The lesson for NATO is not to abandon armored warfare, but to rethink how it is conducted. That is the argument Ukrainian military observer Oleksandr Kovalenko draws from Operation Vivaldi, the Third Army Corps’ counteroffensive near Lyman, which he says proves tanks still have a place on a battlefield many had already written them off.
Vivaldi is Ukraine's counteroffensive aimed at disrupting Russian forces' plans to encircle the fortress-belt cities in Donetsk Oblast from the north and south that protect the region from the entire occupation. Among them are Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka. These cities have helped hold back Russian forces since 2014.
Kovalenko's claim runs against a view that hardened as drones came to dominate the front: that massed armor is finished, kept alive only by habit.
It matters because NATO’s own recent exercises have fed that view, with small Ukrainian drone teams beating Alliance armor again and again. Kovalenko says the Alliance now risks taking the wrong lesson from its own defeats.
What NATO’s war games got wrong about the tank
Kovalenko points to two drills. At Estonia’s Hedgehog exercises in May 2025, Ukrainian FPV-drone units ran rings around NATO troops, who he says lost vehicles by the dozen and failed one task after another.
In one episode, Ukrainian pilots notionally knocked out a large combat group built around a British brigade.
A year later, during the Aurora 26 exercises on the Swedish island of Gotland, the pattern repeated, and the NATO units, in his telling, in a sense lost control of the island.
The skeptics’ case leaned on exactly these results, Kovalenko says, with many concluding that the Alliance faltered in part because it still fielded large amounts of armor, a tool they believe has lost its relevance in modern warfare.
How the Third Army Corps made armor move again
Vivaldi is the counterexample, Kovalenko argues. During it, the Third Army Corps carried out two mechanized assaults that pushed into the Russian rear, not armor used the old way.
A similar idea appeared in the 2024 Kursk operation, he notes, paired there with intense electronic warfare; Vivaldi widened the package, with deeper reconnaissance and dedicated work against the enemy’s own strike systems.
The vehicles carried extra passive and active protection, and crews trained for the task, and Ukrainian forces moved to suppress Russian surveillance and communications.
None of these ingredients is new on its own, he says. What mattered was adapting the working formulas to attack a heavily outnumbered enemy.
“Ukrainian forces are showing that even what seems at first glance to be a battlefield anachronism can be adapted and given a new function,” Kovalenko says.
The corps’ commander made the same point about armor specifically.
“These operations prove that maneuver by armor remains possible on a battlefield increasingly dominated by reconnaissance drones, loitering munitions and precision weapons,” Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, who leads the Third Army Corps, said in a comment Kovalenko cites.
His own conclusion is a warning: NATO armies are stuck near Cold War templates for attack and defense, and unless they study and absorb what Vivaldi did, the Alliance could one day find itself routed not in an exercise but on a real battlefield.
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