kyiv and Kherson, two mistakes that mark the course of the war in Ukraine | International

There are two battles in which Russia and Ukraine made serious mistakes, both failures that determine the current course of the war. Moscow withdrew at the beginning of April from the attempt to take kyiv, the capital, in a chain of disastrous decisions that will be studied in military academies. The Ukrainian Armed Forces, for their part, lost control of Kherson in a flash, opening a door to the invader on the southern flank in the early stages of the conflict. The fall of this city, located at the mouth of the Dnieper River in the Black Sea, is one of the few actions for which the opposition has dared to criticize the government.

Kherson was the first weighty Ukrainian city won by Russian troops in this war. It happened on March 2, just six days after Vladimir Putin announced the start of the invasion. Then another big city, Mariupol (400,000 inhabitants), fell after a siege that lasted almost three months and devastated it. But if the Ukraine lost this city —after a Numantine resistance that burned many enemy resources— it was partly because the southern flank, that of Kherson, was blocked. European Solidarity, the main opposition party in the Ukrainian Parliament, has reiterated in recent weeks that when the war ends it will demand an explanation for what happened in Kherson.

On the agricultural plains of Kherson there are steady small Ukrainian advances, the prelude to kyiv’s biggest counteroffensive in the war, which is expected to take place in the coming weeks. Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk called on people in Russian-occupied areas of Kherson province on Sunday to leave. The spokeswoman for the Armed Forces in southern Ukraine, Natalia Humeniuk, confirmed on Monday that in the face of the upcoming offensive, these people will be in danger. The spokeswoman acknowledged that, despite Vereschuk’s warning, the truth is that there are few options for those affected to be evacuated to the west because Russia blocks the transit of citizens.

The ultimate goal is to liberate the city, but above all it is not to make it easier for Russia to build up a military force there that threatens neighboring Odessa and besieges Zaporizhia to the south. “Kherson is critical because it is the only territory that Russia controls west of the Dnieper River,” the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) explains in one of its daily reports: “If Russia consolidates its positions in Kherson, he will have a very strong bastion from which to launch future invasions.”

On the defeat in Kherson silence prevails on the part of the Ukrainian authorities. Unlike kyiv, where few imagined Russia would attack, the cities on the Black Sea coast had Russian military might practically at home: on the Crimean peninsula. Kherson fell because the bridges that cross the Dnieper and those that connect the province with the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014 remained intact. the region.

Volodymyr Dubobik, director of the Center for International Studies (CIS) in Odessa, confirms that the defense of Kherson “was poorly planned and even worse executed.” And he adds another factor, the possibility that the Russians had internal collaboration in this city: “There are rumors about certain people who betrayed Ukraine in the first hours and days of the war. Many patriots wanted to defend the city and the region, but they did not have the opportunity”. US Republican Congresswoman Victoria Spartz, of Ukrainian origin, caused an earthquake last week by accusing Zelensky’s bureau chief, Andrii Yermak, of working for Moscow and being ultimately responsible for the poor response in Kherson.

A source close to the 59th Motorized Brigade of the Ukrainian Army, stationed in the province, assures EL PAÍS that many volunteers from the Territorial Defense Forces —militarized civilian units deployed in their geographical areas, giving them the advantage of knowing the terrain— they went to the local authorities to be supplied with weapons. This is what was happening in the rest of the country, but in Kherson they left in many cases empty-handed, according to these sources. Moscow appointed Volodymyr Saldo, a former mayor of the city and former deputy of the pro-Russian Party of Regions, as the new governor of the area. Saldo’s election confirmed to many that the enemy had already infiltrated.

Russian debacle in kyiv

In kyiv, the opposite happened: bridges were blown up, the Territorial Defense Forces reacted quickly and Russian infiltrators in the very center of the capital were killed. Ukraine continues to exist as an independent state because kyiv was not taken. And this is mainly because it was Russia that lost the fight, with gross errors, as summed up by US Lieutenant Colonel Alex Vershinin in an analysis for the Harvard Kennedy School: “The advance on kyiv seemed to be based entirely on the premise of that the elites and the population would support the invasion, or at least not resist. In the first days of the invasion, the Russian Army did not even bother to secure the townships on its route of advance.”

