In the aftermath of Kherson’s recapture by kyiv, the time was Saturday for demining, repairing infrastructure and documenting “crimes” attributable to Moscow in the major southern city, the loss of which constitutes a major setback for the Kremlin.
For kyiv, the West is on the road to a “joint victory” over Russia after the reconquest of Kherson, where the Ukrainian national anthem sounded on Friday after the withdrawal of Russian troops.
Kherson, annexed at the end of September by Moscow, had been the first major city to fall after the Russian invasion launched at the end of February.
On images broadcast by the armed forces of kyiv, Ukrainians dance in a circle, around a fire, to the rhythm of “Chervona Kalyna”, a patriotic song.
The head of the Ukrainian military administration of the Kherson region, Yaroslav Yanouchevych, published several videos on Saturday where he said he was “very happy to be here (in Kherson) today, at this historic moment”. He said everything was being done to “get back to normal life”.
Behind him, people massed in the main square celebrate the return of Ukrainian forces to the city.
Not far away, in the village of Pravdyné, returning residents hug their neighbors. Some can’t hold back their tears.
“We understood that the Russians had left because our soldiers were driving by. I had tears of happiness, that Ukraine was finally liberated,” Svitlana Galak, a 43-year-old woman who lost her 15-year-old daughter in a bombardment on the village, told AFP.
Her husband, Viktor (44), no longer wants to hear about the Russians: “We don’t want them to come back and shoot everyone. Let us live as before. We lived in bad conditions but it was Ukraine”.
“Stabilisation measures”
“We are all overjoyed,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday evening, who also reported significant destruction in the region. “Before fleeing Kherson, the occupants destroyed all essential infrastructure – communication, water supply, heating, electricity”, he added, adding that 2,000 explosive devices had been neutralized.
According to him, the Ukrainian armed forces have regained control of nearly 60 localities in the Kherson region.
The army is applying “stabilization measures” there, its staff said on Saturday evening, adding that “representatives of the military administration of the oblast have returned to Kherson and have started working there”.
After eight months of occupation by Russian forces, national television programs are once again visible in Kherson. And the region’s energy supplier said it was working to restore electricity supplies.
Some 200 police have also been deployed to Kherson to erect roadblocks and document “the crimes of the Russian occupiers”, National Police Chief Igor Klymenko said in a statement.
He also alerted residents of the town to the presence of explosive devices left behind by Russian forces, urging them to “move with caution”. According to Mr. Klymenko, a policeman was injured during a demining operation in a building in Kherson.
A woman and two children were injured in an explosion near their car in the village of Mylove, Kherson region, according to police, who also reported Russian shelling on Berislav district.
” On the right track “
“Only together can we prevail and drive Russia out of Ukraine. We are on the right track,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kouleba said on Saturday during a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines of a Southeast Asia summit in Phnom. Penh.
The Russian withdrawal from Kherson marks “a new strategic failure” on the part of Moscow, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace said in a statement on Saturday.
Jake Sullivan, national security adviser to US President Joe Biden, described the recapture of the city by the kyiv army as an “extraordinary victory”, “quite remarkable”.
This Russian withdrawal is the third on a scale since the beginning of the invasion on February 24, Russia having had to give up in the spring to take kyiv in the face of fierce resistance from the Ukrainians, before being driven out of almost all of the Kharkiv region (northeast) in September.
On Friday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that it had completed “the redeployment” of its units from the right (western) bank of the Dnieper, on which Kherson is located, to the left bank, ensuring that it had not suffered any loss or abandoned of military equipment.
According to Moscow, “more than 30,000” Russian soldiers and “nearly 5,000 units of armaments and military vehicles have been withdrawn” from the western bank of the Dnieper.
On Saturday evening, it was on the eastern bank of the river, in the Kakhovka district, that an evacuation order was issued by the pro-Russian local authorities for their employees, to the Russian region of Krasnodar, close to Crimea.
“Today, the administration is the number one target of terrorist attacks by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. That is why, by order of the government of the Kherson region, as an organ of power, we are moving to a safer territory, from where we will govern the area, ”wrote on Telegram this pro-Russian administration, which calls also the “residents” to be evacuated.
The staff of the Ukrainian army advanced for its part on Saturday evening that the Russian forces were currently in the process of “reinforcing the fortification equipment of the defensive lines on the left bank of the Dnieper”.
This withdrawal is all snub, Russian President Vladimir Putin having claimed at the end of September the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, including that of Kherson.
On Saturday, he spoke with his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi, at a time when Tehran appears to be a major ally of Moscow in its intervention in Ukraine. The two leaders placed “emphasis on intensifying cooperation in the political, economic and trade spheres”, the Kremlin said.
For his part, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has raised the threat of nuclear weapons. “For reasons that are obvious to all reasonable people, Russia has not yet made use of its full arsenal of possible means of destruction,” he wrote on Telegram, adding: “There is a time for everything”.