- Kyiv's troops try to establish themselves on the eastern bank of the river to reactivate the counteroffensive to the south.
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| Fighting on the Kinburn Peninsula. |
The Ukrainian army launches an offensive on the Kinburn Peninsula to control the mouth of the Dnieper
Break the natural barrier of the Dnieper and reactivate the counteroffensive in southern Ukraine. That is the objective of the Ukrainian army before winter worsens and for this, it is already launching skirmishes at various points of the river.
The most important offensive takes place at the mouth of the Dnieper, specifically on the Kinburn peninsula, a strategic enclave for Kyiv in its attempt to establish a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the river.
The Southern Operational Command of Ukraine reported on Monday an operation to expel Russian forces from the western end of that peninsula and stressed that a storm at sea was helping Ukrainian troops.
However, the Russian army is facing this offensive and, for the moment, Ukraine has not confirmed that it has managed to settle on that peninsula.
"Russian forces are being brought there from the occupied territory. So they can afford to replenish reserves even after we inflict damage," Natalia Humeniuk, spokeswoman for the Ukrainian Operational Command South, has acknowledged, according to The Kyiv newspaper. Independent.
It's been a week since Zelensky's army released a video in which Ukrainian troops crossed the mouth of the Dnieper in speedboats and stepped onto Russian-occupied territory at the tip of the Kinburn Peninsula.
Those images were a warning to the Kremlin, which has been forced to reinforce that southern flank and move troops to an inhospitable, windswept peninsula with sparse vegetation and marshes.
Before the war, the Kinburn Peninsula was a nature reserve of high ecological value, visited by many hikers and ornithologists. The tip of that peninsula is a narrow strip of land barely six kilometers wide, surrounded on one side by the Dnieper estuary and on the other by the Black Sea, which belongs to the Nicolaiev region. In fact, it is the last territory in that region still occupied by the Russian army, while the rest of the peninsula belongs to the Kherson region.
Satellite images show that Russian forces are establishing defensive positions at the entrance to that peninsula to prevent a hypothetical amphibious landing of Ukrainian troops from progressing toward the occupied Kherson region.
Control naval access to Kherson
According to military analysts, establishing themselves on the Kinburn Peninsula would not only allow Kyiv to establish a bridgehead across the Dnieper, but it would also allow it to dominate the mouth of the river and thus control the access of ships to the city of Kherson.
In addition, it would allow Ukrainian forces to alleviate Russian attacks against the Nicolaiev region and the Black Sea coast, as Russia had established artillery units on that strip of land to launch missile attacks against Ukrainian territory, including the city of Odesa, just 40 kilometers from the western end of the Kinburn Peninsula.
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