This week, some Ukrainian officials released more information on how the counter-offensive in Kherson in the south of the country is progressing after days of very little official news. Ukrainian officials said they recaptured two small towns and refused those of the Russian ones, who called the counteroffensive a “failure.” However, it seems that the Ukrainian army is not gaining much ground and would like to focus more on small targets, partly due to a lack of resources and soldiers, partly because their strategy is to burden enemy lines with long-range hits, which makes it the Russians made it difficult to hold their positions.
The reliable US research center Institute for the Study of War, which monitors the course of the war on a daily basis, wrote that the counter-offensive in Kherson was “noticeably damaging Russian logistics and administrative capacity in southern Ukraine”.
Located in the southern part of the country on the Dnieper River, Kherson was conquered by Russia in the first days of the invasion. Inside, the Russians are using violence, intimidation and attempts at forced assimilation of the Ukrainian population. On Monday, after news circulated about the progress of Ukraine’s counter-offensive, local authorities announced that a referendum on the region’s annexation to Russia was being postponed for security reasons. The news was hailed as a symptom that the Ukrainian counter-offensive is worrying Russian authorities in the occupied city.
Kherson is particularly important because it is an access road to the port city of Odessa, a Russian target since the beginning of the war, and thus to the Black Sea, and in the region in which it is located also contains aqueducts and canals carrying water to the Russian-controlled Ukrainian Crimea Peninsula.
Marc Champion on Bloomberg writes that the Kherson counteroffensive is proceeding at about the same pace as the Russian one in Donbass, but the size of the respective operations is very different. In Kherson, the Ukrainian army uses much less resources and ammunition and suffers fewer casualties. The size of the territory is also incomparable: in the Donbass there is fighting on a front hundreds of kilometers long, in Kherson there are a few dozen.
This means that Ukrainians do not need large territorial gains to achieve results: “The circumstances of the two campaigns are so different that what is considered a failure in Donbass can be a success in Kherson,” Champion wrote after hearing a military expert .
Both sides seem to have realized that they cannot go too far on the offensive for fear of losing too many men and vehicles. Ukraine is currently content with using US-supplied HIMARS missile launchers, systematically damaging enemy supply lines and leaving troops on the front lines without the necessary resources. This strategy suits the Ukrainian army because it saves resources, but it also wastes a lot of time, which could increase the duration of the counteroffensive: with the fall and rains, the water-rich Kherson region turns into a muddy and impassable swamp.
However, Champion writes, Ukraine must show the Western Allies clear advances on the battlefield in order to make the economic consequences of the war those countries are suffering more bearable and to avoid the so-called war fatigue that protracted fighting could bring on the aid set for the Ukrainians. Instead, it’s a sentiment that Russia is trying to evoke at all costs, ostensibly cutting off gas supplies to Europe and causing an extraordinary surge in energy and fuel prices.
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