Secret Operation "Vivaldi": a Ukrainian Village of 0.17 Square Kilometres Took More Than a Month

If you thought drones had killed off the classic infantry offensive, Ukraine's Operation "Vivaldi" says otherwise. The secret and still active offensive in the Lyman sector, in the north of Donetsk region, has for the first time been described by the commanders themselves. By 14 October, brigades of the Third Army Corps had liberated 277 square kilometres and 16 villages.

On a map, the number looks modest. The price shows in the details. The village of Shandryholove covers just 0.17 square kilometres, and it took the Ukrainians more than a month to liberate it. "The enemy mined the area unusually densely, because it realised it couldn't stop us any other way," said battalion commander Serhiy Halchenko, known as "Psycho".

Anti-personnel mines, according to Halchenko, account for 80 percent of the losses. He did not reveal the total number of Ukrainian casualties. The Balkans know how long the ground keeps its mines after a war ends: Bosnia and Croatia are still clearing them three decades later. How many generations will be pulling mines out of the fields of Donbas?

Four hours among the drones

Oleksandr, a 37-year-old soldier known as "the Marine", was in the first group to enter the village. Three soldiers had cleared one building and were approaching the church when a Russian FPV drone probably spotted them. A whole swarm followed. For about four hours they ran zigzag through the ruins, sticking to the concrete paths so as not to step on a mine. All three survived, with shrapnel wounds and concussions. "Honestly, I was sure we wouldn't survive," he said.

The tactic was silence and encirclement. Instead of a frontal assault, the infantry advanced through the forest belts to cut off the Russian soldiers in the villages. Soldiers in pairs slipped up to five kilometres deep behind Russian lines. Some days they covered two kilometres, and sometimes it took them four days to cover 200 metres. A commander nicknamed "Judo" admits that in 30 to 40 percent of cases the drones spotted them anyway.

The hardest scenes come from the evacuations. A soldier dragging a wounded comrade on a stretcher stepped on a mine and killed the man he was trying to save. A seriously wounded soldier, loaded onto a ground drone so that no other lives would be risked, made it 1,500 metres from the front before a Russian drone hit him. At one point, six Ukrainian soldiers were attacked by 35 fibre-optic FPV drones and 12 "Molniya" drones. One was killed, five were wounded.

Numbers nobody has checked

The Third Army Corps claims the Russians lost around 8,000 men and that more than 250 were taken prisoner. Andriy Biletsky, who heads the corps, spoke at a briefing of a loss ratio of one to seven in Ukraine's favour. None of these figures has been independently confirmed, and that should be said just as loudly as when we read Russian statements. The war is fought on the ground, but also in the presentations.

Biletsky announced the end of the fourth phase with the line: "The four seasons of 'Vivaldi' are over, but the music goes on." The commanders expect the pace of operations to slow. But if "Vivaldi" has shown anything, it is that even in a war saturated with drones, ground is still taken step by step - and under many of those steps, a mine is waiting.