In southern Ukraine, Russian troops have been subjected to heavy attacks for days. Observers see the battle for Cherson as a decisive battle in this war. If the city falls, Putin’s soldiers would already be halfway west.
The clock is ticking. Moscow wants to create facts in southern Ukraine. As early as mid-September, the occupiers are planning an accession referendum for the citizens of the strategically important region of Cherson and the provincial capital of the same name, which was conquered shortly after the start of the war. The aim is to give the brutal annexation a democratic touch.
According to the Washington Institute for the Study of War (ISW), even online voting should be possible, which already makes the vote appear as what it is due to the diverse possibilities of manipulation – a farce.
Now save articles for later in “Pocket”.
However, the humanitarian situation on the ground is devastating. “Ukrainians in the occupied territories are going through a hell of an ordeal,” said Yulia Gorbunova, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. Fear and lawlessness rule the everyday lives of those who stayed. “Torture, inhumane treatment, arbitrary arrests and unlawful detention of civilians” are just some of the war crimes committed by Russian soldiers.
Anyone fleeing Cherson inevitably comes through Vasylivka, a small town with 13,000 inhabitants on the south bank of the river Dnepr, which was dammed to form the Kakhovka reservoir. There are no alternative routes, but the Ukrainians are expecting four Russian checkpoints there. Ivan Fedorov, Mayor of Melitopol, explains in a report by “Deutschlandfunk Kultur” about the situation there: “The situation is terrible.”
Cherson is of immense importance for Russia, as it goes directly from here to the ports of Mykolaiv and Odessa and further along the entire Black Sea coast to the west. Conversely, this also applies to Ukraine. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his military are far from giving up the fight for Cherson as lost. On the contrary: the area should be back under Ukrainian control by early autumn at the latest. This is also the appeal of the military administration in the region, whose adviser Serhij Chlan claims to have already identified a “turning point on the battlefield”.
All developments in the Ukraine war: Eight dead in Russian shelling of a bus stop in eastern Ukraine
In fact, the Ukrainian counter-offensive of the past few days has already left traces of the destruction of the Antonivka Bridge east of Kherson city, which is so important for Russian supplies. The British Ministry of Defense also assumes that the Ukrainian attacks on a Russian ammunition train in Brylivka on July 30 have at least temporarily impaired the Russian railway connections between the Kherson region and Crimea.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), images of an explosion in Brylivka, also in southern Ukraine, published on social media on August 3 suggest that the Ukrainian armed forces may have shelled the place for the second time.
Ukrainian President Zelenskyy announced that his military was advancing in stages. More than 1,000 Russian soldiers are said to have been surrounded on the outskirts of Cherson. According to Human Rights Watch, the remaining Ukrainians have to endure outright terror from the occupiers, but in the city of 290,000 before the start of the war and its surroundings everything is heading towards a major confrontation, a possibly crucial battle as the war develops.
Can Ukrainian troops push back the Russian aggressors or will Russia break through to the south and thus to the west and Odessa?
If the megacity on the Black Sea falls, political and military experts agree, Ukraine would not only lose its access to the Black Sea, but Russian President Vladimir Putin would also come a decisive step closer to his war goal: bring Ukraine under control, his control .
Or as Sabine Fischer, Eastern Europe expert at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik puts it in an interview with “tagesschau.de”: “If areas in the south are annexed, the Russian armed forces will continue to expand in the direction of Odessa. Then the survivability of Ukraine would be immensely impaired.”
