Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces were advancing “step by step” in the occupied southern Kherson region.
The city of Kherson fell to Russia at the start of the war and is strategically located west of the Dnipro River.
British defense officials reported heavy fighting near Kherson on Saturday. According to his assessment, Russian supply lines west of the river are “increasingly threatened” by the Ukrainian advance.
Earlier this month, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk urged residents of Kherson to evacuate the city as soon as possible to avoid being trapped in the city during a counter-offensive in southern Ukraine. “This is necessary to prevent the Ukrainian armed forces from endangering the civilian population during offensive operations,” he told state television.
Kyiv troops targeted river crossings in the region in an attempt to extend Russian supply lines. On Saturday, an artillery shell hit the Daryivskyi Bridge over the Inhulets River, a tributary of the Dnipro. And on Tuesday they targeted the Antonivskyi bridge over the Dnipro itself with US-supplied artillery.
Speaking to the state-backed news agency, the Russian-backed deputy head of government in Kherson admitted that if the strikes continue, the bridge could collapse. British officials previously described the Antonivskyi Bridge as a “major vulnerability” for Russian troops, saying on Saturday that if “passage is denied and Russian troops cut off in occupied Kherson, it would be a significant military and political setback for Russia. “. would be”.
“Every bridge is a weak point for logistics and our armed forces are cleverly destroying the enemy system,” Serhiy Khlan, adviser to the governor of Kherson, wrote on Facebook. “This is not yet the liberation of Kherson, but a serious preparatory step in that direction.”
Meanwhile, a senior Zelensky defense adviser said around 1,000 Russian soldiers in the region are surrounded by Ukrainian forces.
Oleksiy Arestovych said the Russians were captured in a “tactical encirclement” near the village of Vysokopillya in Kherson Oblast. Russia captured Kherson early in the war with relatively little resistance and the failure of the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) to destroy border crossings over the Dnipro before fleeing the city is believed to have led to Mr. Zelensky’s dismissal of the agency’s director Ivan Bakanov on Monday.
