Wes O'Donnell reports in Medium:
Bomber drones carrying ground robots is a very clever trick. (But) Ukraine's 3rd Corps electronic-warfare units disrupted more than 20,000 Russian drone missions during Operation Vivaldi. The EW that helped blind the Russians to the entire offensive is a much bigger deal than the robots. Bigger still: how Ukraine was able to coordinate a combined arms operation built for the future - a version of robotic warfare that is already working. After the jamming, drones, decoys, robot bombs, artillery, and deception had done their work, the infantry moved in. The 3rd Army Corps combined EW, aerial drones, ground robots, armored decoys, deception, artillery, and infantry in one operation while adapting the plan as it unfolded. None of these things needed to be revolutionary by themselves. The point was getting them to happen together.
During Operation Vivaldi, I have to admit, I went into the story thinking the robots were the story.
It was hard not to. Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps had heavy bomber drones carrying kamikaze ground vehicles more than 10 kilometers behind Russian lines, setting them down where nobody expected an attack, and then letting the little terminators go hunting.
The corps called it a “world first…” That’s catnip for me.
The hook, “Ukrainian murder bots delivered by bomber drone behind enemy lines” is the equivalent of tempting me to snort a line of coke with Ryan Reynolds in the back of an Uber on our way to meet Mark Carney; how could I refuse?!
Then I found a number buried in the 3rd Army Corps’ own reporting that changed the hook for me: Its electronic-warfare units say they disrupted more than 20,000 Russian drone missions during Operation Vivaldi.
That was the moment I realized I had been chasing the shiny object.
The bomber drone carrying a ground robot is a very clever trick. The electronic-warfare campaign that helped blind a Russian force to the entire offensive operation, whose entire defensive system increasingly depends on drones, is a much bigger deal.
Bigger still, how Ukraine was able to coordinate what is essentially a combined arms operation built for the future, without Russia getting the initiative.
Now we have something worth digging into.
What happened north of Lyman
Since late spring, Russian forces had been grinding forward in northern Donetsk, using the now-familiar pattern of sending small groups through gaps, tree lines, ruined villages, and weak seams in Ukrainian positions around Lyman.
The 3rd Army Corps, commanded by Andrii Biletskyi, responded with a phased counteroffensive it keeps calling “seasons,” which, I presume, is a deliberate nod to eighteenth-century Italian violin music.
The first season cleared roughly 75 square kilometers of Russian infiltrators.
The second pushed Ukrainian forces back into Shandryholove and Derylove and secured Drobysheve.
The third phase, announced on September 28, retook Ridkodub, Nove, and Katerynivka. The corps says the total recovered area across all three phases reached 176 square kilometers, with more than 250 Russian soldiers captured and roughly 5,000 Russian casualties inflicted.
Russian military bloggers have also acknowledged Ukrainian advances back toward the Zherebets River, and ISW described parts of the operation as a limited mechanized maneuver supported heavily by drones and ground robots.
“Limited” is a useful word here.
One hundred seventy-six square kilometers isn’t exactly a Thunder Run. In fact, it’s a relatively small patch of ground.
But it’s also one of the few places in 2026 where a Ukrainian formation has managed to steal the initiative from Russian forces that had spent most of the year setting the tempo.
That makes the method more interesting to me than the acreage.
The electronic-warfare crews went after Russia’s drone network.
Heavy bomber drones carried Hryphon strike robots, built and operated by the NC13 unit, deep into the rear.
During the third phase, the 3rd Assault Brigade took two old Soviet BTR armored personnel carriers, converted them into unmanned vehicles, stuffed them with explosives, and sent them toward Russian positions near Nove and Katerynivka.
According to the corps, Russian troops initially thought reinforcements were arriving.
Ahem, they were not, in fact, reinforcements.
The BTRs drove into fortified positions and detonated.
At the same time, Ukrainian forces ran a deception operation designed to pull Russian reserves toward a false axis of attack.
The corps also claims it destroyed drone launch sites belonging to Rubicon, one of Russia’s most capable drone formations, and forced Rubicon elements to withdraw from the sector.
Then, after the jamming, drones, decoys, robot bombs, artillery, and deception had done their work, the infantry moved in.
God loves the infantry…
The corps summarized its philosophy during the operation with one sentence:
“Infantry wins wars, but we protect our infantry, so robots go toward the enemy first.”
For most of military history, somebody had to go first, and that somebody was usually a kid with a rifle.
Sure, you can dress the task up with doctrine, reconnaissance, suppressive fires, smoke, artillery, and every other tool an army possesses, but eventually somebody has to move into the contested space and find out what is actually there.
What Ukraine is experimenting with now is changing who, or what, gets exposed first.
Mykhailo Fedorov announced his Army of Robots project last week, complete with humanoid machines and a goal of getting a robot to kill a Russian soldier within six months.
Maybe he will.
Ukraine has certainly earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to making bizarre technology useful faster than anyone expected.
Vivaldi points toward a different version of robotic warfare, though, and it is already working.
Nobody waited for a humanoid. They used bomber drones, purpose-built strike robots, old Soviet armored vehicles, electronic warfare, deception, infantry, and whatever else solved the problem in front of them.
There is an old World War II comparison that fits here, with the usual warning that historical analogies are useful right up until writers start abusing them.
France didn’t enter the war in 1940 without tanks. It had a lot of them, and some French tanks were extremely well armored. Germany’s advantage came from how its forces were organized and how quickly they could coordinate movement, aircraft, artillery, communications, and armored units.
The machine by itself did not explain the outcome.
That is roughly how I am starting to think about Ukraine’s ground robots…
Putting tracks under an explosive isn’t new… Countries have been finding creative ways to send explosives toward people for several thousand years.
