Operation Vivaldi: How Ukraine’s Latest Counteroffensive Changed the War

Over the last four months, most of the world knew nothing of the secretive Ukrainian counteroffensive known as Vivaldi. But if you watched Ukraine really, really closely over the last several months, you might have seen the shadows that Vivaldi left behind. Closely guarded by Ukrainian intelligence and hidden under the fog of war, Operation Vivaldi has been churning along since May. Its effects were unclear. any territorial changes weren't made public. And every so often, well-connected experts in the open source intelligence world would say some version of the same thing. There's something going on near Lyman, but we aren't supposed to talk about [music] it. Indeed, Ukraine has taken the last four months to create a masterwork. The kind of performance that its operations namesake, the 18th century composer Valdi, would have had to stand on his feet and applaud. Northeast of the critical fortress city of Svankansk where Russian victory would have meant catastrophe for Kiev, Ukrainian forces have managed to take back hundreds of square kilometers of territory. The full extent of the gains is still uncertain even today [music] because across these last few months, the Russians haven't been able to stop and catch their breath even once. Operation Vivaldi is finally public knowledge. But the battle continues today. And in hindsight, it may be remembered as a moment when the entire Ukraine war was shifted on its axis. a virtuoso performance. Now, to understand why Operation Vivaldi was so important, we've got to start with a few words about a city roughly 50 km south, Costantka. Like the cities of Povsk or Bakmut earlier in this war, Costantine is one of those places that was of little consequence before the war. It was known as the center of Ukraine's glass industry, for whatever that may be worth. But it was just another small ordinary city in a nation full of them. In 2026, however, Costantine has become the war's primary killing field, a bombed out memory of a city where Russian soldiers have been infiltrating for months and Ukrainian soldiers have been pushed back further and further. But unlike Brosk or Bakmut, Constantin is the southern anchor of Ukraine's absolutely vital fortress belt, a line of four heavily fortified cities where Ukraine has resolved a hold out. Although Costantina is all but certain to fall eventually, Ukraine has made Russia fight for the city for almost a year, wasting untold lives in the process.