Operation Vivaldi and a tank push at Kharkiv headline Philip Ingram's Battle Plans
The former intelligence officer's weekly map session drew more than 380,000 views in eleven hours, and one viewer offered a theory about a crashed Russian bomber.
The Sun
Story of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 578,680 views a day, 12 times a normal first day on this channel (46,306).
EXPOSED: Ukraine tanks strike in Kharkiv as Russia loses 2,000 troops in 24 hours | Battle Plans
Philip Ingram MBE, the former intelligence officer who hosts The Sun's weekly Battle Plans Exposed series, opened his latest episode with a crashed Russian Tu-95 bomber. He then spent the next twenty minutes on the ground war in Ukraine. The chapters move from the high-tech end of the front, where amphibious supply robots and drone net launchers appear, to the low-tech one: infantry clearing infiltrators around Lyman.
The centerpiece is what the description calls Operation Vivaldi, a Ukrainian push in the Lyman sector. The episode credits it with more than 175 square kilometers retaken and Russian troops pinned against river barriers. Ingram also follows a tank counter-attack near Kharkiv, billed as breaking a Russian "cauldron." A later chapter covers the description's claim that Russian commanders have been sending AI-generated reports and old footage up the chain to hide their losses.
The episode was online for only eleven hours before it reached well past 380,000 views, more than twelve times the start of a usual Sun video. Its comment section had already passed a usual full first day's worth more than twice over. Much of it thanks Ingram by name. One popular comment says the weekly gaps make the progress visible in a way daily clips do not. The bomber crash drew the most technical thread: viewers asked whether three engines failing together could point to bad fuel.
The Sun's other big upload that day was a short on Ukrainian drones hitting the Volodarskaya fuel hub that supplies Moscow, and it came close behind. This is the second Battle Plans episode in a little over a week to start this far ahead of the rest of the channel's output.
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- Channel
- The Sun
- Subscribers
- 6,540,000
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 10,983,019
- Channel views, pace per day
- 1,217,368 (on a normal day: 1,439,074)
- Video published
- October 6, 2026
- Video views so far
- 380,767 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 578,680
The numbers
Here are the episode's views, likes and comments, beside the channel's usual first day.
💡 Test your knowledge
Kharkiv, where the episode's tank counter-attack takes place, is Ukraine's second-largest city. Which city is the largest?
Kyiv, the capital, is Ukraine's largest city, and Kharkiv ranks second.
