KHERSON, Ukraine — President Volodymyr Zelenskyy triumphantly walked the streets of the newly liberated metropolis of Kherson on Monday, hailing Russia’s withdrawal because the “beginning of the end of the war,” but in addition acknowledging the heavy worth Ukrainian troops are paying of their grinding effort to push again the invaders.
The retaking of Kherson was one in all Ukraine’s greatest successes within the almost 9-month-old warfare, dealing one other stinging blow to the Kremlin. It might function a springboard for extra advances into occupied territory.
President Biden referred to as it a “significant victory” for Ukraine.
“I can do nothing but applaud the courage, determination and capacity of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian military,” he mentioned on the sidelines of a Group of 20 summit in Indonesia. “They’ve really been amazing. … we’re going to continue to provide the capability for the Ukrainian people to defend themselves.”
Large components of japanese and southern Ukraine are nonetheless below Russian management, and the town of Kherson itself stays inside attain of Moscow’s shells and missiles. Heavy combating continued elsewhere in Ukraine. Russia’s state information company RIA Novosti reported the city of Oleshky, in Russian-held territory throughout the Dnieper River from Kherson, got here below heavy artillery hearth.
Zelenskyy awarded medals to troopers in Kherson and posed with them for selfies whereas hanging a defiant observe.
“This is the beginning of the end of the war,” he mentioned. “We are step by step coming to all the temporarily occupied territories.”
But he additionally grimly famous the combating “took the best heroes of our country.”
The finish of Russia’s occupation of the town — the one provincial capital seized for the reason that February invasion — has sparked days of celebration. But as winter approaches, its remaining 80,000 residents are with out warmth, water and electrical energy, and quick on meals and medication. Zelenskyy says the town is laced with booby traps and mines. And Ukrainian authorities say there are indicators of atrocities rising, simply as in different liberated areas.
Russian forces “destroyed everything in their path, wrecked the entire electricity network,” he mentioned. Communications operators mentioned cellphone service was being restored and the regional governor mentioned a public wi-fi web entry level would start working Tuesday.
The Institute for the Study of War mentioned Ukraine has received “an important victory” in Kherson and different areas west of the Dnieper, however the Washington-based suppose tank famous that “it has by no means liberated the minimum territory essential to its future security and economic survival.”
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that Moscow shouldn’t be underestimated.
“The Russian armed forces retain significant capability as well as a large number of troops, and Russia has demonstrated their willingness to bear significant losses,” he mentioned in The Hague.
In Ankara, Turkey, CIA Director Bill Burns met together with his Russian intelligence counterpart, Sergei Naryshkin, to underscore the implications if Moscow had been to deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, in response to a White House National Security Council official.
The official, who was not approved to remark publicly and spoke on the situation of anonymity, mentioned Burns and Naryshkin, the pinnacle of Russia’s SVR spy company, didn’t talk about settlement of the warfare. Their assembly was the highest-ranking face-to-face engagement between U.S. and Russian officers since earlier than the invasion.
While U.S. officers have warned for months of the prospect that Russia might use weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine amid battlefield setbacks, Biden administration officers have repeatedly mentioned nothing has modified in U.S. intelligence assessments to counsel that Russian President Vladimir Putin has imminent plans to deploy nuclear weapons.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”