Ukraine said it had launched a counteroffensive against Russian forces near the city of Kherson, in a move that has forced the Russian military to shift resources to the southern part of the country, according to a senior White House official.
A senior Ukrainian government adviser confirmed that Kyiv had launched a major operation aimed at recapturing the strategically important southern city, which was captured by Russian forces early in the war.
“The next phase of the counteroffensive is beginning,” the adviser said. “It started with massive attacks on Russian military infrastructure and logistics.”
The long-awaited attack on Russian forces is aimed at recapturing territory Moscow seized in the first weeks of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, when troops moved south from the Crimean peninsula.
Over the past two months, Ukraine has carried out dozens of strikes on Russian supply lines and infrastructure that support Moscow’s occupation of the region.
Crucial to this effort is Ukraine’s deployment of Western weaponry, such as US-made Himars, truck-mounted guided missile launchers that have a strike range of up to 80 km. This has greatly increased Ukraine’s ability to strike deep behind enemy lines.
The Center for Strategic Communication and Information Security of Ukraine wrote on Twitter that the country’s armed forces had “breached the first line of defense of the occupiers near Kherson”, the only provincial capital that Russia has captured since Putin ordered the invasion in February.
“Ukraine has a real chance to take back its occupied territories, especially given the very successful use of Western weapons by the Ukrainian military,” he added.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, John Kirby, the White House National Security Council’s strategic communications coordinator, said Ukraine’s move was already taking effect.
“Regardless of the size, scale and scope of this counteroffensive that they talked about today, they have already had an impact on Russia’s military capabilities,” Kirby said.
“The Russians have had to pull resources out of the east simply because of reports that the Ukrainians might go on the attack further south,” he added. “They had to exhaust certain units from certain areas of the east and Donbas.”
Kherson, a mostly flat province in the delta where the Dnipro River flows into the Black Sea, is strategically important to Russia as a “land bridge” to Crimea, which was annexed by Ukraine in 2014.
Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, wrote on Telegram that the country’s army was “killing the enemy” while “Kherson was at the front”.
Russian officials have played down the extent of Ukraine’s counterattack around Kherson, amid conflicting claims about its scale.
Sergei Aksyonov, the Moscow-appointed governor of Crimea, wrote on Telegram that reports of the counterattack were “the latest false [news] of Ukrainian propaganda” and claimed that Kyiv’s forces were in fact “suffering extremely heavy losses on the southern front as well as all others”.
But in a sign that Ukraine was closing in on major population centers, a senior official stationed by Russia in Nova Kakhovka, a town east of Kherson, told state-run RIA Novosti that he had ordered civilians to evacuated to bomb shelters.
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Sirens and explosions from the airstrikes were heard in the city, Ukrainian television reported, citing local residents. Pro-Ukraine Telegram channels posted photos of what they said was a destroyed market after the artillery strikes.
However, the governor of the neighboring Ukrainian-controlled Mykolayiv region wrote in a Telegram post that several civilians had been killed in heavy shelling, an indication of Moscow’s ability to push back Ukrainian forces.
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister and chairman of the Center for Defense Strategies think tank, said Kyiv “certainly plans to return to Kherson in the very near future.”
He added: “It is a complex task involving multiple forces, tactical activities, which had required patience and time to prepare.”
In recent months, Ukraine has regularly bombed the Kherson and Nova Kakhovka bridges, which link Russian occupation forces with supply lines on the eastern bank of the Dnipro.
However, some Ukrainian officials also urged caution around the offensive. One reason is that Russia has doubled its troop presence in the region since Kyiv began talking about a possible counterattack about a month ago.
At the time, about 13 Russian battalion tactical groups were stationed in the Kherson region. That number has risen to about 30, according to Rochan, an independent military consultancy based in Poland.
Kirby noted that this would not be the first time Ukrainian forces have attacked Russian forces since the conflict began in February, including in areas around Kyiv and Kharkiv.
“The idea of going on the attack is not new to the Ukrainians, and they have been taking the fight to the Russians inside their country,” he said. “In fact, with some of the help they’ve gotten from American weapons and others, like Himars, they’ve been able to attack behind Russian lines and put the Russians more on the defensive.”