Ukraine says push against Russian forces near Kherson has begun

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Ukraine said it had launched a counter-offensive against Russian forces near the southern city of Kherson in an attempt to reverse some of Moscow’s biggest territorial gains six months into its full-scale invasion.

A senior Ukrainian government adviser confirmed that Kyiv had begun a major operation aimed at retaking the strategically important city captured by Russian forces early in the war.

“The next phase of the counteroffensive is starting,” the adviser said. “It started with massive attacks on Russian military infrastructure and logistics.”

The long-anticipated assault on Russia’s forces is aimed at recapturing territory Moscow seized in the war’s early weeks, when its troops swarmed in from the Crimean peninsula to the south.

Over the past two months, Ukraine has carried out dozens of strikes on Russian supply lines and infrastructure supporting Moscow’s occupation of the region.

Key to that effort is Ukraine’s deployment of western weaponry such as US-made Himars, truck-mounted guided missile launchers whose attack range of up to 80km has greatly increased the country’s ability to strike far behind enemy lines.

Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security wrote on Twitter that the country’s armed forces had “breached the occupiers’ first line of defence near Kherson”, the only provincial capital Russia has captured since President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion in February.

“Ukraine has a real chance to get back its occupied territories, especially considering the very successful use of western weapons by the Ukrainian army,” it added.

Kherson, a mostly flat province on the delta where the Dnipro river flows into the Black Sea, has strategic importance for Russia as a “land bridge” to Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Andriy Yermak, chief of staff of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, wrote that the country’s military was “grinding down the enemy”, and that “Kherson lay ahead”.

Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defence minister and chair of the Centre for Defense Strategies think-tank, said the move on Kherson was part of “a larger push of Ukraine’s military to liberate the city”.

“Ukraine certainly plans to return Kherson in a very near future,” Zagorodnyuk said. “It’s a complex task including multiple forces, tactical activities, which had needed patience and time to prepare.”