After the sinking of the northern front, the hope of a symbolic capture at the other end of the country. On the southern front, the Ukrainian soldiers, boosted by their recent successes, want to reach the city of Kherson for Christmas.
A few hundred meters away, three Russian BM-27 Ouragan rocket launchers, as massive as they are destructive, are no more than steel skeletons. The trees under which the “Hurricanes” were vainly hidden burned down. A smell of fire still hangs in the air, a week after their destruction. In the tubes of one of the BM-27, a gigantic eight-wheeled machine put into service under the Soviet Union, rockets did not explode.
“They were reloading when we hit them,” rejoices a Ukrainian soldier. In another of these devices, a food chest still offers canned “Baltic fish”. A frying pan escaped the flames.
The Russians abandoned equipment in their flight
A little further on, the carcass of a truck, whose Russian license plate was thrown into the grass, remains. But its cargo, placed right next to it, is intact: a dozen Hurricane rockets, whose 280 kg are wreaking havoc, and which are missing from the Ukrainian army. “They will soon be loaded and transported to ours,” says the soldier.
Near this precious “trophy” snatched from the Russians, empty powder barrels lie pell-mell. Others, full, have already been brought back to units serving nearby.
The Russians say they staged their withdrawal. But when we organize his departure, we don’t leave his weapons, his underpants or his pillows”, mocks “Doc”, a rescuer.
“The enemy is in low spirits and is fleeing. The second army in the world is afraid of the 22nd”, breastplate “Kappa” (mouth guard), commander of an artillery unit. “We should still increase our speed, rather than reduce it, to push them across the river,” the Ukrainians having advanced west of the Dnieper, when the Russians still firmly control its eastern part, he continues.
A new line of defense to stem the Ukrainian assaults
The maneuver does not seem obvious, however, while the positions have frozen in recent days. The Moscow troops regrouped behind a new defensive line, which they strongly reinforced, and even concreted. Many Russian soldiers were also brought in as reinforcements.
If the Ukrainians swept their enemy in the north of the Kherson region at the beginning of October, it was in particular because they were “in numerical superiority”, the Russian military density being very low in these agrarian plains punctuated by a few villages, explains George Barros .
But behind the new front, the Russian lines “will tighten”, which will facilitate their defense and complicate the Ukrainian advance, adds the analyst from the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
Placing “a sixth of the total Russian forces”, or even more, “and among the best”, in the south-west of the Kherson region is “extremely dangerous”, observes French military expert Michel Goya.
The crucial problem of supplies
“The position is paradoxically solid but also fragile, because it can explode under pressure”, which according to him would constitute “a disaster perhaps decisive for the fate of the Russian expeditionary force in Ukraine”.
Natalia Goumenyuk, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian army in the south, bets that the soldiers in Moscow are “only looking to surrender”, but also that “their logistics routes have been significantly damaged”.
For months, the kyiv forces have been bombarding enemy ammunition warehouses, but also the infrastructures allowing Moscow to supply its troops. The Crimean bridge, which, according to Natalia Goumenyuk, provided “75% of the supply [militaire] of the Kherson region” was thus partially destroyed on Saturday during an attack not claimed by kyiv.
“The Russians have already lost the war”
“The Russians don’t have any supply problems yet,” sweeps away the French expert Pierre Grasser. If the situation was “critical”, they would proceed to “many more airborne deliveries, he judges. Kherson is the long-term goal, but it cannot be reached before winter, winter included”.
What will become of Kherson next? Storming the city would mean heavy casualties on both sides, and intense destruction.
If Pierre Grasser imagines a “barter” between kyiv and Moscow, the first abandoning their claims to the Donbass in the spring in exchange for a city of Kherson returned “in good condition”, George Barros only conceives of a total Ukrainian victory. “The Russians have already lost the war,” he said.