There has been much talk in 'western' media about a Ukrainian offensive in the southern Kherson region. However most of the claims made about it seem to be divorced from the observable realities on the ground. The detailed look below provides that there is no such offensive and that there is little chance that there will ever be one.
The purported offensive has for months been a core talking point:
- Ukraine Battle Expands as Kyiv Launches Counteroffensive – New York Times – May 29, 2022
- Ukraine Regains Some Territory in Counter-Offensive in Kherson Area – Defence Ministry – Reuters – Jun 9, 2022
- Near Kherson, Ukrainians regain territory in major counteroffensive – Washington Post – Jun 29, 2022
- Ukraine prepares a counter-offensive to retake Kherson province – Economist – Jul 3, 2022
- Kherson cut off: Ukrainian counter-offensive gaining momentum in southern city – Fox News – Jul 29, 2022
Lets look at the map of the Kherson area and how it has changed over time. LiveUAmap, the source used here for these maps, is know to be more in favor of Ukrainian claims than Russian ones. The red parts are held by Russian forces.
This is the Kherson area as depicted on May 13, 2022:
Source LiveUAmap 13.5. – bigger
This is the Kherson area as depicted on May 14, 2022:
Source LiveUAmap 14.5. – bigger
We see that the maintainers of LiveUAmap kept the front line as it was, but added a gray zone on the Ukrainian side. I am not sure what it is supposed to show. It may designate the extend to which forward Russian reconnaissance units had been observed during their February-March offensive in the area. Since then the gray area has for some become the 'success' of a 'Ukrainian counter-offensive'. But Russian forces had never held onto that gray zone nor was there any significant fighting about it.
This is the Kherson area as depicted today, August 12, 2022:
Source LiveUAmap 12.8. – bigger
I see two small differences between the May 14 map and the current one. On the west side the minor settlement of Pravdyne and the fields around it have changed hands.
Source LiveUAmap 14.5. – bigger
Source LiveUAmap 12.8. – bigger
Another change happened around a small river at the norther part of the front line south of Kvkaz. The May 14 front line there was simplified as being straight. The real front line ran along the winded Ingulets river in that area.
Source LiveUAmap 14.5. – bigger
At the beginning of June Ukrainian forces crossed the river around the towns Davydiv Brid, Bilohirka and Adriivka only to get slaughtered by Russian artillery. The area has since been no man's land.
Source LiveUAmap 12.8. – bigger
One small town retaken and a failed river crossing attempt is all the much vaunted Kherson offensive has achieved since May.
That may well be because, despite the noise, there has been and will be no Ukrainian Kherson offensive. For the Ukrainian leaders in Kiev that offensive is only a joke.
On August 9 Zelenski advisor Mikhail Podolyak talked with a Ukrainian language BBC outlet. The Ukrainian Ctrana online news site reported about it (machine translation):
Podolyak called the words about the counterattack on Kherson "part of the information and psychological operation"
Reports of counteroffensives of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the southern direction are part of the "information-psychological special operation."
This was stated by adviser to the head of the OP Mikhail Podolyak in an interview with the BBC.
"Was it the IPSO? Of course, today all public comments are part of the IPSO. We need to demoralize the Russian army. They must understand that there will always be a territory of fire," he said.
Nevertheless, Podolyak clarified that "the events on the Antonovsky bridge show that it is essential for us to liberate Kherson" (as the only regional center that was under the occupation of the Russian Federation after February 24).
"And therefore, our army is already taking certain actions for this today," he said.
That news did not reach the Washington Post propagandist David Ignatius. On August 11 he still lauded the non-existing 'southern offensive':
A southern offensive opens in the Ukraine war
The grinding war of attrition in Ukraine might be entering a new phase as the Ukrainian military prepares an offensive to recover occupied land in the southern region surrounding Kherson, and Russia escalates its rhetoric by charging that the United States “is directly involved in the conflict.”
Ukraine appears to have begun its new southern campaign with a bold attack Tuesday on a Russian air base in Crimea, along the Black Sea coast.
…
With its long-anticipated southern offensive, Ukraine evidently hopes to regain momentum against Russian forces that have suffered heavy losses of soldiers and equipment since they invaded on Feb. 24. At a time when Russia is strained and vulnerable, Ukrainian leaders want to show that they can reclaim lost ground and ultimately prevail.
On August 12, a day after the Ignatius screed was published, four Washington Post reporters painted a different picture:
On the Kherson front lines, little sign of a Ukrainian offensive
MYKOLAIV REGION, Ukraine — On the front line in southeast Ukraine, there is little sign that a major counteroffensive is brewing.
For weeks, Western intelligence and military analysts have predicted that a Ukrainian campaign to retake the strategic port city of Kherson and surrounding territory is imminent. But in trenches less than a mile from Russia’s positions in the area, Ukrainian soldiers hunker down from an escalating onslaught of artillery, with little ability to advance.
