To Win In Northern Donetsk, The Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps Thought Small

A major breakthrough was off the table

3rd Army Corps photo

by DAVID AXE

Five months after launching Operation Vivaldi, a local counteroffensive in northern Donetsk Oblast, the Ukrainian 3rd Army Corps has eliminated the Russian bridgehead on its most important long-term objective: the Zherebets River, which flows south through eastern Ukraine and forms a natural defensive barrier east of the last big free cities in Donetsk: Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.

Attacking methodically under strict secrecy, the 3rd Army Corps has pushed back the Russian 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies and returned 176 sq km of northern Donetsk to Ukrainian control as of Sept. 30, according to Ukraine’s presidential office. Operation Vivaldi netted the Ukrainians hundreds of Russian prisoners and erased 18 months of Russian advances toward Sloviansk.

“Ukrainian forces have defeated the 2026 Russian campaign to seize Donetsk Oblast,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington concluded.

It’s a remarkable feat for the overall outgunned and outmanned Ukrainian forces. Equally remarkably, the Ukrainians deftly dodged several potentially fatal traps as they flanked the 20th and 25th CAAs. They didn’t get stuck in the Russians’ dense minefields. They didn’t expose themselves to devastating air attack. Perhaps most importantly, they didn’t set their sights on distant objectives. They thought small instead of big, stacking small gains on top of small gains until those wins amounted to a big victory.

A trio of U.S. Army officers—Col. Timothy Price, Capt. Patrick Visser, and Capt. Andrew Carter—described this achievement in academic terms. The corps’ defeat of the Russian bridgehead on the Zherebets “had little to do with maneuver warfare,” the officers wrote for the Modern War Institute at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.

In military parlance, “maneuver” generally involves heavy ground forces supported by air strikes and artillery decisively breaking through enemy lines and then rushing vehicles and troops into the panicking enemy’s unguarded rear area to quickly inflict maximal destruction and achieve maximal territorial gains.

That’s not what the 3rd Army Corps did in its five-month—and ongoing—counteroffensive. No, the Ukrainians “won through systematic, geometric interdiction and positional pressure,” Price, Visser, and Carter wrote. Put plainly, the corps carefully probed for tree-covered assault lanes toward key settlements, deployed unmanned ground vehicles to clear mines and explode the most important nearby Russian strongpoints and then rushed in armored vehicles carrying infantry.

Read the rest at Euromaidan Press.