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These are images of a triumphant entry that residents of the Kherson region are spreading on social media. Old women, with tears in their eyes, embrace young, bearded soldiers whose faces show the tensions of the past weeks. “Guys, where have you been?” ask the Ukrainian citizens.

Armored passenger cars roll past farms. Farmers line the road and wave to the soldiers on the tanks. Blue and yellow flags are being taken from shelters everywhere. In Kherson, the provincial capital, a man with a Ukrainian flag on the roof of a car is driven through the streets.

On the Freedom Square in front of the imposing regional government building, a few soldiers crowd around, who are the first to arrive in uniform in uniform.

The Russians dismantled the flagpole in front of the provincial building because the trident, the Ukrainian national emblem, was on the point. All other Ukrainian symbols have also been removed. But even before the arrival of the first soldiers, residents decorated the spacious Freedom Square with blue and yellow flags and ribbons.

Civilians stood in the way of the Russians

What a difference with February 24, the first day of the war. When the Russian armored cars drove into Kherson, it was not the soldiers who stood in the way, but the civilians. The people protested loudly against the invaders. A Ukrainian climbed onto a moving infantry fighting vehicle bearing the Z symbol and waved a blue-and-yellow flag as he reached the top. The Russians probably imagined the ‘liberation’ of the city differently.

They gradually suppressed the demonstrations and countless unruly Ukrainians disappeared into prisons and torture chambers. Tens of thousands, many of them children, were evacuated, as the Russians euphemistically put it, and put in so-called filter camps. There they wanted to separate the wheat from the chaff, that is, to separate the incorrigible Ukrainian nationalists from the pro-Russian people. The latter were assigned residence in Russia, while the former were held captive in a network of camps spread across the Russian Federation.

Russian television proudly showed Ukrainian orphans who now have to be forcibly Russified. They were handed over to Russian adoptive parents. Everything Ukrainian, in addition to national symbols, especially the language, should be erased. The Russian curriculum was introduced in the schools. The Russians hung huge posters everywhere. They show a blond girl, dressed in white, with the Russian tricolor in her hands. Next to it is written in large letters: “Russia is here forever.”

Nothing better illustrates the absurd lies of the Russian leadership and their Ukrainian lackeys than these posters now being ripped from billboards by civilians in Kherson. Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops called on all remaining Russian soldiers on the western bank of the Dnipro to surrender immediately. There are reports that the Russians simply advised in time the fighters who did not make it to the river, which in some places was almost a kilometer wide, to put on civilian clothes and somehow escape.

Before the war, the city of Kherson had almost 300,000 inhabitants. The Russians recently announced that they would also evacuate civilians on both sides of the Dnipro in a swath of 15 kilometers deep. They once said that they had already brought 70,000 people to the East Bank.

So it is completely unclear how many people still live in the area, especially since countless civilians have fled to the Ukraine-controlled zones during the eight-month occupation. There was a lot of corruption involved as the Ukrainians had to bribe the Russian officers at the roadblocks. A few Russians deserved a golden nose with such actions.

The only way out of the hopeless situation

There are three border crossings across the Dnipro in the Kherson region: a road bridge and a railway bridge, both of which the Russians blew up on Friday to stop Ukraine’s advance. However, it is unclear what happened to the third junction, the Kachowka Dam and the hydroelectric power station a little further away.

The withdrawal from Kherson represents a major victory for the Ukrainians. It was the only way out of an increasingly hopeless situation for the Russian armed forces. Because the Ukrainians have made most of the three crossings useless for heavy trucks in recent months by firing GPS-guided Himars missiles, the Russian forces on the western bank have been short of supplies.

As a result of the retreat, the length of the front has now been considerably shortened for both combatants. The southern front now runs for about 300 kilometers along the Dnipro and the large reservoir of Kachowka. Since this is an almost insurmountable natural obstacle, it is likely that the war is now shifting more to the northeast, in the region of the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant and in the Donbass. The Ukrainians have been standing there on the east side of the great river since the beginning of the war.

Crimea is vulnerable

The long-term goal of the Ukrainian counter-offensive is to recapture the territories lost since February 24 and the Crimean peninsula, which Russia occupied in 2014 in violation of international law. Crimea is vulnerable because there are only two axes through which the Russians can supply the peninsula: the Kerch Bridge, which connects Crimea directly to mainland Russia, and the road that leads from Russia along the Sea of ​​Azov via Mariupol and Melitopol to Crimea.

The Ukrainians recently severely damaged the Kerch Bridge; and the land bridge via Mariupol is less than 80 kilometers wide at its thinnest point. The Ukrainians will certainly try to completely cut off supplies to Crimea. It wasn’t until Wednesday that US President Biden reported that America had delivered not only Himars missiles to Kiev, but also GPS-guided ATACMS missiles with a range of about 300 kilometers. This means that the entire Crimean peninsula and the strategically important Kerch Bridge are within the effective range of the Ukrainian missile artillery.