Residents in Kherson have reported heavy explosions around the southern Ukraine city as Kyiv’s armed forces continued an offensive to retake one of the first conurbations to fall to Russian forces following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour.
Ukrainian missile strikes and artillery fire hit the city on Monday night and continued into Tuesday morning on the second day of what Kyiv says is a counter-attack to try to turn the tide of the war.
One Kherson resident said she had heard machinegun fire and the sound of large-calibre weapons close to her home in the city centre. “It’s very loud . . . for the second day there hasn’t even been an hour break where something did not explode or bang,” she added. “It’s scary, but at the same time joyful when you hear the sound of explosions.”
Long-running partisan resistance in Kherson since Russia’s takeover has forced Moscow to repeatedly postpone its plans to annex the region through a referendum. Government advisers told the Financial Times that one aim of the latest Ukraine offensive could be to continue to undermine that prospect.
Ukraine has maintained a near-total news blackout on the operation since it began and senior officials in Kyiv cautioned on Tuesday that the operation would be “slow”, “grinding” and gradual.
“This is a planned slow operation to grind down the enemy, saving the lives of our military and civilians,” Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the government, said on a YouTube news channel.
“Be patient. This process will not be very fast, but will end with the installation of the Ukrainian flag over all the settlements of Ukraine.”
The military aim of the assault is to recapture territory Moscow seized in the early weeks of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion, when troops swept in from the Crimean peninsula to the south.
It comes as a mission from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived in Kyiv on its way to inspect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which is near Kherson on the southern front line and has come under repeated fire, raising fears of a catastrophic accident.
Russia insists it will not return any of the Ukrainian territory it has captured.
Dmitry Peskov, spokesperson for Putin, told reporters on Tuesday that Russia’s invasion was “ongoing, methodically and according to plan, and all the goals will be reached”, according to the Interfax news agency.
Russia’s defence ministry on Monday evening said Ukraine’s new offensive had “completely backfired” and that Moscow’s forces had inflicted “heavy casualties” on Ukrainian troops.
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.
Ahead of the attack, Ukraine conducted two months of strikes deep behind enemy lines on the southern front line using long-range drones and western weaponry such as US-made Himars — truck-mounted guided missile launchers that have a range of up to 80km.
According to Britain’s defence ministry, Ukraine was continuing such strikes on Tuesday in order to disrupt Russian supply lines and infrastructure.
Officials in Crimea tacitly confirmed the strikes. “Today in Sevastopol our surface to air missiles worked again,” Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russian-imposed governor of Sevastopol, the port city on the Crimean peninsula, said on his Telegram channel. “According to preliminary information, they knocked down an unmanned aerial vehicle.”
Additional reporting by Max Seddon in Riga
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August 30, 2022 at 07:56PM
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Heavy explosions in Kherson as Ukraine battles to retake city - Financial Times
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