Russia announced on Wednesday (9) that it ordered the withdrawal of its military forces from Kherson, the capital of the homonymous province that had been annexed by the government of Vladimir Putin on September 30.
It is one of Moscow’s most symbolic defeats in its nearly nine-month military campaign against its neighbour. Kherson had been conquered on March 2, right at the beginning of the war, and was the most important city hitherto occupied by the Russians.
The ease of withdrawal, humiliating as it may be, has left the flea behind in Kiev’s ears. “Until we see the Ukrainian flag over Kherson, there is no point in talking about a military withdrawal,” presidential adviser Mikhailo Podoliak said.
With the measure, Moscow consolidates what it had telegraphed in previous weeks, when it removed the occupation administration from the city and promoted the evacuation of about 100,000 civilians to the east bank of the Dnieper River, next to the city, thus creating a new border. to the region that Putin had announced was Russian “forever”.
The admission of the city’s inability to defend itself, even due to the difficulties of supplying Russian forces in the face of the Ukrainian military escalation in that direction, was made in a televised event with Defense Minister Sergei Choigu and the new invasion commander, General Sergei Surovikin. .
The terms were unusually frank. “Kherson cannot be fully supplied. Having comprehensively studied the current situation, we propose to make the defense from the left bank of the Dnieper River,” Surovikin said in front of a map that was blurred in the broadcast.
“I understand that it is a very difficult decision, but at the same time we are going to preserve the most important thing: the lives of our soldiers and, in general, the combat effectiveness of the troops”, he said, adding: “It would be futile to keep them in a limited area on the right margin”.
In a choreographed way, Choigu then says he agrees with the decision. “For us, the lives and health of Russian soldiers are priorities, and we have to take into account the threats to the civilian population,” said the minister, increasingly weakened in his post.
It is unknown how many inhabitants were left behind, but the city had nearly 300,000 residents before the war. With the withdrawal, the Russians do what military analysts have been suggesting in recent weeks: they have reinforced their line of defense along the Dnieper, itself a formidable natural barrier against attack.
“It’s a dark page in the history of the Russian Army,” said the notorious Russian military blog War Gonzo on its Telegram channel without mincing words. On Wednesday, number 2 of the occupation government in Kherson, Kirill Stremousov, also died in what was described as a car accident.
The Russian withdrawal had raised an alarm among Ukrainians about the risk of Putin using a low-powered tactical nuclear weapon against Kiev’s troops in the region. The fact that Kherson, the capital, is still inhabited, seems to make this hypothesis difficult.
With the withdrawal, Moscow will theoretically be better able to defend the rest of Kherson. About 80,000 of the 320,000 reservists called up to bolster the war effort were deployed to the southern and eastern areas of Ukraine.
Thus, only Lugansk appears almost entirely under Russian control among the four areas annexed by Putin: Donetsk, also in the east, and Zaporijia, neighboring Kherson in the south, have parts in Ukrainian hands.
Indeed, the Russian never established the boundaries of the areas he wished to absorb. This suggests space for peace negotiations, a topic that has emerged with force in recent days.
The United States is pressing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to agree to sit at the table with Putin’s, according to reports that have not been denied by Washington. Kiev hissed, and the same Podoliak said that his country would fight even if it took “a stab in the back” from its allies.
That is why the advisor is cautious about withdrawing from a region that analysts such as Michael Kofman, from the American think-tank CNA, said was indefensible in the medium term. Previously, Russia’s biggest defeats had been the failure to capture Kiev early in the war and the withdrawal from Kharkiv, an area in the north-east of the country.
The political ballet continues: according to the American agency Bloomberg, Putin is not expected to go to the G20 meeting in Bali next week. The summit will be attended by the American Joe Biden and the Chinese Xi Jinping, who are in the phase of a rough rapprochement, and there was an expectation that the delegations would talk to each other and to the Russian one – China is the Kremlin’s biggest ally.
With the new situation on the ground in Ukraine, it remains to be seen whether the Kremlin’s next step will be a resurgence of its tough campaign against the Ukrainian energy system on the eve of winter or some diplomatic opening.
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