Ukrainian infantry encircled and retook the village of Kolodiazi north of Lyman without getting drawn into street fighting, while a drone battalion kept the sky above them shut, the battalion’s chief of staff told Suspilne on 18 October. The village fell during the fourth and final phase of Operation Vivaldi, Ukraine’s counteroffensive in northern Donetsk Oblast.
For years now, Russia has aimed to seize Lyman and cross the Siverskyi Donets River. It needs this area to encircle Ukraine’s fortress belt of Donetsk Oblast cities from the northwest, ISW assesses. Vivaldi’s four phases retook 277 km² and 16 settlements on that approach, and a veteran of the operation has said Ukraine’s assault troops suffered more than ten times fewer casualties than Russian forces doing it.
The 60th Mechanized Brigade fought in all four phases of Vivaldi and took Kolodiazi in the last one, said the chief of staff of the brigade’s Fatum unmanned systems battalion, callsign Krash.
“Our task, as an unmanned systems battalion, was to escort and ‘close’ the air in front of our infantry to make it impossible for the enemy to hit it. To suppress all the firing assets possible,” he said.
The brigade’s 3rd Mechanized Battalion, the main striking force, encircled Kolodiazi and retook it without getting drawn into street fighting, Krash said. The 1st Mechanized Battalion kept Russian reinforcements out of the area, while drone crews suppressed artillery, hit supply runs, and worked against Russian drone operators.
The drone battalion killed or wounded about 500 Russian troops during the fourth phase and struck Russian armored vehicles, trucks, and motorbikes, its chief of staff said.
“More than two hundred pieces of various equipment: Grad and Uragan multiple rocket launchers, various armored vehicles, tanks, armored combat vehicles. Most of all motorbikes and quad bikes, there the count runs into the hundreds. This is our enemy’s main logistics tool,” he said.
The villages retaken in northern Donetsk Oblast are nearly empty of civilians, Krash said.
“It’s very typical for de-occupied settlements: these are ghost towns. You can see right away where the occupier stepped. All the settlements are under the control of the Third Army Corps, our forces stand there and prevent enemy infiltration. But civilian life in these towns is either absent or very scarce,” he said.
Third Army Corps commander Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi reported Kolodiazi’s liberation, along with Zelena Dolyna and Lypove, when he summed up Vivaldi’s fourth phase, which secured 101 km².
Ukrainian forces are advancing east of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, and even Russian milbloggers now acknowledge it, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said on 8 October. The gains may follow months of groundwork like the one that preceded Operation Vivaldi near Lyman, which Ukraine says returned 176 km² to its control. Russian commentators are already doubting that Moscow can reach the two cities.
Russia's years-long push on the Fortress Belt, the chain of cities anchoring Ukraine's defense in Donetsk Oblast, has been stalling since Vivaldi began. Unable to take those cities, Russia keeps hitting them from the air. On 8 October, a Russian bomb killed 30 people on two buses in Kramatorsk.
Russian milbloggers said Ukrainian forces liberated Ozerne and advanced east of Pyskunivka toward Kryva Luka, ISW reported. They also acknowledged that Ukrainian troops drove Russian forces out of Pyskunivka. Ukrainians are now counterattacking toward Kryva Luka from the west and northwest, from across the river.
ISW called the repeated Russian claims of a river crossing notable, because the Siverskyi Donets is a significant natural obstacle. Kryva Luka is a dominant height just south of the river. From there, Ukraine could launch further counterattacks. Ukrainian forces appear to have pushed Russian troops off both banks in this area, ISW assessed.
After Vivaldi cleared ground near Lyman in September, Russia shifted its push south toward Mykolaivka and Sloviansk. Russian forces likely see Mykolaivka, just east of Sloviansk, as a primary objective, ISW said. Its heights would favor an offensive on the city. Ukrainian pushes northeast and southeast of the town now deny Russia that terrain.
East of Kramatorsk, milbloggers claimed Ukrainians liberated Malynivka and advanced between Fedorivka Druha and Holubivka. They also reported gains into southern Minkivka and near Fedorivka. The lines remain tangled. Geolocated footage shows Ukrainian forces striking a Russian position in central Tykhonivka after what ISW assesses was a Russian infiltration.
ISW said the counterattacks may point to a broader Ukrainian goal: pushing Russian forces east, away from the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk area and toward the Siverskyi Donets–Donbas Canal.
The counterattacks have run for weeks. On 29 September, Ukrainian military observer Kostiantyn Mashovets reported them in the same areas, saying Russia's 3rd Combined Arms Army had failed to make significant gains. ISW assesses that the attacks build on months of shaping meant to wear down Russia's offensive capacity.
Before Vivaldi, Ukrainian forces targeted Russian drone operators, gaining drone superiority before the counteroffensive. They used the same approach ahead of their Oleksandrivka counterattacks in early 2026.
Moscow appears to see the pattern. A Ukrainian military official said on 7 October that Russia is moving drone units and Spetsnaz from quieter sectors to the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk direction. Ukraine also reorganized its command in and around Donetsk Oblast in early September, which may be blunting Russian attacks from the east, ISW said.
One Russian milblogger called an advance toward the Sloviansk–Kramatorsk area a "distant" prospect, ISW reported. A Russian offensive from Siversk toward Sloviansk may be "doomed" to failure or heavy losses unless Russia retakes the forests south of Lyman, he said.
The counterattacks east of the two cities appear to support Vivaldi, ISW assessed. Together with Russia's defeat north of the river, they could disrupt Russia's offensive toward Sloviansk from the east entirely.
If Ukraine holds Kryva Luka and keeps Russia off the Mykolaivka heights, Moscow's pincer on Sloviansk and Kramatorsk loses the ground it was built on.
"Skipper", an FPV company commander in Ukraine's 413th Raid Unmanned Systems Regiment, has described destroying a Russian UR-77 mine-clearing vehicle with drones during the 2023 counteroffensive as the strike he is proudest of, according to Army TV.
The UR-77, nicknamed "Zmiy Horynych" after a fire-breathing serpent of Slavic folklore, carries a rocket-fired line charge to blow paths through minefields, as per Militarnyi. Each charge carries more than two tons of explosives, which is why a cheap FPV hit can trigger a blast far larger than the drone itself.
"It exploded so hard that I thought it was a small nuclear blast. There are more than two tons of plastic explosive inside, and when it went off after the second hit, it was something unbelievable," Skipper says.
Skipper joined the army at the start of the full-scale invasion and moved from infantry and aerial reconnaissance to commanding an FPV unit. His regiment now operates on the Zaporizhzhia front, where FPV drones conduct combat missions.
In civilian life, Skipper was a sailing instructor, and he says the sport partly helps in military work, especially his knowledge of navigation and radio communication. He is convinced that a technological edge can be one of the keys to victory.
He counts the UR-77 strike among his unit's early work, from a time when few Ukrainian units were using FPV drones at all, he says. The hit came during hard fighting in the counteroffensive, when his crews were among the first to work the FPV niche.
The UR-77 was built in the 1970s for a different war, one of fast tank thrusts that needed enemy minefields cleared quickly. Its base rides on the chassis of the 2S1 Gvozdika self-propelled howitzer, and its charge can cut a lane six meters wide, with some anti-personnel mines detonated across a band up to 15 meters wide.
Modern combat changed that role. The classic mine-clearing use remains, but Russia now more often turns these machines on Ukrainian fortifications, using the line charge to flatten defenses rather than open a path.
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