary warfare is not measured solely by the colour of villages on maps. Forcing the enemy to move reserves may alter operations hundreds of kilometres away.

None of this means that Ukraine should abandon the possibility of exploitation when genuine Russian collapse occurs. Quite the contrary. One of the persistent lessons of warfare is that opportunities appear suddenly and disappear equally quickly. Ukraine’s September 2022 Kharkiv offensive succeeded partly because Ukrainian forces recognised that Russian defences were extraordinarily thin and continued moving faster than the Russian command could reconstruct them. Any army hoping to regain territory must maintain forces capable of exploiting such moments.

But an exploitation force is different from a strategy based upon the assumption that exploitation will necessarily become possible.

Operation Vivaldi therefore deserves attention, including from NATO armies that are still trying to understand what the Ukrainian battlefield has done to conventional military doctrine. It demonstrates that drones have not abolished manoeuvre. They have changed the conditions under which manoeuvre becomes possible. Before tanks can move, sensors must be blinded. Before infantry can advance, logistics must be disrupted. Before territory can be liberated, the invisible network enabling the enemy to defend it must be attacked.

This represents something considerably more sophisticated than the caricature of the Ukrainian war as two exhausted armies exchanging drones across an immovable front.

Yet Ukrainians should resist the understandable temptation to transform every success into the discovery of a new Wunderwaffe, whether technological or doctrinal. There probably is no single weapon and no single operational concept that will suddenly solve this war. Russia is too large, the battlefield too transparent and technological adaptation too rapid.

Vivaldi’s achievement is more modest and, for that reason, perhaps more important. It shows that Russian advances are reversible. It shows that apparently static fronts can still contain exploitable weaknesses. It shows that intelligent integration of drones, logistics, communications, intelligence and ground forces can temporarily restore freedom of manoeuvre. Most importantly, it demonstrates that Russia does not possess some inexorable military momentum by which every Ukrainian town must eventually fall if Moscow is simply willing to wait long enough.

As of early October, however, the wider war remains ferocious. Ukrainian reporting recorded 194 combat engagements on 3 October, with particularly intense Russian pressure around Kostiantynivka and Pokrovsk. Vivaldi has changed part of the battlefield; it has not abolished the battlefield’s underlying arithmetic.

Perhaps that is where the musical name is most appropriate. Vivaldi wrote four seasons, not one triumphant finale. Ukraine’s Third Army Corps now speaks of successive “seasons” of the operation itself. Wars of this magnitude are seldom won by one magnificent movement. They are won by surviving long enough to learn faster than the enemy, preserving one’s strength, exploiting his mistakes and repeatedly creating situations in which he must choose between bad alternatives.

Operation Vivaldi may therefore be something more valuable than the overture to a decisive victory imagined at West Point. It may be evidence that Ukraine is learning how to conduct offensive warfare in an age when almost everything on the battlefield can be seen and almost anything that can be seen can eventually be destroyed.

That is not yet a theory of victory.

But it is a theory of how not to lose — and, from time to time, of how to start moving forward again.