Operation Vivaldi is over – now Ukraine moves the war underground with Operation VELES

For months, Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps executed a counteroffensive dubbed Operation Vivaldi in northern Donetsk Oblast.

Concluded earlier this month, the operation severely degraded Russia’s 144th Motor Rifle Division and thwarted Moscow’s plans to outflank Sloviansk and Kramatorsk from the north.

Meanwhile, on another front, the 2nd Khartiia Corps of the National Guard has unveiled its own distinct campaign—codenamed Operation VELES—taking the war entirely underground.

First footage

On Wednesday, Ukraine’s 2nd Khartiia Corps of the National Guard released the first footage from a classified program it calls Operation VELES, built around moving troops, logistics and command functions below the surface to evade constant aerial observation. The video shows soldiers at work underground.

Objectives and duration remain classified, but Ukrainian military reports indicate the operation took place in the Kupiansk sector of the Kharkiv region, where assault units traversed more than 15 kilometers through subterranean corridors to emerge behind Russian positions.

“When the battlefield became transparent, the war went underground,” the corps said.

Brigadier General Ihor Obolenskyi, who commands the 2nd Khartiia Corps, praised the troops involved. “We have unique people; we are an unbeatable nation,” he said. The corps said other Ukrainian Defense Forces units are taking part in the joint operation, but did not identify them.

A battlefield that cannot be crossed above

The operation reflects a change in how a war under constant drone surveillance is now being fought. According to an analysis published by the Modern War Institute at West Point, reporting from Ukraine’s Pokrovsk area has described drones accounting for as many as 80 percent of battlefield casualties, and soldiers along the front describe a death zone roughly thirty kilometers deep where surface movement can trigger attack within minutes.

Ukrainian engineers have been constructing underground networks for months. The same analysis describes hardened, multilevel facilities equipped with fiber-optic communications and ventilation that connect trench systems, fighting positions, command nodes and logistics hubs. One project in the Donetsk region, the Pokrovsk underground facility built by the Automagistral-Pivden Company, extends thirty kilometers, the analysis says.

From a commander’s warning to a named doctrine

Obolenskyi previewed this shift publicly weeks before Wednesday’s footage. At the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv on September 14, the general told the audience that in his corps’s sector “the battlefield has gone underground. And we are more effective there than the Russians.” He warned on the same stage that military tactics from just two years ago were now obsolete, with battlefield doctrines shifting every few months.

The corps did not say when it would release further details about Operation VELES.

The video of Operation VELES includes recordings of Russian soldiers being taken captive. This is a possible violation of the Geneva Convention which states that prisoners of war must be protected from “public curiosity”. We have chosen not to embed or link to the video for this reason.

This article is made and published by Jens Asbjørn Bogen, who may have used AI in the preparation