West’s Himars opened the door to military’s liberation of Kherson
Celebrations put paid to scepticism among Western allies that Ukraine could pull off such an operation
The first sign that Vladimir Putin’s “liberation” of Kherson might not be permanent came on a hot evening last June, when an almighty explosion rocked the city’s outskirts. Despite the spectacular fireball that lit up the night sky, Russian forces insisted there was nothing much to see. An agricultural warehouse had somehow caught ablaze, they claimed, igniting stocks of combustible fertiliser inside.
Ukraine had a different explanation for the fireworks. According to Mykhaylo Podolyak, a presidential aide, it was one of the very first uses of Kyiv’s new US-supplied Himars missiles, which can land 200lbs of explosives on to a dinner table-sized target from 50 miles. Far from being a random strike, it had wiped out a Russian ammunition dump previously beyond reach – a “reality collision”, as Mr Podolyak put it, for Putin’s forces.
In the months that followed, “General Himars”, as the high mobility artillery rocket system is colloquially known, paid many more visits to Kherson, wreaking havoc on the bridges, supply depots and command HQs that Russia relied on to keep it subdued. On social media, the strikes were gleefully called “Himars O’clock” – chiming a timeline that finally ended in the small hours of Friday, when Russia withdrew its 30,000 troops from the city.
Last night, celebrations in Kherson were in full swing, the only projectiles in the air being champagne corks popping in the city’s main square. What had been just a few huddles of revellers on Friday became large crowds by yesterday, as fears that the Russian withdrawal could be a feint began to ease.
“Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes! Glory to the Nation,” shouted the crowd, as the national anthem was sung, the Ukrainian flag waved, and cars blasting horns formed jubilant motorcades.
This weekend’s scenes contrast starkly with the despair in the city eight months ago, when it became the first of Ukraine’s major centres to fall. Russian troops raised their flag there on March 2 – just a week into the invasion – having taken it with relative ease. Amid reports that collaborators had prevented key routes to the city being defended properly, it suggested that Ukrainian resistance – no matter how spirited – would ultimately prove futile.
In early March, locals held daily protests in the city’s main square, shouting “Fascist occupiers!” at Russian paramilitary police. At first, they were tolerated, the security forces apparently bemused at the lack of welcome. Within weeks, though, the protests were broken up with tear gas and live fire, the ringleaders hunted down. Meanwhile, “Russification” was under way, with Ukrainian media banned, the rouble introduced and Kremlin officials installed in city hall along with local collaborators.
From then on, life in occupied Kherson served as a warning to the rest of Ukraine not to succumb to the same fate. Anyone suspected of pro-Ukrainian sympathies risked jail and torture. With many business owners having fled or shut their shops, the city’s commerce shrunk to the level of a car boot sale, with food and medicines sold at black market prices on the streets.
Many were reminded of the grim days after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the closure of Kherson’s shipbuilding yards ground economic life almost to a halt. As in Soviet times, Kherson’s new overlords did not feel
bound to respect private property rights. When Elena left Kherson, she instructed her hotel staff to switch off the water and electricity, after receiving a phone call from a Kremlin apparatchik who said his colleagues wanted to billet there.
They moved in anyway. With the Kremlin’s grip tightening, there was little sign of organised resistance to the occupation, beyond anti-Russian graffiti on street corners.
By the summer, that had changed – although the resistance campaign bore the hallmark of seasoned professionals rather than ordinary people. In June, a car bomb in a Kherson square killed Dmytro Savluchenko, a pro-Russian activist appointed as a youth minister. Other officials were gunned down and cafes used by Russian troops bombed. “Wanted” posters were put up of alleged collaborators. Others showed a Himars launch vehicle, warning: “Occupier, leave now – or this Himars will help you.”
Meanwhile, a stalemate prevailed on the front lines north and west of Kherson towards the Ukrainian-held cities of Zaporizhzhia and Mykolaiv.
