Russia captures port city as Ukraine invasion gains traction in south

Russia’s claim to have captured the port city of Kherson in southern Ukraine makes increasingly clear that its invasion, while slowed in the north, is gaining traction in the country’s open and hard-to-defend coastal plains.

Along with Russia’s shift to more aggressive aerial attacks on urban centres, it is leading to a tempering of optimism over Ukraine’s ability to sustain its so far effective organised resistance against a vastly superior force. 

“We are now in for the long haul and Russia is reorganising itself to ensure that it wins this war,” according to Keir Giles, senior consulting fellow for the Russia and Eurasia programme at Chatham House, who spoke on a webinar. “So the implications of the Russian way of war is that we need to prepare now for humanitarian catastrophe.”

Wednesday morning saw heavy fighting in Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, after paratroopers were dropped into its streets. Huge quantities of equipment and supplies continue to push towards the capital, Kyiv. Russia says it is only aiming for military targets.

Speaking on the same webinar, the London think tank’s Russian defence specialist, Mathieu Boulegue, said there were signs — including Russian attacks on communications infrastructure in Kyiv, and the spread of false declarations of capitulation online  — that Russia will bring its full cyberwarfare capabilities and air power to bear over the coming two to three days. 

That could rupture communications between Ukraine’s commanders and positions across the eastern half of a nation roughly the size of France, as well as their ability to move food and new weapons supplies from Europe and the US to the places they’re needed, according to Boulegue.

The Kremlin’s “intention at the moment is really to storm Kyiv, take it over by force with all the brutality and all the tactics that Russia has in its playbook”, he said, predicting a long war of attrition. Having removed the government, Russia would also aim to change the narrative of its campaign, he said, because with no political leadership “the army is no longer an army, it’s a group of ‘terrorists’.”

In the south, maps produced by Western analysts to track Russia’s invasion of its westward neighbour already show areas shaded to mark occupation starting to join in a solid strip along the coasts of the Black Sea and Sea of Azov. 

An amphibious landing of marines took Ukraine’s second Azov Sea port Berdyansk and may have pressed on to join with Russian and pro-Russia separatist troops pushing west to encircle and lay siege to the southern city of Mariupol. That city of more than 500,000 was under heavy bombardment on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, troops that moved out of Crimea, seized by Russia in 2014, spread east, taking the town of Melitopol and could soon create a land corridor from the peninsula to Russia’s mainland border, should Mariupol fall. Until now, Crimea and Russia have been connected only by a 19km bridge that opened in 2018.

Other troops from Crimea moved west to Kherson and Mykolaiv, the last significant town before the historic port city of Odesa and potentially — if the arrows on a campaign map shown in video footage behind Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko are to be believed — the neighbouring ex-Soviet republic of Moldova. Fierce fighting was reported in Mykolaiv on Wednesday.

In Odesa, citizens were filmed on Tuesday making sandbags on city beach, in anticipation of an amphibious assault the local military believes has been delayed by poor weather conditions. Widespread reports of an attempt that was aborted at the last moment on Monday could not be independently verified. 

“The fact that they left occupied Crimea (for Odesa) is true,” Alexander Kovalenko, an Odesa-based military analyst for the website Inforesist, said of the Russian naval detachment. “Why they didn’t attempt to land I don’t know.” 

The situation in Odesa is stable, but that’s unlikely to last, Kovalenko said, not least because the city of just over 1-million hosts a large — if for years inactive — population of pro-Russian residents. In 2014, they clashed with supporters of the so-called Maidan revolution, leaving 48 dead. All but two were pro-Russians, and 42 died when the building they had retreated to was set on fire. 

On Tuesday, President Volodymyr Zelensky replaced Odesa’s regional governor, Serhiy Hrynevetsky, with Maksym Marchenko, an army colonel who until last year commanded a mechanised brigade in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, according to Ukrinform, Ukraine’s state news agency.

While several Russian attempts to land troops around Odesa since February 24 have been repelled, these were small diversionary operations, according to Kovalenko. That’s likely to change if Russian forces have full control of Kherson and Mykolayiv, a two and a half an hour’s drive away. 

“It’s clear that Russia intends to punch a corridor to Transnistria, and in that regard Odesa is both the last and the key element,” Kovalenko said. Transnistria is a pro-Russia enclave of neighbouring Moldova, just 70km  northwest of the city.  Russia has not said it plans to extend its “special military operation” in Ukraine to Moldova.

Even so, not everything has gone according to plan for Russia in the south. 

A cold reception from Russian speaking citizens of towns such as Berdyansk that President Vladimir Putin aimed to liberate, with residents chanting “go home” rather than wave flags, suggests the expanse from Mariupol to Odesa — like the rest of the country — may be easier for Russian troops to capture than to hold.

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