Me too. It makes perfect sense because rivers meander. It just never occurred to me.
It’s like WWII Eastern Front in color:
Frikin’ hell. The Ukrainians do NOT appear to be short of ammo.
The Russians had lots of ammo once upon a time.
Pretty sure those are Grad (“Hail”) MLRS. 40 rockets per launcher, 20 kilo warhead per rocket, range 20-30km. Not at all accurate, but if you want to blanket an area where, say, just to pick a random hypothetical example, troops are collecting to board ferries to cross a river, pretty devastating if you can fire off a really big volley. This is pretty much the most common Soviet MLRS, and absolutely ridiculous numbers of the rockets have been produced. The list of current operators on the Wikipedia page is ~70 countries. Ammo is not hard to come by.
That’s terrifying.
Wow, Zelensky can sure drive home a message Wonderful tribute to the soldiers sacrificing so much for Ukraine.
I was unable to watch the news this morning. Are we at the shooting fish in a barrel as Russian troops mass at both crossings phase yet?
preliminary twitter et al scanning leads me to believe that NO, this has not happened … best guess at this stage is that most of the flesh made it across the Dniepro, but lots of heavy assets were left behind, especially most all of “towed-artillery”
I get the impression most of the Russians have left.
Some wounded were left behind. Ukraine is urging any Russian soldiers in Kherson City to surrender and they’ll be treated well.
The city seems to be liberated.
The bridge was partially destroyed by the retreating Russians.
Crowds gather in city centre.
Meanwhile over on the border of the Luhansk Oblast, things are not going particularly well for Russia either…
Those trenches turned out to be useful, didn’t they?
It’s not clear whether there are any Russian forces left north of the river. Maybe the exodus happened quicker than the Ukrainian defense minister anticipated. There are several Z-trucks visible in the Kherson square crowd video that were evidently abandoned.
I would go so far as to say that the retreat from Kherson might be the militarily most impressive thing the Russians have done so far in this war. It appears that they’ve gotten nearly all their forces out intact and in reasonably good order. I was not expecting that. We’ll see over the next few days just how much materiel has been abandoned, but the first flood of videos that’s appearing is all civilians hugging Ukrainian soldiers and singing and flags, not captured T-72s and BTRs.
Being the end of World War I, is 11/11 noted in eastern Europe?
Side note: I said to DesertRoomie, “Kherson City’s been liberated.”
“From what?”
“Russians.”
“Russians in Carson City?” was when I looked up and saw she had earphones on.
Why did the Ukrainians allow this? Those retreating Russians were not all mobniks (untrained draftees). Many of them were well trained professional soldiers, who will continue to fight hard , even it’s from the other side of the river. .
The river is within range of the Ukrainian artillery. hitting individual boats would be difficult, but the bridges and pontoons should be easy to hit, aren’t they?
I am sure that they did not “spare” the russians …
Probably a set of limitations … but I agree … there you could have done more damage in 1-2 days than on other places in 1-2 weeks or months