“We see all these signs — blown up bridges, leaving the villages, heading towards the Dnieper River,” Kostenko said. “We see that they are pulling back.”
The moves jumbled a battlefield picture that already was chaotic after nine months of fighting. Some officials in Kyiv have questioned whether Russia’s announcement is a trap meant to draw in Ukrainian forces. It also remained unclear Wednesday whether some Russian forces could be stranded on the west side of the river, depending on how quickly Ukrainian troops advance.
U.S. officials assessed that Moscow made the decision to avoid a repeat of their chaotic, bloody failure in the Kharkiv region, in which Ukrainian forces broke through Russian front lines in September, seizing hundreds of square miles and vast quantities of hastily abandoned Russian military equipment. This time, it appears that the Russian retreat is strategic — proactively pulling back to safer positions and preparing for future combat.
“Russia realized it would be better to have an early withdrawal than to be overrun by Ukrainians and suffer massive losses,” said Jim Stavridis, a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO. “Ukrainians will not stop until they fully retake the city — nor should they. It has enormous geographic, military and psychological value.”
The recapture of Kherson, complete with Ukraine raising its blue-and-yellow flag over a city that Russian forces seized in March, would mark the latest major battlefield setback for the Kremlin in Ukraine. Hawkish Russian military bloggers have lamented the retreat, calling it a betrayal.
Stavridis predicted that Ukraine could seize a “windfall” of left-behind Russian military equipment and perhaps uncover additional evidence of Russian war crimes, “including what has become their modus operandi of rape, torture, detention and mass murder.”
In the Mykolaiv region, to Kherson’s northwest, a Ukrainian medic, Ivan Malenkyi, said Wednesday that his unit already was cleaning up mines laid there by Russian forces, in a potential preview of what might await Ukrainian troops in Kherson.
“Now we don’t understand ourselves what’s the front line, the second line or whatever,” Malenkyi said. “We just know that they left. Where they went and what they left behind is not clear.”
U.S. Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Tuesday night that 20,000 to 30,000 Russian forces remained on the western bank of the river and that it would take time for them to withdraw. But he, too, saw “initial indicators” that the retreat was underway, he said.
“This won’t take them a day or two,” Milley said, speaking at an event at the Economic Club of New York. “This is going to take them days and maybe even weeks to pull those forces south of that river.”
Ukrainian forces have been slowly advancing toward Kherson for weeks, targeting ammunition centers, command posts and supply facilities in the region and…
Read More: Russian retreat from Kherson city sets stage for more hard combat
