Russia claims to have completed withdrawal from Kherson city

Russia announced on Friday that its forces had completed the withdrawal from the strategic Ukrainian city of Kherson, after Ukraine said it had reclaimed dozens of landmine-ridden settlements abandoned by the Russians.

The Russian Defense Ministry said it had finished withdrawing troops from the west bank of the Dnipro River, Russian state news agency TASS reported, just two days after Moscow announced the withdrawal.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine, but the announcement appears to contradict Ukrainian reports that thousands of Russian soldiers were still on the west side of the river.

Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told Reuters on Thursday that it would take at least a week for Russia to withdraw from Kherson. He estimated Russia still had 40,000 troops in the region, and said intelligence showed its forces remained in and around the city.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an evening speech that Ukrainian forces liberated 41 settlements as they pushed through the south, indicating one of the most rapid and dramatic changes in control in nearly nine months of war.

Reuters was unable to verify the extent of the Ukrainian advance or the status of Russia’s withdrawal.

Yaroslav Yanushevych, the Ukrainian governor of Kherson, posted a video on Telegram of soldiers from the 59th motorized brigade walking through the liberated village of Blahodatne, which is about 20 km outside Kherson, waving Ukrainian flags.

In the village of Posad Pokrovskiy, reached by Reuters about 12 km down the road, destroyed buildings and a wrecked truck stopped on the road to Kherson marked the old front line. A Ukrainian flag fluttered above a bus stop scarred by bullet holes.

Houses and buildings on both sides of the road were destroyed by artillery fire and broken branches hanging from tree trunks along the road. Ukrainian soldiers occupied checkpoints waving at passing Ukrainian military vehicles.

bridge collapse

If there are still Russian troops on the west bank of the Dnipro, Moscow must figure out how to transport them safely across a wide river under fire from the advancing Ukrainians.

The already damaged Antonivsky Bridge, the only road linking Kherson to the Russian-controlled east bank of the Dnipro River, collapsed, according to Ukrainian public broadcaster, citing local residents. This could make it difficult for Russian troops to escape and at the same time prevent Ukrainian troops from following them.

It is the third major Russian withdrawal from the war and the first to involve the abandonment of such a large occupied city. Moscow forces were expelled in March from the outskirts of the capital Kiev and expelled from the northeastern region of Kharkiv in September.

Kherson province is one of four that Russian President Vladimir Putin said he annexed from Ukraine in late September. The loss of the regional capital appears to end dreams expressed by some Russians of seizing the entire Ukrainian Black Sea coast, although Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the region’s annexation status remained unchanged.

Ukrainian military analyst Yuri Butusov said the town of Kherson is within range of Ukrainian artillery and the closest Ukrainian reconnaissance patrols are less than 18 km from the town.

“Ukrainian forces are trying to invade Kherson on the shoulders of the retreating enemy,” he said. “In the area of ​​the river crossings, where Russian troops are concentrated, shootings are taking place.”

land mines

Explosives experts were entering areas reclaimed from Russian forces to rid them of thousands of unexploded landmines they left behind, Butusov said.

In his speech, Zelensky said 170,000 square kilometers still need to be cleared, including places where there was still fighting and “where the enemy will add landmines before their withdrawal, as is the case now with Kherson.”

The Ukraine-appointed governor of the region, Yaroslav Yanushevych, said on Telegram that Russian troops had “taken away public equipment, damaged power lines and wanted to leave a trap behind them”.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, said on Thursday that Russia wanted to turn Kherson into a “city of death”, mining everything from apartments to sewers and planning to bomb the city across the river.

Russia denies deliberately targeting civilians, though its forces have pulverized Ukrainian cities in a conflict that has killed thousands and displaced millions.

The Russians fired missiles overnight at Mykolaiv, the closest Ukrainian town to Kherson, hitting a residential area and killing six people, Ukrainian officials said.

Rescue workers were scouring the rubble of an apartment block for survivors on Friday after the Russian attack, Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych said. A Reuters reporter in the city heard three impacts, the first at around 3 am local time.

The dead include a couple whose 16-year-old daughter survived because she was sleeping in another room in their apartment, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy chief of staff to the Ukrainian president, told Telegram.

Ukraine’s defense minister told Reuters he did not know when the war would end, but it was clear to him how it would end.

“It will be a victory for Ukraine. It will be when we are in a position to vacate or liberate all Ukrainian territories temporarily occupied up to the 1991 borders, including Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk,” Reznikov said.

Source: CNN Brasil

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