Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
The first phase alone has cleared 75 square kilometers.
Ukrainian troops have spent months quietly pushing Russian units back in the woodlands north of Lyman, out of public view.
On Tuesday, the commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps put a name on that campaign and said the fighting is nowhere near finished.
Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi told reporters the corps had been running a phased offensive in northern Donetsk Oblast that his staff had codenamed after Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, with three further phases still to come.
The corps said in a statement that the first phase cleared 75 square kilometers of Russian troops in northern Donetsk Oblast and de-occupied another 10 square kilometers.
Ukrainian units retook Novoselivka, Oleksandrivka, Yarova, the outskirts of Korovyi Yar, and the village of Serednie. Donetsk Oblast is part of the Donbas, the eastern industrial region Russia demands Ukraine cede as part of any settlement.
A codename kept under wraps
The 3rd Army Corps put reported Russian losses across the first phase at roughly 1,500 troops, more than 12,000 drones, and hundreds of armored vehicles and artillery systems.
The blow, the corps said, fell on units belonging to Russia’s 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies.
Biletskyi announced the codename himself, telling reporters that operations had been conducted “under a communications blackout.”
He would not confirm that the campaign’s ultimate objective is the Chornyi Zherebets River, saying only that open sources were making that claim and urging reporters to “follow our official statements and do not rush with spoilers.”
He described the completed work as one part of a four-part plan, saying “this is only the first of them.”
What ISW is seeing on the ground
The Institute for the Study of War, in its September 12 daily assessment, writes that Ukrainian forces effectively cut the Russian salient north of Lyman between September 9 and 11 and were fighting along the Zherebets waterway itself by the time of publication.
The think tank writes that the Ukrainian push has disrupted a Russian plan for a wide encirclement of what analysts call the Fortress Belt, a chain of fortified towns in Donetsk Oblast that has anchored Ukraine’s defense for years.
ISW notes that Ukrainian forces advanced between Novoliubivka and Katerynivka, with one Russian milblogger claiming Ukrainian troops had forded the river, though Ukrainian officials have not publicly confirmed that.
A slow-burn offensive
The Lyman push did not begin this month.
According to Euromaidan Press, the 3rd Army Corps opened its counterattack on May 22 and analysts outside the military only began piecing the operation together in late August, once the salient’s shape on the map had changed too much to hide.
Biletskyi said further phases of Operation Vivaldi remain undisclosed and urged the public to rely on official statements rather than speculation about how far the corps intends to push.
