What do you mean, allow? The Ukrainians have been pushing Russian forces along the Kherson front hard for months. The actual river crossings were hit time and time and time again, but they have always been out of conventional artillery range, subject only to MLRS attacks from HIMARS/M270. There’s only so many HIMARS out there. Ukraine advanced very quickly yesterday, but they had to deal with lots of minefields, damaged road bridges, etc. There’s only so fast you can safely move forward. It was late in the day by the time they could have had 155mm guns or Grads in range of the crossings.
We of course don’t really know yet what sort of toll the Russians were made to pay for crossing the river. There was reportedly a lot of heaving shelling around the dam, which has been the best crossing for some months now ever since the Russians filled the lock with rubble. Also a lot of shelling of ferry landing locations nearer the city. I’ve seen no videos yet of those areas.
But for a while last night the rumours floating around Twitter suggested we might wake up to scenes akin to the Iraqi Highway of Death. At this point it appears nothing of the sort actually happened.
I hope that we can celebrate the fact that Kherson was taken without house to house fighting even if the cost is that most of the occupiers made it across the river.
preventing Russian advance to Odesa, which if brought under Russian control, would cut off Ukraine from access to Black Sea and ability to import/export by sea;
I was surprised to see video of Russian soldiers walking across the pontoon bridge. While probably out of range of regular artillery, it’s in range of HIMARS.
I saw videos reported to be artillery barrages directed at the retreating Russian forces. They didn’t “allow” those Russians to get away.
Besides, those guys are likely to end up trapped again. It would make sense if the next offensive is towards Melitopol, and then westward to liberate the left bank. Sure, they could retreat to Crimea, but that would be across a narrow strait. It would also mean abandoning the parts of the left bank of the Dnieper river that are west of the crossing to Crimea.
Joe Haldeman was a combat engineer in Vietnam; he wrote once that the ground-pounders would tend to stay away from tanks because they would always be targeted if and when a firefight started.
People are making fun of how on the day of “annexation” Putin declared that Kherson was part of Russia forever, and now they’ve “voluntarily” withdrawn after such a short period of time. But that’s not really fair. Kherson was annexed for 50% of one British PM’s time in government, and 100% of the next’s. Admittedly, that would be more impressive if we were talking about Thatcher and Blair as opposed to Truss and Sunak, but still.
For those keeping score at home, 1 Putin Forever = 6 Scaramuccis.
In brief, he maintains Ukrainian armed forces only ‘mistake’ in allowing so many Russians to leave alive was Ukr. commanders were preparing for the Russians to make a sane, phased, fighting withdrawal and therefore planned to proceed methodically while doing things like clearing villages and minefields. They were not prepared for every Russian to leave their positions and much of their equipment behind all at once. But it seems Russian incompetence worked in their favor this time.
So they were too busy gathering up left behind military equipment to bother with soldiers that didn’t want to fight in the first place. Sounds plausible enough.
From reports I’ve read, Ukraine has been very solicitous of their HIMARS units. Which makes sense - they’re a real advantage, but not easy to replace if lost. This means that they are being used mostly in ‘shoot and scoot’ mode to reduce potential losses to counter-battery fire. This is much safer, but trades concentrated offense for defense. So they are not going to be particularly useful in putting saturation fire on a target. For that Ukraine needed to get closer and get tube artillery in range and apparently that never happened before the Russians bugged out.
Against the new GMLRS-AW rockets, though, those Russian troops would still be better off inside an armored vehicle.
The rocket (fired by HIMARS) sprays 180,000 tungsten pellets at infantry in the open. Those would shred the human body, but might not penetrate a BMP’s steel.
From what I understand, “Lettuce” is currently the most scientific way to measure political timespans. According to wikipedia 1 lettuce = 10 days. Kherson was occupied from 2. march to 11. november, so 8 months and 9 days. If we approximate 1 month = 3 lettuces, we get
