Ukraine works to stabilize Kherson after Russian pullout

The Ukrainian military carried out “stabilization measures” near the southern city of Kherson on Saturday following the end of an eight-month occupation by Russian forces, a retreat that solid an additional pall on President Vladimir Putin’s designs to take over large parts of Ukraine.

People across Ukraine awoke from an evening of jubilant celebrating after the Kremlin announced its troops had withdrawn to the opposite side of the Dnieper River from Kherson, the one regional capital captured by Russia’s military in the course of the ongoing invasion.

In an everyday social media update Saturday, the General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said Russian forces were fortifying their battle lines on the river’s eastern bank after abandoning the capital. About 70% of the Kherson region stays under Russian control.

Ukrainian officials from President VolodymKherson — however the retreat can be dangerous for each sidesyr Zelenskyy on down cautioned that while special military units had reached Kherson city, a full deployment to strengthen the advance troops still was underway. On Friday, Ukraine’s intelligence agency said it thought some Russian soldiers stayed behind, ditching their uniforms for civilian clothes to avoid detection.

“Even when the town just isn’t yet completely cleansed of the enemy’s presence, the people of Kherson themselves are already removing Russian symbols and any traces of the occupiers’ stay in Kherson from the streets and buildings,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address on Friday.

Photos circulating Saturday on social media showed Ukrainian activists removing memorial plaques put up by the occupation authorities the Kremlin installed to run the Kherson region. A Telegram post on the channel of Yellow Ribbon, a self-described Ukrainian “public resistance” movement, showed two people in a park taking down plaques picturing what seemed to be Soviet-era military figures.

Moscow’s announcement that Russian forces planned to withdraw across the Dnieper River, which divides each the Kherson region and Ukraine, followed a stepped-up Ukrainian counteroffensive within the country’s south.

Within the last two months, Ukraine’s military claimed to have reclaimed dozens of towns and villages north of Kherson city, and the Ukrainian General Staff said that’s where the stabilization activities were going down.

The Russian retreat represented a big setback for the Kremlin some six weeks after Putin annexed the Kherson region and three others provinces in southern and eastern Ukraine in breach of international law and within the face of widespread condemnation. The Russian leader unequivocally asserted the illegally claimed areas as Russian territory.

Russian state news agency TASS quoted an official in Kherson’s Kremlin-appointed administration on Saturday as saying that Henichesk, a city on the Azov Sea some 200 kilometers (125 miles) southeast of Kherson city, would serve because the region’s “temporary capital” after the withdrawal across the Dnieper.

Ukrainian media derided the announcement, with each day newspaper Ukrainskaya Pravda saying Russia “had made up a latest capital” for the region.

Like Zelenskyy, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba sought to temper the joy over the invaded nation’s latest morale boost. “We’re winning battles on the bottom, but the war continues,” he said from Cambodia, where he was attending a gathering of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Kuleba also brought up the prospect of the Ukrainian army finding evidence of possible Russian war crimes in Kherson, just because it did after the Russian Defense Ministry pulled back its forces within the Kyiv and Kharkiv regions earlier in the best way.

“Each time we liberate a bit of our territory, once we enter a city liberated from Russian army, we discover torture rooms and mass graves with civilians tortured and murdered by Russian army in the midst of the occupation of those territories,” Ukraine’s top diplomat said. “It’s demanding to talk with people like this. But I said that each war ends with diplomacy and Russia has to approach talks in good faith.”

U.S. assessments this week showed Russia’s war in Ukraine may have already got killed or wounded tens of hundreds of civilians and tons of of hundreds of soldiers.

Despite the advances in Kherson, other parts of Ukraine continued to face civilian casualties, energy shortages and other fallout from Russian military attacks and Putin’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

The state-owned electricity grid operator, Ukrenergo, announced emergency blackouts — which could go on indefinitely — in eight regions that included Kyiv, where a Russian military strike hit an energy facility critical to supplies to the capital.

Ukrenergo said scheduled one-hour blackouts, that are temporary and limited in time, also would proceed each day in central and northern Ukraine.

Moscow has admitted targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with drone and rocket strikes since early October. Ukrainian officials reported said last month that 40% of the country’s electric power system had been severely damaged.

While much of the main focus was on southern Ukraine, Russia continued its grinding offensive in Ukraine’s industrial east, targeting specifically the Donetsk region city of Bakhmut, the Donetsk region, the Ukrainian General Staff said.

Donetsk Gov. Pavlo Kyrylenko reported Saturday that two civilians were killed and 4 wounded during the last day as battles heated up around Bakhmut and Avdiivka, a small city that has remained in Ukrainian hands throughout the war.

Russia’s continued push for Bakhmut demonstrates the Kremlin’s desire for visible gains following weeks of clear setbacks. Taking the town would open the best way for a possible push onto other Ukrainian strongholds within the heavily contested Donetsk region. A reinvigorated eastern offensive could also potentially stall or derail Kyiv’s ongoing advances within the south.

Kyrylenko, in a Facebook post Saturday, also pointed to “intense shelling” by Russia overnight of two other Ukrainian-held cities: Lyman, near the border with the neighboring Luhansk region, and Vuhledar, southwest of Donetsk’s separatist-controlled capital of the identical name.

Luhansk Gov. Serhii Haidai said Ukrainian forces had recaptured 11 unnamed settlements in his province but their advance was “not as rapid as in other regions.”

“We congratulate Kherson on its homecoming!” Haidai posted on Telegram. In Luhansk, the “occupiers proceed to dig in and gather reinforcements, mine every little thing around them.”

Within the Dnipropetrovsk region west of Donetsk, Russia kept up its shelling of communities near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the Ukrainian regional governor said. Russia and Ukraine have long traded blame for shelling in and across the plant, Europe’s largest.

Jake Sullivan, the White House national security adviser, reemphasized that america would defer to Ukrainian authorities on whether or when to barter with Russia a couple of possible end to the conflict.

“Russia invaded Ukraine,” Sullivan told reporters on Air Force One en path to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, as a part of a visit by President Joe Biden to international summits in southeast Asia.

“If Russia selected to stop fighting in Ukraine and left, it might be the top of the war,” Sullivan said. “If Ukraine selected to stop fighting and surrender, it might be the top of Ukraine.”