Ukraine sets its sights on reclaiming cities and towns lost to Russian forces in the war for the south.
Ukraine, Mykolaiv (CNN) In a little house in a village close to Mykolaiv, a Ukrainian reconnaissance team is squatting. Sleeping bags are spread out on the floor, there are machine guns and army knapsacks lining the walls, and a pot of soup is warming on the stove.
Outside, Javelins and other shoulder-launched anti-tank weaponry are piled high in the garden shed.
While smoking on the porch, the soldiers hardly hear the roar of approaching artillery shells as they land about 10 kilometers distant. On the southern front of Ukraine, it is not their turn to battle today.
The home’s owners, who left for Poland when the war started in late February, are relieved that Ukraine finally controls their community.
Andrii Pidlisnyi, a senior lieutenant, was one of the soldiers who drove the Russians from the area two months ago. It was first a defensive effort to halt them, he claims. “After that, we discovered some excellent locations for offensive operations to retake our areas. We’re doing that right now.”
Pidlisnyi is in charge of a squad of 100 men tasked with locating Russian locations, frequently using drones. The artillery is then summoned.
He displays CNN bodycam videos from his earlier missions from his computer. Despite some near misses, he claims his morale is high in light of recent triumphs. US equipment is beneficial.
In one video, Pidlisnyi can be seen operating his drone to locate Russian tanks while seated in a trench. He shouts on the radio, “Call in the American gift.”
In contrast to the east, where Ukrainian troops are being compelled to give ground, Russian troops are currently on the defensive in this region of the south.
But it is still a struggle here. For soldiers like Pidlisnyi, the goal is to seize small strategic pockets—high terrain with a view of distant, seized Ukrainian towns—from which more gains can be made.
Regarding the retaking of Russian-occupied territory in southern Ukraine, he states, “I’m not convinced we will win it [by] the end of this year.” Perhaps not until the end of the following year.
The Ukrainian military claims to have reclaimed some ground. They claim that early this week, they drove the Russians from two more villages near the border between Mykolaiv and Kherson.
The Russians have had several months to construct defensive positions in three tiers around the area, but it is a vast tract of open, rolling countryside where any approaching forces would be exposed.
Additionally, the Ukrainians only have a small number of assault units because they have largely played defense during this fight, which has caused some of their best units to decay.
The majority of the weapons that Western friends supply are not intended for ground offensives, and the Ukrainians lack adequate air support for any advancing forces.
Although the military rarely gives specifics, Ukrainian soldiers have been suffering significant losses in the south.
There are more and more indications that Russia is bolstering its military presence in Kherson, keen to keep it as a key piece of the land bridge to Crimea and as the peninsula’s primary water supplier.
Large convoys have been traveling west from Mariupol through Melitopol to Kherson for the last two weeks.
Numerous citizens have already left. According to estimates from Ukrainian authorities, about half of Kherson’s residents have moved to areas under Ukrainian control.
They claim that the Russians are stopping more people from fleeing seized Zaporizhzhia cities like Melitopol in order to utilize them as “human shields” in the case of a Ukrainian offensive.
Shifts on the frontline in southern Ukraine start close to Mykolaiv, a port city to the north of Kherson, which is under Russian control. Nearly every day, missiles and rockets are fired against it.
A meandering front line to the south and east extends from the Black Sea coast across farmland and upwards towards the kilometres area.
Even while this region is far from the Donetsk front, which has been the site of fighting since 2014, it is now only a small portion of a larger battleground that covers more than 1,000 kilometres.
Artillery battles take place throughout the line, which one Ukrainian soldier referred to as “ping-pong with cannons.”
That’s how it’s been for months.
Now, the Ukrainians claim they have an advantage since donated weapons, particularly the US-supplied HIMARs rocket system, are destroying vital storage facilities, command centers, and ammo dumps spread throughout Russian-held area.
According to Ukraine, at least two ammunition dumps in Nova Khakova in the Kherson region were destroyed this month. In addition, Ukraine destroyed three Dnipro River bridges and even a shipment of Russian S-300 missiles, an updated surface-to-air missile that terrorized Mykolaiv.
The three bridges were hit by Ukrainian long-range artillery on Thursday, according to the UK Ministry of Defense, and the 49th Army of Russia, which is stationed on the west side of the Dnipro River, “now looks dangerously vulnerable.”
One of these, the 1,000-meter-long Antonivskyi bridge near Kherson City, was damaged last week, and following another strike this week, the Defense Ministry warned “it is quite likely that the crossing is now useless.”
It said that “Kherson city, the most significant Russian metropolis in terms of politics, is now practically shut off from the other captured areas.
With pontoon bridges and river ferries across the Dnipro, the Russians may be able to resupply their men on the west bank, as they still hold significant territory to the northeast of the city. Russian equipment will be replaced with more of the same.
Exclusive video footage shot by partisans and provided exclusively to CNN depicts S-300 missiles being fired at the Dzhankoi train station in the occupied Crimea. There could have been up to 50 S-300 missiles atop railcars at the station on Thursday, 21 July, according to Maxar’s satellite imaging and analysis. One S-300 is all it would take to level a building in Ukraine.
The military officials of Ukraine have claimed that despite the size of the Russian war machine, this month’s attacks against Russian supply routes and depots may have the ability to change the course of the struggle.
Now, numerous soldiers on the front lines have corroborated it, telling CNN they think the Russians have significantly fewer bullets to shoot at them.
According to Snr Lt Pidlisnyi, “We had around two to three weeks where they didn’t have enough ammunition to engage us with artillery, rockets, and so on.”
Ukraine Armed Forces Captain Volodymyr Omelyan tells CNN that surgical strikes behind enemy lines on another section of the southern front are a part of a continuing modernisation of Ukraine’s tactics.
According to Snr Lt Pidlisnyi, “We had around two to three weeks where they didn’t have enough ammunition to engage us with artillery, rockets, and so on.”
Ukraine Armed Forces Captain Volodymyr Omelyan tells CNN that surgical strikes behind enemy lines on another section of the southern front are a part of a continuing modernisation of Ukraine’s tactics.
Before joining the army, Omelyan worked as a politician. He says, “We believe that Russians will surrender much faster, especially in Kherson region where we already hit three main bridges, two automobile bridges, and one railway one.”
Gains are being made “day by day” on the battlefield, according to Omelyan, but Ukraine prefers not to publicize them: “Our commanders have an excellent habit of talking about what’s happening after it’s already done.”
Getting ready for a long battle Ukrainian military are put to the test in the industrial town of Kryvyi Rih in the country’s south as they had to storm a home while armed with pellet guns. On a higher plane, Ukrainian police are portraying Russians.
The fact that the trainees were unable to capture the top floor after an hour of fictitious combat shows how dangerous and challenging hand-to-hand urban warfare is.
Oleksander Piskun, their commander, has needed a wheelchair ever since he suffered serious injuries pushing Russian-backed separatists out of cities in the eastern Donbas region in 2014.
He claims that “street combat, the fight to storm a settlement, is the hardest combat.” “Because we are liberating settlements rather than taking them, it is harder. These are our cities and our citizens.”
Street fighting is not currently dominating the battle on the southern front; instead, artillery is. According to Ukrainians, an attack on Kherson will come in the future, but first, the distant conflict must be fought and won.
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Ellen Nimo
