Russian forces are repeatedly trying to seize a foothold across Ukraine’s Dnipro River, dispatching troops on high-casualty missions to gain territory for future peace negotiations, according to the Ukrainian governor of Kherson region.
Oleksandr Prokudin said Russian forces were trying to cross in four locations to justify their claim to the whole oblast, one of four Ukrainian regions that Moscow says it wants to incorporate.
“Every single day they are trying to cross,” Prokudin said, while on a working visit to the UK. “We heard from our intelligence, that the Russian deputy commander told troops in the area that they had to force the river at any cost, though not all the soldiers are willing to do that.”
The governor, directly appointed by the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said his understanding was that Russian soldiers had been told “they have to make the right [western] bank part of the negotiation” by capturing a village across the river, though so far they had failed to do so.
Casualties had been high, Prokudin continued, and the attackers were killed or injured almost immediately. “The Russians completely understand it is a suicidal mission,” he said. Documents recovered from soldiers showed that some were recent recruits while others had fought for more than two years in Ukraine, he added.
Russia had largely captured the Kherson region, which includes territory on both sides of the Dnipro River, in the early stages of the war, but was forced to retreat from the west bank, including the city of Kherson, in November 2022 because it was proving impossible to supply it.
Nevertheless, a few weeks before that, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, unilaterally announced the annexation of the entire region as well as three others, declaring in the Kremlin that people who lived in those regions were “our citizens for ever”.
Kherson is particularly important because it straddles the mouth of the country’s main river. Before the war it had a population of about 1 million, but only about 155,000 remain on the Ukrainian-controlled side, with constant drone and artillery attacks continuing in the frontline regions.
Those territorial claims have not been forgotten by Russia, which is trying to gain as much land in Ukraine as it can ahead of any peace negotiations. Though Ukraine has said repeatedly it will not formally surrender territory, the country’s leadership knows it is unable to win back much land on the battlefield.
Prokudin said he thought Russia was trying to “tick a box” to show that “we are present on the right bank”, and so press a claim for the whole region. He added that the struggle had become particularly urgent as various peace negotiations began. Last month, the US began direct discussions with Russia, largely marginalising Ukraine.
Russian offensives are taking place in four locations: across the marshy islands at the mouth of the Dnipro, a treacherous grey zone; the Antonivka road and rail bridges east of Kherson city; and beyond that, the villages of Lvove and Zmiivka, the latter of which is upstream of the destroyed Nova Kakhovka dam.
The Kherson governor said he thought there were three possible future scenarios for the end of the war, including one where Zelenskyy was replaced by a pro-Russian president and the country ended up ceding territories to Moscow, meaning that “the borders of Russia would shift closer to Europe”.
The most favourable, he added, was one in which Ukraine received firm security guarantees from Europe and elsewhere as part of a negotiated peace settlement, but he questioned if Europe was ready to do so without the US.
That left what he said was the “most probable” scenario – “a freezing of the conflict at the existing frontline”, though he feared that the danger for Ukraine there would be that it would allow Russia “time to regroup and restock ammunition”.
Prokudin was in the UK to sign an economic partnership agreement with Lincolnshire council. Both Kherson and Lincolnshire are predominantly agricultural regions and the English county has a small Ukrainian population, having taken in 1,000 refugees under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.
