The Russian Defense Minister on Wednesday ordered the withdrawal of Russian forces from the right bank of the Dnieper River in the Ukrainian region of Kherson, which includes the regional capital of the same name, the target of a vast Ukrainian counter-offensive.
“Proceed with the withdrawal of the soldiers,” Sergei Shoigu told television, after a proposal to that effect from the commander of Russian operations in Ukraine, General Sergei Surovikin, who acknowledged that it was a decision “not at all easy” to take.
“The maneuvers (withdrawal) of the soldiers will begin very quickly”, assured the general.
This withdrawal constitutes a new stinging setback for the Kremlin, Kherson having been the main Russian hold, after the conquest of the city in the first days of the offensive against Ukraine.
It is the only regional capital that Moscow has been able to claim conquest.
According to General Surovikin, Russia is going to reorganize its line on the other bank of the Dnieper, a natural barrier which flows south of the city of Kherson.
This decline comes on top of that of the Kharkiv region in September.
It comes just over a month after Vladimir Putin claimed the annexation of the Kherson region and three other Ukrainian regions. Moscow considers all of these areas as its sovereign territory.
The Kherson region is all the more strategic as its territory borders Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014.
General Surovikin before proposing the withdrawal, justified the need for the withdrawal by his desire to protect the lives of Russian soldiers, and accused the Ukrainian forces of bombing civilians.
Before proposing this withdrawal from Kherson, he had nevertheless asserted that his troops were successfully repelling the Ukrainian assaults, inflicting considerable losses on them.
“We are successfully resisting the enemy’s attempted assaults,” he said, claiming to have killed or injured 9,500 Ukrainian soldiers and maintaining that Russian losses were seven or eight times lower.
“We think first and foremost about the life of every Russian soldier,” he said.
For several weeks, Russia had been carrying out the “evacuation” of civilians from the right bank of the Dnieper, transfers of population qualified as “deportations” by kyiv.
According to General Sourovikine, some 115,000 people thus joined the left bank (to the east) of the river.
Before launching its ground offensive in the north of the Kherson region at the end of the summer, the Ukrainian forces had disabled key bridges for supplying the Russian forces, in particular thanks to the armaments delivered by the West. , especially American HIMARS.
Senior Russian occupation official killed
Earlier in the day, a senior Russian occupation official in Ukraine’s Kherson region, Kirill Stremoussov, was killed in a road accident, a Russian leader said.
“It is with great sadness that I report that Kirill Stremoussov was killed in the Kherson region […] in a traffic accident,” said Vladimir Saldo, head of the Russian occupation administration in the region.
In recent months, several Moscow-appointed executives have been targeted by attacks, sometimes fatal, attributed by the Kremlin to Ukrainian intelligence services operating behind enemy lines.
Since the conquest of the Kherson region in early March, Kirill Stremoussov had been one of the most zealous spokespersons for the Russian occupying forces. He spoke very often in the pro-Kremlin media and ardently supported the Russian military campaign in Ukraine.
In recent days, he has spoken regularly about the major evacuations underway in the Kherson region, in the face of the advance of Ukrainian troops who have been carrying out a counter-offensive there for weeks.
“He worked without a weapon. He worked with his words and his ability to express himself, ”welcomed Vladimir Saldo, specifying that Mr. Stremoussov was the father of five children.
“It is a huge tragedy, an irreparable loss”, also reacted on Telegram Sergei Aksionov, head of the pro-Russian occupation of the Ukrainian region of Crimea, annexed by Moscow.
According to several Russian media, Kirill Stremoussov was born in 1976 in the Ukrainian region of Donetsk (east), partly occupied by the Russian army.