The interesting part is that the 3rd Army Corps appears to have combined electronic warfare, aerial drones, ground robots, armored decoys, deception, artillery, and infantry in one operation while adapting the plan as it unfolded.
And I keep finding the same pattern across Ukrainian weapons programs.
The weapons keep changing, yet Ukraine keeps approaching the development process in roughly the same way.
When I wrote about the MICH 2000 drone in August, the part I remembered was not the specifications. It was the SBU’s Alpha unit telling the manufacturer to stop testing and start fighting before the engineers thought the drone was ready. The first combat mission in October 2024 launched three drones. One was lost, and the other two missed.
Alpha approved production anyway.
That sounds insane until you understand SBU’s logic.
The mission produced information the engineers couldn’t get from another month of controlled testing. They now knew what failed under actual battlefield conditions, so they went back and fixed it.
I ran into the same thing while working on the jet-powered Shahed story last month.
Eight Ukrainian manufacturers had told officials during the previous winter that they had workable high-speed interceptor drones.
Then combat testing happened.
Most of them discovered problems with guidance, maneuverability, endurance, and basic operational simplicity.
Again, that sounds like failure if you are thinking about procurement as a process where a finished product eventually arrives after years of testing.
Ukraine increasingly treats combat itself as part of the test program.
This is often expensive, and occasionally brutal, but the feedback loop is incredibly fast.
Build something.
Put it in combat.
Find out what sucks.
Fix it.
Try again.
Vivaldi looks like that same pattern operating at a much larger scale.
Somebody figured out that a heavy bomber drone could carry a ground robot behind Russian lines. Somebody else looked at two old BTRs and decided they could become unmanned explosives and decoys. Electronic-warfare teams worked on disrupting the Russian drone network. Another part of the corps built a false attack axis convincing enough to pull enemy reserves away from the real one.
None of these things needed to be revolutionary by themselves.
The point was getting them to happen together.
Back in the Air Force, I learned pretty quickly that a good sensor only gets you so far. The real work was keeping the entire air picture synchronized while aircraft moved, plans changed, radios failed, and the other side constantly trying to fuck with you.
You need the right track in the right place, the right fighter looking at the right contact, the tanker where somebody expects it to be, radios working, identification sorted out, and somebody noticing when reality stops matching the plan.
The other side, meanwhile, is constantly trying to wreck that picture.
That is what makes the 20,000 disrupted Russian drone missions so interesting.
If the 3rd Army Corps’ figure is broadly accurate, Ukraine added its own robots to the battlefield while simultaneously degrading Russia’s ability to understand what was happening, all while preserving enough of its own picture to coordinate the offensive.
Seen in that context, the ground robot becomes one piece of a much larger operation rather than the thing that explains Vivaldi by itself.
The corps was trying to conduct the orchestra while somebody was smashing the Russians’ sheet music.
It’s very likely that Russia will copy the hardware
Fedorov made this point last week:
Russia, he said, “has learned to rapidly copy and scale military technologies,” which means Ukraine has to begin the next technology cycle before Russia finishes copying the current one.
That’s obviously true.
Russia copied and industrialized the Iranian Shahed.
It has copied Ukrainian drone concepts.
It learns from Ukrainian interception tactics, electronic warfare, and battlefield modifications.
If the Hryphon works well enough, the Russians will probably build something like it. If air-delivered ground robots prove useful, Russian engineers will try that too. Russia can probably reproduce most of the hardware eventually. But I think recreating the command culture and organization that allowed all of those systems to be used together may take a bit longer.
As the US military is well aware, buying the equipment is the easy part. A military still has to build the training, command relationships, and culture that let junior leaders use that equipment without waiting for permission every time somebody has a strange idea.
That sort of initiative takes years to build into an organization, and it is much harder to import than a drone design.
By the way, in the Air Force, they had a program that allowed anyone, even the lowest ranking airman, to submit an idea to improve a technical process, and if that process was adopted by the entire Air Force, that airman would receive a bonus of $100,000.
Back in the 2010s, that was quite a bit of money. These days, it will hardly get you a carton of eggs from Costco.
Russia has improved dramatically during this war, and I wouldn’t underestimate its ability to adapt. Still, its military has repeatedly struggled with the sort of lower-level initiative that Ukrainian units often seem far more comfortable exercising.
That may be one of the more durable advantages Ukraine can preserve, though there are obvious limits to what that can accomplish.
Ukraine is still short on infantry, while Russia retains more people, more artillery, and enormous industrial capacity.
One successful corps-level operation north of Lyman does not alter the arithmetic of the entire war, and the 3rd Army Corps’ casualty claims still need independent confirmation. Russia will also study every second of publicly released Vivaldi footage looking for ways to break the next iteration of the operation, and there is every reason to assume that process has already started.
What I would watch now is the fourth “season,” assuming the corps keeps the naming convention.
Do we see the same mix of electronic warfare, bomber drones, ground robots, decoys, and infantry, or does the toolkit change?
Do Russian drone units return with better resistance to Ukrainian jamming?
Do the Ukrainians modify the ground robots, expand the deception effort, or change how the heavy bomber drones approach the front after Russia has had time to study them?
It would also make sense for Russian forces to start hunting those bomber platforms more aggressively before they ever get the chance to deliver a robot behind the lines.
If I were trying to figure out where the next version of this war is coming from, I’d watch the units that are allowed to try strange ideas, screw some of them up, learn quickly, and get the next version back into combat before the Russians have fully figured out what happened.
Right now, the 3rd Army Corps looks like one of those formations.
The airborne murder bots are simply the easiest part to talk about on YouTube.
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