For Kyiv, the West is on the way to a “joint victory” over Russia after the recapture of Kherson, where the Ukrainian national anthem was played on Friday after the withdrawal of Russian troops. Kherson, annexed at the end of September by Moscow, had been the first major city to fall after the Russian invasion that began at the end of February.
In images released by the Kyiv military, we see in the distance, in the dark, Ukrainians dancing in a circle around a campfire to the rhythm of “Chervona Kalyna”, a patriotic song. After eight months of occupation by Russian forces, national television programs are once again visible in Kherson. And the region’s power provider said he was working to restore power.
“Very few people believed that Ukraine would survive,” Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said during a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the sidelines of a South Asia-East summit in Phnom Penh.
“Only together we can win and drive Russia out of Ukraine. We are on the right track,” Dmytro Kuleba said on Saturday, “and our victory will be our common victory.”
A video posted on Telegram by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, portrayed as coming from Kherson, also showed Ukrainian soldiers claiming to be from the “28th brigade” being cheered into the night by a crowd chanting “VCU,” the acronym for the forces Ukrainian armies.
“Extraordinary Victory”
Some 200 policemen have been deployed in Kherson to erect barricades and document “the crimes of the Russian occupiers,” National Police Chief Igor Klymenko said in a statement. He also alerted city residents to the presence of mines left behind by Russian forces, urging them to “move with caution.” According to Igor Klymenko, a policeman was injured during a mine clearance operation in a building in Kherson.
A woman and two children were injured in an explosion near their car in the town of Mylove, Kherson region, according to police, who also reported Russian shelling in the Berislav district.
“There are dead and injured,” police said, without elaborating.
The Russian withdrawal from Kherson marks “a new strategic failure” by Moscow, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace said in a statement issued on Saturday. Jake Sullivan, US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, called the Kyiv military’s takeover of the city an “extraordinary victory”, “quite remarkable”.
“Today is a historic day,” Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday night.
“Finally My Free City”
This Russian withdrawal is the third in a scale since the start of the invasion on February 24, as Russia had to surrender in the spring to take Kyiv in the face of fierce resistance from the Ukrainians, before being expelled from almost all territories. Kharkiv region (northeast) in September.
On Friday night, on Kyiv’s iconic Maidan square, Kherson residents who had been sheltering for months in the capital celebrated the news with jubilation.
“Finally my free city, the one where I was born, where I lived all my life”, said Nastia Stepenska with tears in her eyes, the patriotic colors painted on her cheeks.
“When (the Russians) arrived it was horrible, we didn’t know what would happen the next day, if we would get out alive,” testifies the 17-year-old high school student, who says to herself “in a state of shock.”
The previous Friday, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it had completed the “redeployment” of its units from the right (western) bank of the Dnieper, on which Kherson is located, to the left bank, claiming no losses, no equipment abandoned military. According to Moscow, “more than 30,000” Russian soldiers and “almost 5,000 units of weapons and military vehicles have been withdrawn” from the west bank of the Dnieper. This decline, however, has all the slights, since the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, claimed at the end of September the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, including that of Kherson.
“Crazy Claims”
When asked on Saturday about reports that Washington had begun pressuring Volodymyr Zelensky to consider negotiations with Moscow, Jake Sullivan said Russia continued to have “extravagant claims” to its neighbor’s territory.
“Ukraine is the party of peace in this conflict and Russia is the party of war” and “our position remains the same as it has been in the past and is fundamentally in close consultation with and support for President Zelensky,” said Jake Sullivan, al judge that “if Ukraine decided to stop fighting […] It would be the end of Ukraine.”
Volodymyr Zelensky repeated this week that the first condition for a negotiation was the complete withdrawal of Russian troops, who entered Ukraine on February 24.
Source: BFM TV
