The Kherson Battlefield: The Third Setback for Russia in the First Battle of Kyiv and the Kherson-Karkiv Region
While state media in Russia said that Ukrainian shelling had damaged the power lines, Yaroslav Yanushevych, the exiled Ukrainian head of the Kherson regional military administration, blamed Russian troops.
The town of Beryslav, less than 50 miles from Kherson city, was the site of mines placed by the Russian forces.
Ukrainian officials say that Russians, who have told civilians to evacuate, fear that those left behind could feed intelligence to the advancing Ukrainian forces or sabotage the Russian military. The governor of the region warned that any civilians still in the area could be treated negatively.
Some 250,000 people lived in the city before the war. It is not possible to know how accurate the guesses of Ukrainian activists are.
The loss of Kherson would be Russia’s third major setback of the war, following retreats from Kyiv, the capital, last spring, and from the Kharkiv region in the northeast in September. Kherson was the only provincial capital Russia had captured since invading in February, and it was a major link in Russia’s effort to control the southern coastline along the Black Sea.
Ukrainian forces swept into the key city of Kherson on Friday as Russian troops retreated to the east, delivering a major victory to Kyiv and marking one of the biggest setbacks for President Vladimir Putin since his invasion began.
The Kremlin said that despite the soldiers fleeing, they still considered Kherson to be a part of Russia.
Hours earlier, the Kremlin had issued a statement saying that the withdrawal of its forces across the Dnipro River was complete, though residents reported that there were still Russian soldiers in the city, some wearing civilian clothes.
“This is a subject of the Russian Federation,” Dmitry Peskov said during a regular briefing with journalists. “It has been legally fixed and defined. There can’t be any changes here.
The final hours of the Russian occupation in Kherson, Romania, revealed by residents of a Russian drone unit: “We do not know where they are going,” says Serhiy
The civilians who had survived the Russian occupation came to Kherson, hugging newly arrived Ukrainian soldiers and waving Ukrainian flags.
The commander of a Ukrainian drones unit said he had not seen a single Russian troops or equipment near the Kherson city.
He said the Russians left all the villages. “We looked at dozens of villages with our drones and didn’t see a single car. We do not know how they are leaving. They retreat quietly, at night.”
According to residents of Kherson who were reached by telephone on Friday morning, the final hours of the Russian occupation featured several explosions and were chaotic and confusing.
Serhiy, a retiree living in the city who asked that his last name not be published for security reasons, said in a series of text messages that conditions in the city had unraveled overnight.
“At night, a building burned in the very center, but it was not possible even to call the fire department,” he wrote. “There was no phone signal, no electricity, no heating and no water.”
On the destruction of bridges between Kherson and Dniepro by Russian troops, and on social media in the wake of Friday night’s Russian withdrawal
“They will be plotting provocations, false-flag operations in the city,” he said. “There is a lot of work ahead on demining and clearing the city.” Residents of Kherson city with whom CNN has spoken in recent weeks confirmed that many Russian soldiers were using civilian clothing.
The Ukrainian advance was held back for several days, and that the military equipment on the right bank of the Dnieper were being hit by fire.
On Friday evening, a video was posted on the website of the President of Ukraine, where a crowd of people were singing and waving flags.
Russia’s Defense Ministry announced earlier on Friday that its forces have completed their partial withdrawal from the Kherson region, after Moscow ordered the retreat Wednesday,
“Not a single piece of military equipment or weaponry was left behind on the right [west] bank,” the statement added. “All Russian servicemen have moved to the left bank of the Dnieper.”
The Russian Defence Ministry stated that despite attempts to disrupt the transfer of Russian troops, no losses among personnel, weapons, military equipment and materiel were allowed.
Ukraine has not reported any incoming fire from the east bank Friday but said a missile attack on the city of Mykolaiv, close to the border with Kherson, killed seven people early Friday.
Earlier Friday, the Ukrainian military’s southern operational command said Russian forces had been “urgently loading into boats that seem suitable for crossing and trying to escape” across the river.
The main conduit over the Dnipro in the Kherson region had been destroyed in images and video on social media Friday.
