A senior Ukrainian government adviser confirmed that Kyiv had launched a major operation aimed at recapturing the strategic southern city that was captured by Russian forces early in the war. “The next phase of the counterattack begins,” the adviser said. “It started with massive attacks on Russian military infrastructure and logistics.” The long-awaited offensive on Russia’s forces is aimed at recapturing territory Moscow seized in the first weeks of the war, when its troops swept 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 this effort is Ukraine’s deployment of Western weapons, such as the US-made Himari, truck-mounted guided missile launchers with an attack range of up to 80 kilometers. This has greatly increased Ukraine’s ability to strike far behind enemy lines. Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security tweeted that the country’s armed forces “breached the occupiers’ first line of defense near Kherson,” the only provincial capital Russia has captured since President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion on February. “Ukraine has a real chance to take back its occupied territories, especially considering the very successful use of Western weapons by the Ukrainian army,” he added.

Kherson, a mostly flat province in the delta where the Dnipro River flows into the Black Sea, is strategically important to Russia as a “land bridge” to Crimea, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014. Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, wrote on Telegram that the country’s army was “destroying the enemy” as “Kherson was in front”. Russian officials have so far downplayed the extent of Ukraine’s counteroffensive around Kherson, amid conflicting claims about its extent. Sergei Aksyonov, the Moscow-appointed governor of Crimea, wrote on Telegram that reports of the counterattack were “the latest hoax from Ukrainian propaganda” and claimed that Kiev forces were in fact “taking extremely heavy losses on the southern front as well as in all the others”. But in a sign that Ukraine is moving closer to major population centers, a senior official stationed by Russia in Nova Kakhovka, a town east of Kherson, told the state-run RIA Novosti news network that he had ordered civilians evacuated to bomb shelters. Air raid sirens and explosions were heard in the city, Ukrainian TV reported, citing local residents. Pro-Ukrainian channels on Telegram posted photos of a damaged market, they said, after artillery strikes. However, the governor of the neighboring Ukrainian-controlled Mykolayiv region wrote in a Telegram post that several civilians were killed in heavy shelling, a sign of Moscow’s ability to push back Ukrainian forces. Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine’s former defense minister and president of the Center for Defense Strategies think tank, said Ukraine “definitely plans to return Kherson in the very near future.” He added: “It is a complex project involving multiple forces, tactical activities, which took patience and time to prepare.” Ukraine has in recent months regularly bombed the bridges in Kherson and Nova Kakhovka, which connect Russian occupation forces with supply lines on the eastern side of the Dnipro. However, some Ukrainian officials also urged caution when attacking. One reason is that Russia has doubled its troop presence in the region since Ukraine began talking about a possible counterattack about a month ago. At that time, there were about 13 tactical groups of Russian battalions stationed in the Kherson region. That number has now risen to about 30, according to Rochan, an independent military consultancy based in Poland.