Ukrainian troops found themselves trying to press forward over a Flanders’ style no-mans’ land of flat wheatfields, which dug-in Russian forces could easily defend.
The Himars attacks that started in June helped break that deadlock and, by mid-July, Kyiv advised Kherson’s remaining residents to leave, ahead of a major operation to “deoccupy” the city.
A few days later, “General Himars” was in action again, tearing four large holes in the Antonovsky Bridge, one of the main supply routes over the River Dnipro. In late August, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, announced that the counter-offensive had begun in earnest, declaring: “The occupiers should know: we will oust them to the border. To our border, the line of which has not changed.”
Yet there was scepticism among Kyiv’s Western allies that Ukraine could pull off such a mission, given that it could lead to thousands of troops dying in bloody urban combat. Some believed it was a feint to distract Russian forces from Ukraine’s northeastern counter-offensive in September, which reclaimed vast amounts of territory around Kharkiv and Izyum. Others feared the mission was a potentially dangerous overreach, with Kyiv desperate to notch up a major victory before winter closed in.
Even outside of Kherson, the counter-offensive proved slow and costly, with many towns and villages in the surrounding countryside being fiercely contested. In one battle in September around Davydov Brod, a small but strategic village north of Kherson, 150 Ukrainians and more than 600 Russians were killed in a single day, military sources said.
Meanwhile, Russia staged referendums in Kherson and other occupied territories on whether to become part of Russia, which were denounced as “shams” by Western governments. That month, Putin also announced a mobilisation of 350,000 reservists, indicating that he had every intention of carrying on the fight.
By early October, though, Ukrainian troops began a breakthrough, taking around 50 villages in just two days and reaching the western bank of the Dnipro. Russian troops were then forced to regroup because of the threats to their supply lines. That also paved the way for Moscow to start ordering civilians to evacuate from Kherson.
Until this week, Ukrainian forces were still bracing themselves for a very hard fight to retake the city. Last weekend, at a base near Bereznehuvate, 60 miles north of Kherson, one Ukrainian commander said he expected months more fighting.
“Taking Kherson will be a great morale booster for our troops and also show our Western partners that they are not giving their weapons away for nothing,” he said. “The Russians will fight hard for it, as they can’t afford to lose it. But we don’t need to invade the city – we can just surround it and sit t out – they wouldn’t last more than a month.”
On Wednesday, however, Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, announced that troops would withdraw from Kherson, saying the move was to protect the lives of both Russian soldiers and Kherson’s civilians. The move went ahead on Friday despite Kyiv warning that it could be a ruse to lure Ukrainian forces into a trap.
Having evacuated to the eastern side of the River Dnipro, Russian forces are still in a position to rain artillery on to Ukrainian troops
But Alina Frolova, a former Ukrainian deputy defence minister and deputy chairman of the Centre for Defence Strategies, a think tank, said it would be hard for Russia to maintain hostilities as supply lines were now overstretched.
“I don’t think this is the end, but it’s certainly a major stage,” she added. The question now, she said, was whether Ukraine would move troops up from Kherson to join those fighting in the eastern Donbas, or try to take nearby Crimea, which was annexed by Russia in 2014.
Some analysts say that Kyiv would be best off leaving Crimea in Moscow’s hands, arguing that the peninsula has long been a stronghold of pro-Russian feeling. Large numbers of retired Russian naval staff live there, enjoying its balmy climes. And since annexation in 2014, the Kremlin has encouraged an estimated half a million more Russians to settle there, swelling the population to nearly 2.5 million.
Its days as a “Black Sea Benidorm” may now be numbered. According to Ms Frolova, Ukraine has already drawn up plans to repatriate the new arrivals if and when it retakes Crimea.
“Anybody who settled there after 2014 entered the country illegally, in our view, so they will be asked to leave,” she said.
“There may be people there who don’t support us, but we are not going to back down just because the place was taken from us for eight years.”