Alexander Kots, a reporter for the Russian pro-government tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda embedded with Russian forces, posted a video on his Telegram channel standing on the crossing, showing the entire center section of the bridge destroyed. “Behind me are the two collapsed spans of (the) bridge,” Kots said. They were likely blown up when the Russians withdrew from the eastern bank.
Now that Ukrainian forces have recaptured Kherson as far as the Dnipro river, the two sides face each other across the river over a distance of some 250 kilometers – from the area around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the edge of the Black Sea.
There is a video on social media which shows Ukrainian forces being welcomed by residents on the main highway in Tyahinka. The village is close to the hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper river at Nova Kakhovka.
Residents of the town of Bilozerka, on the western outskirts of Kherson city, raised a Ukrainian flag and ripped down Russian propaganda billboards on Friday, according to videos on social media geolocated by CNN.
The scenes of people greeting Ukrainian troops across the region were in sharp contrast to claims by Russian-appointed officials in Kherson six weeks ago that 87% of voters there supported integration into the Russian Federation, in a referendum widely condemned by the international community as a sham. Kherson was one of four Ukrainian regions illegally annexed by Russia in September.
“There are a lot of mines in the liberated territories and settlements,” Vitaliy Kim, head of Mykolaiv region military administration, said on Telegram. Don’t go there for the sake of it. There are casualties.
Other videos showed cars driving in the city center beeping horns as people on the sidewalks shouted “Glory to Ukraine!” In one, Ukrainian soldiers drove slowly past a crowd as people reached out to touch the soldiers through the open windows.
The relatively few residents who remain in Kherson have endured curfews, shortages of goods, partisan warfare and an intense campaign to force them to become Russian citizens and accept Moscow’s warped version of their culture and history.
The pain has not yet been focused on. Residents have told of friends being killed and children being illegally deported over the course of months. Evidence of abuses has surfaced when Russian pull out of the country.
The Battle of Kherson: A HIMARS Soldier and the First Day of World War II – An Old Friend’s Welcome Back in Kherson
An elderly neighbor greeted him with flowers, wrapped her arms around him and cried, according to a video that Kostenko provided NPR.
“We’ve missed you so much, you’ve been missing,” said the villager in a black watch cap, addressing the colonel and his soldiers who were accompanying him.
Kostenko then walked into the courtyard of the one-story house where he had grown up and where Russian troops had lived since March. He passed a vulgar sign they had left painted on a wall and then stepped inside.
“The windows were broken,” Kostenko recalled in a text message with NPR. His medals, his body armor, and most of the furniture were stolen. The Russians left behind a bed, some old wardrobe and a grenade, but nothing else.
“We pretty much denied those troops their supply chains,” says Stanislav Volovyk, a Ukrainian drone operator who helps guide the fire of howitzers. “We blew up the bridges. We got control of their supply routes with fire.
Various factors led to Ukraine’s routing of the Russians in this part of Kherson, but soldiers say the HIMARS had a big impact because they provided a range and level of accuracy the Ukrainians had never had before.
A reconnaissance soldier from Kherson who goes by the battle nickname Fox said he helped target a HIMAR that flew 24 miles before killing 20 Russian soldiers hiding in a bunker — a direct hit.
Fox was a seaman on a cargo ship in the Kherson port before the war. He fled the first day of the war, then joined the army and became part of a reconnaissance team. He returned to his neighborhood last weekend and received a hero’s welcome. His neighbors had no idea he’d become a soldier.
“They were completely surprised,” said Fox, who arrived in full battle gear. “I didn’t tell them I had joined the army because it could’ve caused them problems as they were in Russian-occupied territory.”
“I didn’t remember such a happy moment, such a light moment in my life as today,” Fox said, after arriving back in Kherson city.
Fox pointed out that before they left, the Russians sabotaged the city’s water, electrical and mobile communications systems — the latter is in the process of being restored, according to the local military administration.
Although Russians retreated across the Dnieper River to avoid being massacred, they were still able to continue the fight in the easy area of the city.