The vital southern province of Kherson, which is partially under the control of Russia, will see “the heaviest of battles,” as per a senior Ukrainian official, who also said that Russia’s military is fortifying itself to stave off advancing Ukrainian troops.
The largest metropolitan centre Moscow still controls since conquering it back in the invasion of Ukraine eight months back is Kherson, the region’s principal city and river port, which had a pre-war population of around 280,000.
Since the early of October, when Moscow claimed to have annexed Kherson and three other provinces, a move condemned by 143 countries at the UN as an “attempted illegal annexation”, Ukrainian army does not seem to have made much improvements in their counteroffensive in Kherson.
In a video posted online on the night of Tuesday, Oleksiy Arestovych, a counsellor to the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a statement that, “With Kherson everything is clear. The Russians are replenishing, empowering their grouping there.”
Arestovych, who did not specify when the war would take place, said that, “It means that nobody is preparing to withdraw. On the contrary, the heaviest of wars is going to take place for Kherson.”
Kherson is one of the most vital province in terms of strategy out of the four(4) that Russian President Vladimir Putin declares to have been annexed. Both the mouth of massive river that divides Ukraine, the Dnipro as well as the single land access point to the peninsula of Crimea that Russia annexed back in 2014 are under its authority.
At the same time, over thousands of individuals have been evacuated by vessel to the eastern bank of Dnipro from the West bank of the Kherson, which is administered by a Moscow-supported government, after receiving TV warnings that the Kyiv army was ready to attack the city.