On the square in front of the airport lie the shells of the battle, machine gun calibers mounted on armored vehicles and tracer shells. These are the shots fired by the Ukrainian assault brigade that regained control of Mykolayiv airport on March 9. But by the time Kievans retook possession of the terminal, the entire facility was already in ruins. The Russians had already begun bombing the small coastal airport on February 24, and the following week they managed to take control of it after crossing the town with armored vehicles blocking one of the country’s main thoroughfares, the the pincer maneuver on the capital could have brought them to Kyiv. But then something went wrong with Putin’s plans, and a few days later the Russian troops found themselves surrounded in the port city and forced to flee without supplies.
“What the Russians didn’t destroy then, they’re doing today with the Iskender missiles that fire at our heads every day from Cherson and Nova Khakovka,” explains one of the soldiers from the press office of the southern command center of the Kiev troops. . “They failed to take Mykolayiv and now their goal is to make it uninhabitable and prevent us from rebuilding it by leveling our entire infrastructure,” explains the soldier while watching the rest of a trample on left luggage. After the Russians withdrew from the area around the airport, rocket attacks were almost daily Mykolayiv.
The small coastal airport was intended to boost tourism in the area, some lowcost airlines’ advertising can still be seen on the walls, the sign in the arrivals area was placed by the military on the ground next to a teddy bear, abandoned at the time of the first explosion and is now on top of one Broken glass bed. At the top, a fallen chair and the remains of tactical rations testify to the fact that a sniper lay there, while the opposite wall gap opens up a view of the runway destroyed by the explosions. Even the train station has met the same fate, if the old Soviet facade has survived, the interior has instead fallen into complete disrepair. However, the commercial port is still complete, but part of the naval remittances have already been destroyed, the latest attack on Monday morning when a Russian missile hit the shipyards of the Qatari company QTerminals Olvia.
The coastal road to Oleksandrivka, the Ukrainian city in the Kherson region where the Southern Command is massing attack vehicles and from where it hopes to launch the Kherson counteroffensive and thus return close to Crimea
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