Ukraine Counterattacks In Strategically Important Kherson Region Are Gaining

Because of Kherson's economic and strategic importance, the advances there - with Ukrainian troops less than 10 miles from the city - could be the most crucial battle of this phase of the war. JL 

Thomas Grove reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Kyiv’s forces in southern Ukraine are fighting to extend one of their most successful counterattacks against Russia to chip away at Moscow’s presence in a strategically vital area along the Black Sea. Kyiv’s southern push seeks to free up the country’s southern ports that exported billions of dollars of wheat and disrupt the landbridge Moscow has sought to establish between Russia, Crimea and to the European Union’s doorstep.Kyiv’s forces now are less than 10 miles away from the city. Ukrainian forces have also worked behind enemy lines here. A Russian-appointed official in Kherson was killed in a bomb blast Friday.

Kyiv’s forces in southern Ukraine are fighting to extend one of their most successful counterattacks against Russia and push beyond this small, artillery-scarred village to chip away at Moscow’s presence in a strategically vital area along the Black Sea.

Even as Russian forces push Ukrainian units back in the eastern Donbas area, Kyiv has launched attacks in recent weeks and months with the aim of clawing back territory from Russian positions in the south.

Kyiv’s southern push seeks to draw Russian forces away from the east, free up the country’s southern ports that once exported billions of dollars of wheat and disrupt the landbridge Moscow has sought to establish between Russia, Crimea and onward to the European Union’s doorstep.

Russia was able to occupy a swath of southern Ukraine in the first days of the war in late February with little resistance, but Ukrainian forces started to push back at the end of March, making tactical counterattacks. Late last month, the Ukrainian military said they had managed to capture positions in three small towns, Andriyivka, Bilohirka and Krynytsia.

“The Russians were pushed back from their positions and they’ll never take them back,” said Maj. Nazar, a deputy commander of a battalion in Ukraine’s 63rd Brigade who gave only his first name. “The operation was massive and it took some time, but it gave us the result we needed.”

 

Ukraine has reeled from last week’s fall of Severodonetsk, a small town in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. For two months, Ukrainian forces held off the Russians, who scored an important symbolic win in a region that the Kremlin says is central to victory in Ukraine.

But in the south, the prospect of taking back the strategically vital city of Kherson has offered Ukrainian forces a glimmer of hope. Ukrainian officials say counter-offensives have pushed through a first line of Russian defense, said Ukrainian officials last week. President Volodymyr Zelensky heralded more victories in the region, days after he publicly awarded medals to officers serving on the southern front.

“In our south we are…gradually liberating Kherson,” he said in an address last week.

For Ukrainians, the most immediate task is to move beyond Pryshyb, the last village before the Russian-controlled town of Snihurivka, which would give Kyiv’s forces a second approach to Kherson, where an estimated more than 100,000 people are still living under Russian occupation, Ukrainian officials have said.

Kyiv’s forces now are less than 10 miles away from the city. Ukrainian forces have also worked behind enemy lines here. A Russian-appointed official in Kherson was killed in a bomb blast Friday, blamed on Kyiv. Other unexplained explosions and gunmen have wounded Russian soldiers and other pro-Russian officials in the region.

“Our boys and partisans do their work very well and they’re helping us a lot from behind enemy lines,” said Maj. Nazar.

Kherson was the first major city to fall in the Russian invasion and it remains a linchpin of Russia’s occupation of southern Ukraine. Kyiv’s taking of the city would give it for the first time since the start of the war full access to the Dniepr River, an important transit route for shipping, and would put Ukrainian troops at the doorstep of Crimea, which Mr. Zelensky has vowed to return to Ukraine after it was annexed by Moscow in 2014.

“I am sure the Ukrainian armed forces will raise the Ukrainian flag above Kherson very soon, just like it will over Simferopol, Sevastopol,” said Maj. Nazar, referring to Crimea’s two largest cities.

For Russia, the southern front is one of the few objective victories the Kremlin can claim and offers Moscow a way to extend its control beyond Kherson, take the Ukrainian-held city of Odessa and eventually link up with the Moscow-controlled statelet of Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova, with the Kremlin’s backing, in 1992. The move would give Russia a land bridge from its own territory to Moldova, a country that borders the EU.

Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month said he has been recapturing territory that historically belonged to Russia, comparing himself to Peter the Great.

“Russian leadership still holds the dream of a renewed campaign along Ukraine’s southern coast, seizing Odessa,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at CNA, a defense research center in Arlington, Virginia.“Even though the current Russian campaign is centered on the Donbas, the more significant territory that Russia has occupied thus far is Kherson,” Mr. Kofman said. “The city has greater implications for Ukraine’s economic viability, and will also prove the future focus of this war.”

Mr. Kofman added that Ukraine will need time to make a meaningful dent in Russian forces along the country’s southern flank.

With much of Kherson province occupied, Ukrainian forces have amassed in the Mykolaiv region just to the west. While counter attacks have been tactical so far, Ukrainian officials expect the weapons now coming in like the American howitzers and multiple rocket launch systems will give them the firepower they’ll need to make new meaningful gains on the southern front in the coming months.

“I hope that by July or August we can see a change in the battlefield,” said Vitaly Kim, governor of Mykolayiv province. “We need Kherson back.”

A Ukraine victory in the south would be the first step toward freeing up ports that have been blocked by the threat of Russian ships. Mr. Kim said Mykolaiv alone exported some 28 million tons of wheat last year, equivalent to some $10 billion worth of revenue coming into the region.

“We are the gate to the sea in Ukraine,” said Mr. Kim. “And now we can’t use our ports, and every sixth port is destroyed.”

In Pryshyb, Vladimir, 58, is one of the 14 residents who have remained in the village that still gets hit regularly by mortar shelling. “Our boys drove the Russians back,” he said. “But it’s still best to keep your women and children somewhere else.”