For four months, Ukraine said almost nothing about the Lyman axis. No maps, no briefings, no victory claims. Behind that silence, the 3rd Army Corps ran a multi-phase counteroffensive north of Lyman that Ukrainian commanders later named Operation Vivaldi.
On 15 September 2026, Brigadier General Andriy Biletskyi broke the blackout. He said Ukrainian units had cleared more than 75 square kilometers of Russian infiltration, liberated Serednie, and mopped up Novoselivka, Yarova, Oleksandrivka, and the approaches to Korovyi Yar. Independent OSINT mapping put the recovered area higher—over 200 square kilometers in some tallies. A later second phase added Shandryholove, Derylove, and full control of Drobysheve; the corps then put the two-phase total near 125 square kilometers, including about 50 formally de-occupied.
The tactical core was not a single breakthrough. Vivaldi was designed to break the northern arm of Russia’s pincer toward the Donbas fortress belt—Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, and the fortified cities behind them—while Russia’s 20th and 25th Armies were still trying to close the loop. Ukrainian strikes hit command nodes, crossings, and logistics; unmanned systems and air-dropped ground robots worked ahead of infantry. Over the operation the corps said its “Protective Dome” electronic-warfare network disrupted more than 20,000 Russian drone missions, blinding reconnaissance that should have seen the buildup.
Biletskyi’s line was deliberate: Vivaldi has four seasons, and this was only the first. Analysts and some Russian warbloggers treated the result as more than local ground: the northern encirclement route looked broken, and the fight for Donbas looked longer—by a year, in the most pessimistic Russian readings. Zelensky later publicly praised gains on the Lyman axis. Season 2 remains only partly disclosed. The war was not frozen. Russia’s most ambitious plan on this sector had been forced back to the rivers.