…
The progress Ukrainian forces had made here in recent months — recapturing a string of villages from Russia’s control — has largely stalled, with soldiers exposed in the open terrain.The roads that soldiers zip along among the scorched wheat fields at the front lines are pockmarked with craters from previous strikes, guided by Russia’s Orlan drones that allow them to pick and choose targets.
“There is nowhere to hide,” said Yuri, who has fought here without a break since the beginning of the war, and like other soldiers did not give his last name, in line with protocol. His unit has a hodgepodge stock: modern antitank weapons and a Soviet machine gun manufactured in 1944, and the focus here is holding the line.
Ukrainian military officials are tight-lipped on any timeline for a wider push, but say they need more supplies of Western weapons before one can happen. Ukraine lacks the capacity to launch a full-scale offensive anywhere along the 1,200-mile front line, one security official conceded.
The area north of Kherson is flat land with open fields. There is no place where one could securely assemble a force big enough to punch through the frontline. Ukrainian units went into hiding in Mykolaiv (Nikolaev in Russian writing) where they have dispersed among the civilian population after several of their concentrations had been attacked by Russian missile forces:
One woman took me to see her daughter’s school, smashed by Russian missiles. Through the broken concrete you could see a shelf of library books exposed to the sun and rain. Instead of blaming Russia for firing missiles at the school, she blamed Ukraine for quartering soldiers there. (..)
When I asked her about Putin’s aims, she said: ‘I don’t know. He must have his reasons for what he’s doing.’ Did she think what he was doing was right? ‘I never get involved in politics.’ She mentioned that salaries in Russian-annexed Crimea were higher than in Ukraine. She’d been angry, earlier on in the fighting, when Russian troops were approaching Mykolaiv, about how close Ukrainian armoured vehicles were to her house. She was Russian-born. She was unhappy that Russian language teaching was disappearing from Ukraine. She said people were punished for using Russian.
…
Another well-informed man told me what most locals would not say, that after a devastating strike on a Mykolaiv barracks in March, which killed scores and perhaps hundreds of marines, the authorities adopted a policy of dispersal, with small groups of Ukrainian personnel spending the night in a wide array of buildings, including schools.
The above quoted LRB piece, which mostly takes the Ukrainian side, details the difficulties the Ukrainians have in launching any offensive. (Sorry for the length of the quote but the details matter as they confirm the take above):
When Sasha’s company got to Posad-Pokrovske, they spent the first night in a school. The next day it was flattened in an air strike. They spent the next three and a half months living in concrete pipes under a bridge. ‘I’m already used to it,’ he said. ‘A typical day is they shell and bomb us from morning to night. Mum says, “Where are you?” and I say: “I’m home.” It’s our home now. People say, “We’re looking forward to you coming home,” and we say: “We are home.”’
Bodies of dead civilians have been lying unburied in Posad-Pokrovske for months. The soldiers aren’t allowed to collect them; since they’re civilians, it has to be done by the police, and the police don’t come.
…
A handful of villages have been liberated in the north of the Russian bridgehead, and Ukraine has won a toehold on the hostile side of a smaller river, the Ingulets. But mainly the two sides remain a few miles apart, with more lines of artillery further back. In the flat, open landscape, with little cover except the trees along the roads, any attempt by one side to breach the other’s lines is subject to withering fire from anti-tank missiles and guns, or shelling. Both sides launch drones to spy out artillery targets; when the artillery fires, it becomes the target for the other side’s artillery.Russia has an overwhelming advantage in all these areas. It has more artillery guns and rockets than Ukraine, by a large margin. It has more attack planes and helicopters. It has more anti-aircraft missiles to shoot down Ukrainian drones, and a crushing advantage in electronic warfare systems to jam them. ‘It’s easier for them,’ Sasha said. ‘They haul in shells by rail, by the wagonload. They unload them with cranes. They dig shelters with bulldozers. They shoot rockets from morning till night as if they came out of a machine. It’s shameful to admit – they have drones flying over us 24/7 and we have one. Sometimes we can see what they’re up to … but it’s embarrassing. We don’t have the capability.’
Ukraine has been good at hiding its military, but even so, the absence in Mykolaiv and the surrounding countryside of the signs of a build-up of equipment, troops and supplies that you might expect for a counter-offensive is striking. There’s only so much you can move by night. If Ukraine is using its much vaunted mobilisation to expand its army with new units to retake Kherson, it’s being done with extraordinary stealth – or it’s simply taking a long time to integrate a chaotic array of foreign weapons and untrained recruits. Sasha was coy about his unit’s losses, but he did say they hadn’t been replaced.
No new weapons are coming into the Mykolaiv area. Front line units are depleted and have not been rotated out since March. Russian forces have overwhelming material superiority in the area.
There is no Ukrainian Kherson offensive. There will be no Ukrainian Kherson offensive.
If there will be an offensive in the general area it will be launched by the Russian side which will overrun the few exhausted Ukrainian forces which hold that frontline.
The few Ukrainian operations, missile strikes on bridges that are easily replaced by ferries, sabotage acts on a Crimean air base, are minor pin pricks to the Russian side. They will not change the imbalance of forces or the outcome of the war.