The war began in the early hours of February 24 when half a thousand Russian elite paratroopers were airlifted by surprise helicopters to Antonov airport in Gostomel. Its objective, unsuccessful, was to ensure that the airfield could be used for the landing of troops. This municipality to the north of the capital is one of the angles of the triangle of horrors formed together with Irpin and Bucha. In the territory delimited by these three urban centers, some of the worst war crimes of which the invader is accused took place.

In Gostomel there are the necessary testimonies to understand the barbarism and the mistaken Russian strategy to occupy kyiv. Ania Roman, an official of the Gostomel City Council, recalls that in the first week of the invasion, those first elite Russian soldiers of the 31st Air Assault Brigade, well prepared for war, were relieved by poorly equipped and inexperienced regular units: “With the neighbors we heard some how they said among themselves that they were afraid for when they faced the Armed Forces [ucranias]”.

At that time they had only faced a Rapid Reaction Brigade of the National Guard, a militarized unit of the Ministry of the Interior trained by NATO since the separation war of Donbas (in the east) broke out in 2014. Andrew McGregor, director of the Canadian security research center Aberfoyle, reported that the Russians did not even know that this squad was in the area. Vershinin adds another inexplicable error: that the invader’s air superiority did not kill the few Ukrainian fighters that ended up being decisive in the defense.

The destruction is present in every corner of Gostomel, from the vicinity of the airport to the Sviatoshin forest road, which leads to kyiv, and which continues to be wound by trenches dug in mid-March by the 241st Brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces. . In the first week of that month, the men of the 241st Brigade covered the backs of the National Guard and the Armed Forces, all fighting, house by house, against the Russian special forces on the outskirts of kyiv. The highest floors of many buildings in Gostomel are a cheese Gruyèrepierced by Russian attempts to nullify the Ukrainian defense.

“The Russians didn’t have a plan B, so they stayed isolated in the suburbs of kyiv, becoming fair game ducks for the more agile Ukrainian units,” explains Dubobik. There is a military rule that a defending Army has a three-to-one strength advantage to begin with. In the complexity of an urban area like kyiv, the advantage becomes 10 to one, former US Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers commented last June at a conference of the Center for International Strategy Studies. The invading units were always outmatched because they did not even have the proper artillery and tank support.

The battle ended when it became clear that Russian assistance would not come, summarizes Dubobik. Image of the Russian disaster in kyiv was the famous convoy of armor, supplies and 15,000 soldiers that stretched along 65 kilometers of road through Belarus. Few of those units reached the Ukrainian capital, punished by the drones and the resistance they found in the regions around the capital and that Russia did not contemplate.

Natasha Piroh’s experience illustrates what happened. Piroh, a resident of Gostomel, was waiting last Saturday for a bus to take her to kyiv, at a stop in front of which the remains of a Soviet T-64 tank, painted in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, still rest. Piroh fled the township on the first day of the invasion. She moved to relatives’ house in a village near Borodianka, northeast of the capital. This town was also occupied, but without the Russians securing her position. The local partisan network organized the rapid evacuation of civilians. Piroh recounts how he got out of it: “There were two Russian road checkpoints. We had to wait for them to be nullified by our Armed Forces at the front and by the local Territorial Defense forces behind them. When we crossed, a security perimeter was immediately established by the local Territorial Defense Forces.”

If Kherson is a wound to national pride, preserving kyiv has been the greatest Ukrainian success to date, especially considering that there were even plans to move the capital de facto from free Ukraine to Lviv, in the west of the country. Four months later, the leaders of the allied countries can regularly visit Zelensky in the city, sending the message that the European Union will also stand up to Russia.

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