The ukrainian troops they are unleashing a renewed counteroffensive in southern Kherson region at the time of apparent greatest weakness for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his generals following last week’s territorial setbacks in the northeast. After a relative pause in the offensive operations in the south, the kyiv forces returned to attack this Monday. According to Russian military bloggers, there was significant troop movement on Monday morning along the northern stretch of the vast western bank of the Dnieper River. The Ukrainian goal, according to well-known military blogger Rybar, is to drive south to the town of Dudchany and encircle the Russian troops, making a swath of their defenses untenable. It would be a repeat of the ring Ukrainian soldiers launched last week around Liman, a key logistics city in the far north of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.
The Russian Ministry of Defense admitted on Monday that his forces withdrew after “units of superior tanks could penetrate deep in our defenses” near Zolota Balka and Oleksandrivka. The ministry reported no further withdrawals around Liman, saying only that it had attacked Ukrainian forces there.
Within the framework of this exchange of information, the president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, who is always cautious when it comes to bragging about progress in the areas recovered from Russian control, acknowledged that two villages in the area had been recovered. “The successes of our soldiers are not limited to Liman,” Zelensky said in his daily video address to the nation on Sunday. “This, you know, is the trend.”
nuclear threat
The result of these troop movements adds confusion to the situation after the annexation of Ukrainian areas to Russia. Putin annexed four Ukrainian provinces last month, but the struggles of his forces on the ground are raising questions about the sustainability of those areas theoretically added to Russia. It is not clear whether the lost areas are Russian or not, or how the limits of Russian law are established. Furthermore, this new weakness on the battlefield opens the door to an escalation of the conflict, with the incorporation of either new troops or new weapons into the conflict. The nuclear threat is revitalized.
Moscow acknowledged on Monday that it has not yet set the borders of two of the four regions that Putin claimed last week as his own. The geostrategic interest is above all to maintain a corridor to the Black Sea, after reaching Crimea. “As for Kherson and Zaporizhia, we will continue to consult with the people who live in those regions,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said in a conference call. He declined to explain how that could happen or whether the new borders would be established in separate laws. “I’ve said all I can say about that,” he said when pressed by reporters for more information.
Territories without control
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“Russia has a problem: it does not fully control these territories,” said Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Moscow Center for Political Technologies. “But you can’t move border posts every day, otherwise Russia wouldn’t have fixed borders on the map.”
The Kherson offensive began in late August and has progressed more slowly than in the Kharkov provinces, and now in Donetsk and Lugans. That’s in part because the Kherson attack was announced well in advance, prompting Russia to move reinforcements into the area from the north and east. However, Russian forces west of the Dnieper remain in a precarious position, because the river, in parts a mile wide, cuts them off from their lines of supply and additional reinforcement. Ukraine has used US-supplied HIMARS multiple rocket launch systems to destroy bridges across the river and attack pontoon and ferry crossings. The Ukrainian Army has asked the US for missiles with a longer range, but the US fears that they could be used to be launched into Russian territory, which would further aggravate the conflict. Ukraine is under increasing pressure to recapture territory before winter sets in, and newly mobilized Russian troops make progress more difficult and costly.