People across Ukraine awoke from a night of celebrations after the Kremlin announced that its troops had withdrawn across the Dnipro River from Kherson. The Ukrainian military said it was overseeing “stabilization measures” in areas around the city to make sure it was safe. The Russian retreat represented a major setback for the Kremlin some six weeks after Putin annexed the Kherson region and three other provinces in southern and eastern Ukraine in violation of international law and declared them Russian territory. The head of the National Police of Ukraine, Ihor Klymenko, said on Facebook on Saturday that about 200 officers were working in the city, setting up checkpoints and documenting evidence of possible war crimes. Police teams were also working to locate and defuse unexploded ordnance, and a bomber was injured Saturday while demining an administrative building, Klimenko said. Ukraine’s communications watchdog said national television and radio broadcasts had resumed in the city, and an adviser to Kherson’s mayor said humanitarian aid and supplies had begun arriving from the neighboring Mykolaiv region. But the councillor, Roman Holovnya, described the situation in the city as a “humanitarian disaster”. He said the remaining residents were short of water, medicine and food — and basic staples such as bread were not baked due to a lack of electricity. “The occupiers and collaborators did everything possible to make those people who remained in the city suffer as much as possible during those days, weeks, months of waiting” for Ukrainian forces to arrive, Holovnya said. “Water supplies are practically non-existent in the city.”
Russian forces are still nearby
The chairman of Khersonoblenergo, the region’s pre-war electricity provider, said electricity was being restored “to every settlement in the Kherson region immediately after liberation.” Despite efforts to restore normal civilian life, Russian forces remain nearby. The General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said on Saturday that the Russians were reinforcing battle lines on the eastern bank of the river after the capital was abandoned. About 70 percent of the Kherson region remains under Russian control. Antonina Ustymenko, 64, reacts as she speaks about the Russian occupation of the village of Blahodatne, which was recaptured by Ukrainian forces a day ago, in Ukraine’s Kherson region, on Friday. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters) Ukrainian officials from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that while special military units had arrived in the city of Kherson, the full deployment to reinforce the advancing troops was still underway. On Friday, Ukraine’s intelligence service said it believed some Russian soldiers stayed behind, mistaking their uniforms for civilian clothes to avoid detection. “Even when the city has not yet been completely cleared of the presence of the enemy, the residents of Kherson themselves are already removing Russian symbols and every trace of the occupiers’ stay in Kherson from the streets and buildings,” Zelensky said at his nightly video speech on Friday. Zelensky said the first part of the stabilization work includes demining operations. He said the entry of “our defenders” – the soldiers – into Kherson would be followed by police, swordsmen, rescuers and energy workers, among others. “Medicine, communications, social services are coming back,” he said. “Life is coming back.” Newlyweds hold a Ukrainian flag in front of the Odessa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater as people gather in central Odessa on Saturday to celebrate the recapture of the city of Kherson. (Oleksandr Gimanov/AFP/Getty Images)
Big setback for Moscow
Photos circulated on social media on Saturday showed Ukrainian activists removing commemorative plaques placed by the occupying authorities that the Kremlin has put in place to manage the Kherson region. A Telegram post on the Yellow Ribbon channel, a self-styled Ukrainian “public resistance” movement, showed two people in a park taking down plaques depicting Soviet-era military figures. Moscow’s announcement that Russian forces planned to withdraw across the Dnipro River, which separates both the Kherson region and Ukraine, followed an intensifying Ukrainian counteroffensive in the country’s south. In the past two months, Ukraine’s military claimed to have recaptured dozens of towns and villages north of the city of Kherson, and the Ukrainian General Staff said stabilization activities were taking place there. A child holds a Ukrainian flag as people gather in Maidan Square in Kyiv on Friday to celebrate the withdrawal of Russian forces from Kherson. (Genya Savilov/AFP/Getty Images) Russia’s state-run TASS news agency quoted an official in Kherson’s Kremlin administration as saying on Saturday that Henichesk, a town on the Sea of Azov about 200 kilometers southeast of Kherson city, would serve as the region’s “temporary capital” after the withdrawal along of Dnipro. . Ukrainian media mocked the announcement, with daily Ukrainskaya Pravda saying Russia had “created a new capital” for the region.
“The War Continues”
In much of Ukraine, moments of jubilation marked the exit of Russian forces, as a retreat from Kherson and other areas on the west bank of the Dnieper appeared to dash Russian hopes of pressing an offensive west towards Mykolaiv and Odessa to cut off the Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea. In the Black Sea port of Odessa, residents dressed in the blue-and-yellow flags of Ukraine shared champagne and held cards in the color of the flag with the word “Kherson” on them. But like Zelensky, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tried to temper the enthusiasm. “We are winning battles on the ground, but the war continues,” he said from Cambodia, where he was attending a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. A member of Ukraine stands next to a Russian armored personnel carrier in the village of Blahodatne in the Kherson region on Friday. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters) Kuleba also referred to the prospect of the Ukrainian military finding evidence of possible Russian war crimes in Kherson, just as it did after the Russian Defense Ministry withdrew its forces from the Kiev and Kharkiv regions earlier. US estimates this week showed that Russia’s war in Ukraine may have already killed or injured tens of thousands of civilians and hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Elsewhere, Russia continued its offensive in industrial eastern Ukraine, targeting the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, the Ukrainian General Staff said. Donetsk Governor Pavlo Kyrylenko said on Saturday that two civilians had been killed and four wounded in the last day as fighting raged around Bakhmut and Avdiivka, a small town that remained in Ukrainian hands throughout the war. . Russia’s continued pressure on Bakhmut demonstrates the Kremlin’s desire for visible gains after weeks of setbacks. It would pave the way for a possible push into other Ukrainian strongholds in the hotly contested Donetsk region. In the Dnipropetrovsk region west of Donetsk, Russia again bombed communities near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the Ukrainian governor said. Russia and Ukraine have long shared responsibility for bombings in and around the plant, Europe’s largest. A man walks past cows near a building damaged by shelling in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, on Saturday. (Andry Andriyenko/The Associated Press)
