The Ukrainian army approaches the city of Kherson with little Russian resistance

The Ukrainian army is getting closer to the city of Kherson, the only city in the country that Russia controls on the western bank of the Dnieper River and whose capture was the greatest success for the Kremlin at the beginning of the war on February 24. .

After a few days of caution given the ground they were gaining, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Tuesday night that his men are making "quite rapid and important" advances in the south, where the Kherson region is located.

In his daily speech, the president cited eight towns in that territory that have been recovered in the last few hours and said that there are dozens that have already won in other regions such as Kharkov, Lugansk or Donetsk.

The Ukrainian offensive is managing to prevent the Russian Army from sending ammunition, defense equipment or more men to the Kherson front line, according to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which agrees that the advances of the local troops in that region are “significant”.

Until Tuesday night, both the government and the kyiv army had fled from triumphalism.

Social networks are burning, however, with videos of local soldiers raising the blue and yellow flag in each enclave they recover.

The inhabitants receive them, greet them and, as has happened in other recovered areas of the country, offer them what little they have.

The Ukrainian advances take place on the two open war fronts, both in the east and in the south.

These are territories invaded by Kremlin troops that belong to one of the four regions (Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson) that Moscow considers unilaterally — and illegally — as part of Russia since last Friday.

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"More and more occupants are trying to escape," Zelensky said Monday, his tone more measured than on Tuesday.

“The offensive advance of our army and all our defenders continued today.

There are new liberated enclaves in various regions,” he added.

Although he also acknowledged that "fierce fighting continues in many areas of the front."

According to the videos released, the local Army does not run into excessive resistance from the Russians, whose strategy seems to be to continue launching long-distance missiles against non-military targets.

That has been the case in recent hours, with the attack on railway facilities in the city of Kharkov, in the northeast, in which an employee died on Tuesday, as reported by the national train company.

It also does so repeatedly against the city of Zaporizhia, where 31 people were killed on Friday after the launch of several Russian model S-300 missiles against a convoy of civilian vehicles, according to kyiv.

Difficult Russian withdrawal

In the last hours of this Tuesday, Russian troops launched a total of 114 projectiles without causing fatalities in the Zaporizhia region, as reported on his Telegram channel by the governor, Oleksandr Staruj.

He also insists that the lack of security for the caravans after Friday's attack, together with a greater zeal of the invader in the controls, prevents the flow of escapes of Ukrainian civilians.

If before hundreds of inhabitants did it every day, this Monday, for example, only 43 did it, of which 11 were minors.

Since Russia considers these territories as its own, it considers its neighbors as Russians and has ordered that they be enlisted to fight in the ranks of the Kremlin troops.

That is why more and more men between the ages of 18 and 35 are trying to escape to the area controlled by kyiv.

In the northeast, the Ukrainians are gaining positions east of the Oskil River (Kharkov area) towards the Lugansk border, whose 26,000 square kilometers are almost entirely in Russian hands.

The idea is to try to advance towards Lugansk from Kharkov and from Donetsk, where over the weekend the local troops already took over the enclave of Liman, a strategic point for the supply and logistics of the invading army.

The main objective is to recover the cities of Lisichansk and Severodonetsk (in the Lugansk region), separated only by the Donets River and occupied by the Russians for three months after intense fighting and heavy losses on both sides.

In Kherson, Ukrainian soldiers already took up positions in Dudchani on Monday, about 125 kilometers from the regional capital.

These advances, like those announced by Zelensky on Tuesday, could jeopardize Russian logistics to keep its troops on the right bank of the Dnieper River, where Kherson is the only major city they occupy.

In addition, kyiv has bombed and disabled the bridges of that city so that they cannot be used in their withdrawal by the Russians in case they want to withdraw with weapons and tanks towards the eastern shore, where their positions are firmer.

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