Ukraine’s bid to retake Kherson unleashes ‘worst hell of the war’

The angels were on Sergeant Oleksandr’s side on Saturday morning. He had been told the Russians were retreating but when he crested the rise out of the village, there was one on the other side, waiting for him, with a machine gun.

“You are supposed to lead from the front, they say, so I decided to do just that and headed up the hill,” he told The Times just a few hours later. “But the bastard was just standing there.” The Russian unleashed a volley of shots but only managed to hit Oleksandr, 27, through the upper arm. Oleksandr fell back down the hill and managed to get back to his men.

“Then there was real hell,” he said. “The worst hell of the war.” His men’s position was exposed and Russian artillery came raining down as he tried to get back from the front line for treatment. “They even sent in a tank.”

For an hour and a half, with a comrade helping to apply a tourniquet, he attempted his escape back across the fields. The countryside around Kherson is open arable land, the crops divided by rows of trees that make perfect artillery cover.

Back at a hospital behind the front, his arm now bandaged, Oleksandr was pleased to report that despite the onslaught, the rest of his men were able to hold their position. He asked not to give his surname — the Ukrainian authorities have imposed a tight news blackout on the Kherson offensive.

Four men were injured, he added, though none killed, with a kilometre’s territorial gain their prize. The encounter was typical of the fighting along the whole front of the offensive towards Kherson — the largest city to fall in Russia’s invasion — announced seven days ago by the Ukrainian authorities after weeks of build-up.

The news blackout is part of the hybrid war Ukraine is now waging against Moscow, its main military spokeswoman, Captain Natalia Humeniuk, told The Times.

“We have an information front line as well as the military front line,” she said. “The information front line that is advanced by political forces is very different from the advances according to military tactics.”

The absence of verifiable information has led to wild claims on both sides. Some pro-Ukrainian accounts say their army has broken through on three fronts, with the Russians disillusioned and running away. The informal network of pro-Russian accounts online, meanwhile, boasts of the offensive’s failure, with thousands of Ukrainian dead said to be left in its wake. “Cynical butchery,” one pro-Russian report termed it, without providing any visual evidence for its claims of huge Ukrainian losses.

The accounts of injured soldiers who left the battlefield for treatment as recently as this weekend suggest the advance is slow going, with heavy but not necessarily catastrophic casualties. They confirm a handful of more precise Russian battlefield reports, which concede Ukraine has made some gains but has taken losses and would be vulnerable to a counter-attack if Russians could muster their strength — a big if.

The soldiers’ version of events shows the Ukrainians have learnt to fight an offensive war like the Russians, particularly now they have accurate medium-range artillery such as Himars and M777 howitzers provided by the US, the UK and other Nato countries. That means grinding away at Russian lines and depots before seizing one small patch of territory at a time, then regrouping.

“There is no blitzkrieg,” said Denys, 25, another soldier recovering from concussion and a foot injury in the same hospital as Oleksandr.

He had been fighting on the western side of a broad but shallow front, more than 60 miles long across the north and west of Kherson. He described how his unit was told its objective on the first day of fighting was to seize one village then move to a second. By the time they surrounded the first village, it was empty, so they pushed on. But it was a trap — or, perhaps, conventional tactics in an artillery war.

“They were waiting for us in the trees,” he said. As he crossed the fields towards the second village, the artillery started coming in and a retreat was ordered to the first — which, of course, was already in the Russians’ sights.

He had been in a BMP — a light-armoured vehicle — but said he was lucky, because when its tracks were hit by a mortar shell, he was outside with another soldier dragging to safety a third who had sustained leg injuries. “I don’t know what happened after that,” he said. But he, the other rescuer and the injured man made it safely back.

While Ukrainian politicians say the aim of the offensive is to take Kherson, western military strategists say the army’s tactics suggest it is trying to squeeze the Russians into the built-up area while cutting its resupply routes across the Dnipro river. It cuts Ukraine in two, from north to south, with Kherson the only Russian-held city on the western side.

Video posted online this morning showed smoke billowing from the Antonivka bridge in the city centre after a Ukrainian strike. The bridge is already seriously damaged from previous Ukrainian attacks.

Ukraine’s leadership hopes a successful offensive will force the Russians to withdraw across the river into Crimea without the need for potentially disastrous street-to-street battles.

The squeeze was clearly planned to be slow, to avoid the sort of casualties Russia suffered when attempting its blitzkrieg on Kyiv and Kharkiv.

A senior doctor at a hospital that cannot be identified said its emergency department had been busy in the past week but not overwhelmed. Of the 200 casualties it had received, it had lost only one man, with another critically injured after having pieces of bone removed from his brain.

“It is not as bad as at the beginning,” the doctor said, referring to the period in March when the Ukrainian army put up a desperate and ultimately successful defence against Russian forces pouring north and west from Kherson towards the cities of Mykolaiv and Odesa. “The injuries are less severe.”

Those injuries are still largely caused by shelling rather than bullet wounds, suggesting the Russians are relying on their numerical advantage in artillery rather than on infantry.

The Ukrainians have managed two incursions along the lines. One is to the northwest from Mykolaiv, where they have seized up to 20km (about 12 miles) of largely open and sparsely defended territory, according to another soldier, Mikolay, 40.

Attempts to break through along the M14 main road that connects Mykolaiv and Kherson have seen back-and-forth fighting, with the front line hardly changed. The village of Posad-Pokrovske, which since April has been in no man’s land, “is no more” according to one Ukrainian officer. Yesterday morning, lines of Ukrainian artillery could be seen shelling Russian positions from villages such as Lymany to Posad-Pokrovsky’s west.

The other “breakthrough”, to Kherson’s north, has established a bridgehead that is now the scene of the fiercest fighting on the front and where Russian sources say the most Ukrainian casualties are being sustained. To its east, back-and-forth fighting over the small town of Vysokopole over the week ended in a victory for the Ukrainians, who filmed themselves raising a flag over the town hospital on Sunday morning.

The Ukrainian authorities insist they are not in a hurry. “De-occupation of the south and east and the Ukrainian victory will take time,” said Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to President Zelensky, said on Saturday night in a regular briefing. “The advancing force is bound to have some casualties. At the infantry level, it’s a complicated and bloody affair.”

He said the main aim of the offensive was the continued degrading of Russian positions and equipment.

Oleksandr said Ukraine was losing men but Russia losing more. He claimed the Russians were finishing off their own injured men as they retreated to prevent them falling into Ukrainian hands. “We can hear the injured Russians asking for help and then single bullet shots,” he said. “We find the bodies when we advance.”

There is little evidence either of the huge Russian casualties claimed by Ukrainians, nor is there much sign among the Ukrainian soldiers encountered by The Times of a loss of morale on their own side.

Ihor, 23, another soldier, said that for all the successes of the Himars and other high-end artillery provided by the West, the Ukrainian army needed more mortars and short-range artillery to cover its advances. But his commanders remain determined to retake Ukrainian territory. “They say it is our land and we have to take it back,” he said. “Everyone is still up for it.”