VELYKA OLEKSANDRIVKA, Ukraine — As Ukrainian soldiers patrolled the streets of a small village they’d retaken from the Russian army just days earlier, they found messages scrawled on partitions and fences so dark and cryptic they pointed not less than to poor morale, and possibly more serious mental stress.
“Give us back our people killed by witches,” one note painted on a wall said. One other message read, “Whatever we can we won’t leave this life alive.”
Nearby there have been more tangible signs of a Russian army under assault: a blown-up bridge on the sting of town, and the obliterated stays of an armored personnel carrier littered on the road, its chunks of metal scattered about and burned to a wealthy orange color.
The Russian military pulled out of Velyka Oleksandrivka, one in every of 29 towns and villages Ukraine has reclaimed within the southern Kherson region, last week; the few remaining older residents emerged from basements to greet Ukrainian soldiers.
Ukraine may gain more advantage within the region if the strike on the bridge to Crimea on Saturday seriously disrupts the availability line to Russian forces. Their situation was already tenuous enough that Russian commanders had requested pulling back from the town of Kherson, American officials have said, but Russian President Vladimir V. Putin denied it.
On Monday Russia launched a series of missile strikes across Ukraine in what gave the impression to be retaliatory attacks for the blast that damaged the bridge to Crimea.
The Kherson region is one in every of two where Ukraines is pressing a counteroffensives against the Russians. The opposite, moving more swiftly, is within the northeast and east.
But there are distinct differences between the 2 theaters of war. Within the north, the Russian retreat was unplanned and chaotic, as soldiers fled the Ukrainian advance, fleeing on stolen bicycles and abandoning documents, laundry and, more chillingly, dead comrades on the side of the road. Ukraine’s forces met little resistance.
Within the south, Russian soldiers are dug in additional securely, and while there are signs of low morale, there are also indications of a determination to fight. In a single spot in Velyka Oleksandrivka, Ukrainian troops discovered that Russian soldiers had fired anti-tank missiles, leaving a heap of about 20 empty launch tubes under a birch tree.
And when retreats became the one option, they were apparently planned and rather more orderly than within the north.
“It’s a distinct tempo here,” said Colonel Roman Kostenko, the commander of a unit fighting within the south and chairman of the defense and intelligence committee within the Ukrainian Parliament, or Rada. “The front didn’t crumble. They’re retreating step-by-step into latest defensive positions.”
In a pale fall sunshine of late afternoon, Colonel Kostenko drove past several of those steps on a journey into the reclaimed areas to examine what the Russians had left behind, bumping over dirt roads. Outside one abandoned village, the summer’s harvest of grain burned in a warehouse, sending tendrils of smoke wafting over the road.
Along the route, he zigzagged past acacia trees knocked onto the road by artillery explosions — and an unexploded Grad rocket, which looked like a fence post hammered into the asphalt near the road’s centerline.
Since the road bridge was blown up, Velyka Oleksandrivka is accessible now from the west only by foot, requiring a scramble over a partially destroyed footbridge crossing the Inhulets River.
The Russian army had used the village as a staging ground for tanks to strengthen a close-by town, Davydiv Brid. But when it fell to the Ukrainians earlier last week, the rationale for remaining apparently disappeared.
They drove the tanks out before the Ukrainian soldiers arrived on Tuesday. They fired the anti-tank missiles at Ukrainian troops across the river. The Ukrainians dismounted, fanned out and entered the village on foot. The Russian soldiers who remained retreated after a transient gunfight, soldiers in Colonel Kostenko’s unit said. While it marked a retreat, it didn’t convey fear and desperation like within the north, he said.
Two days later, shell casings and shards of shrapnel from the battle remained scattered across the streets, tinkling because the Ukrainian soldiers walked over them. The village was abandoned save for stray dogs and elderly residents.
Some people vented emotions that had long been bottled up. A retiree who identified herself only as Grandmother Nadya sat crying on a bench. “I would like to see my children, I would like to see my grandchildren,” she said. That they had evacuated before the Russians captured the village in early March, she said.
One other woman watched the soldiers walk past and shouted, “Glory to Ukraine!” The soldiers yelled back the standard reply, “Glory to its heroes!”
Other residents make clear the Russian soldiers’ morale problems. Viktor Pichkur, a retiree, said discipline had been breaking down.Soldiers had looted his mo-ped.
“They got here and said, ‘We want your moped for the cause,’” Mr. Pichkur said. Later that day, he said, he saw Russian soldiers zipping across the village on his moped on what gave the impression to be joy rides.
A more sinister side of the occupation and a possible sign of an unraveling of the mental state of the Russian soldiers was seen in graffiti. Ukrainian soldiers were flummoxed by the cryptic message about witches.
And along the wall of an apartment constructing was written the phrase, “punishment medicine,” whose exact meaning was unclear. Among the Ukrainians speculated that it could possibly be a reference to forced psychiatric treatment within the Soviet era.
The cryptic graffiti left by Russian soldiers and located in liberated areas has been confusing enough that a nongovernmental group in Kyiv, Between the Ears, has arrange a database of messages and is looking for to systematically analyze the meanings.
“Perhaps it’s mental problems, nevertheless it may be that they don’t see any way out from this war, this case” and write notes of desperation, said Anastasia Oleksiy, the project manager for Between the Ears. The group has collected photographs of about 200 messages left as graffiti or written on blackboards in schools.
Some say “I’m sorry.” One within the Kyiv region said, “Mother of God, forgive us your sons.”
Crumbling morale on the Russian side played a job in Ukraine’s advances within the south however the decisive factor was weaponry, tactics and troop numbers, Colonel Kostenko said.
The Russian government instituted a draft only last month, after it began losing ground within the counteroffensives, he noted; Ukraine called up soldiers immediately after the Russian invasion in February and these troops, a few of them trained in Britain, are actually entering the fight.
Ukraine now has a numerical advantage in soldiers within the fight on the western bank of the Dnipro River, where the village of Velyka Oleksandrivka is. This theater within the war is isolated from Russian supply lines by blown up bridges over the broad Dnipro River.
The Ukrainian army waited on its attack until it amassed sufficient artillery systems and armored vehicles donated by Western allies to shift the chances, Colonel Kostenko said. In its initial assault on Russian lines near here in late August, for instance, the Ukrainian army sent American-supplied M113 tracked armored vehicles bouncing over fields to storm the village of Sukhy Stavok. The armored vehicles enabled this decisive breakthrough, he said.
But a full Russian retreat from the western bank of the Dnipro River stays unlikely, Colonel Kostenko said. Town of Kherson is the one regional capital the Russian army captured after its invasion in February and Mr. Putin has now claimed to have annexed Kherson region and made it a part of Russia.
And yet local Russian commanders in Kherson are pulling back in organized retreats to secondary lines of defense, to avoid wasting their soldiers’ lives.
“They’re defending it just for political reasons,” Colonel Kostenko said. “They can’t leave because Putin will lose face.”
Ukrainian officials have been attempting to capitalize on poor Russian morale and promote the concept that Russian forces are pawns within the political messaging from Moscow.
Oleksiy Reznikov, the Ukrainian minister of defense, appealed on Thursday to Russian officers in a speech in Russian, saying they were deceived by their political leadership, in an apparent effort to use dissatisfaction within the Russian ranks and officers’ corps. He specifically addressed the officers operating within the Kherson region on the Dnipro’s western bank.
“You were promised a simple ride but sent right into a trap,” Mr. Reznikov said. “Now they don’t hearken to you because listening to you now means admitting mistakes.” He suggested they give up.
Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine.