Militarily, the sensible thing would be to withdraw from the Kherson Oblast. The 75km range of the HIMARS are making the situation untenable. Ammo and other supplies for the Kherson Garrison must be stored north of the Dnipro river and to the west of the Inhulets. Every inch of the Russian held territory that is north of Dnipro and west of Inhulets is in reasonably effective range of HIMARS to the west of the Southern Buh. Russia will not be able to cross the Southern Buh with meaningful force before being repelled, and an assault on Mykolaiv to take the bridge there has all the makings of a Stalingrad situation in the Ukrainian’s favor… the geography around the city is simply too heavily in favor of the Ukrainians as Russians would be subjecting themselves to near-cauldron like conditions as they push deep into the city due to the two rivers that meet in the city preventing Russians from exploiting mobility to suppress Ukrainian artillery. If they hadn’t wasted the air assault components of their VDV units on the overly ambitious goals around Kyiv at the start of the war, Mykolaiv would have been the most important operation to deploy them for to secure the bridge intact and to suppress Artillery to the west of the Southern Buh and to the north of the Inhul river(not to be mistaken for the Inhulets that feeds into Dnipro). As a result, I deem a Mykolaiv operation to secure the western shore of the Southern Buh to be non-viable. For Russia, the March to Odessa is effectively dead. They should pull back to the south of Dnipro and set up a handful of artillery positions and decoy positions and assign reconnaissance and intelligence assets to the region to prevent the Ukrainians from crossing the Dnipro in turn, and redeploy the excess troops elsewhere. Arrange for Defense in Depth arrangements throughout the area south of the Dnipro to create a buffer to prevent Ukraine from reaching the critical 300km range to Sevastopol and Kerch… while Ukraine isn’t likely to get the 300km ranged ATACMS from Biden anytime soon, the possibility is still on the table. There is also the possibility of smuggling a handful from sympathetic operators of the limited international stock of the missiles. That said, there is also the distinct possibility of the Ukrainians modifying their Neptune Missiles for ground attack to make use of some of their stock now that the Boack Sea Fleet does it’s best to stay out of range of the missiles.

Now, that all being said, the question remains… if it makes no military sense to remain in Kherson, why are they trying to hold the city… and the answer is that Putin himself has likely issued a mandate regarding the city out of fear of the political repercussions that could accompany its liberation by the Ukrainians. He was able to back away from Kyiv because even though strong circumstantial evidence supports the theory that Russia planned to take Kyiv in a matter of days, the Russian government and military never actually publicly addressed the objective, giving them room to spread the rhetoric that the whole operation was merely a distraction to pull Ukrainian forces away from the “true” objectives, the Eastern and Southern reaches of Ukraine. However, in making these sorts of statements in their eagerness to justify the withdrawal from the Kyiv region, they highlighted the city of Odessa as one of the primary objectives of the war. This means that holding the city of Kherson has been stated as a vital component of the Russian operations to achieve this objective, along with the capture of Mykolaiv. The failure to take Mykolaiv should have been proof enough that not all was swell in the Russian war effort, but something I noticed about a lot of the territorial control maps displayed by Russian media is that they often omit Mykolaiv and even very wide rivers like the Southern Buh. As a result, Russian media has been able to mostly wave off the failure to take Mykolaiv just by its obscurity. But Kherson… this was a conquest that Russia paraded around like a trophy wife. This is all to say… losing Kherson isn’t something that they can easily make excuses for. It is a critical part of the Odessa operation that government and military officials spent months heralding, it is well known to the Russian people through propaganda through its inclusion in propaganda. Losing Kherson… would be proof that Russia could be losing the war, and it would be evidence that the Putin regime can’t explain away and would struggle to hide, and one that would be very easy for the Russian masses to comprehend as a whole.

The Russian military can afford to let go of Kherson to focus on objectives elsewhere, and they may very well fully understand this. Putin however, is convinced that HE cannot afford this loss and may have issued an order to hold the city at all costs, failing to understand just how bad an idea this actually is given the circumstances surrounding the battle. It is not the Ukrainian HIMARS knocking out the bridges that have trapped Russian forces in Kherson… it is Putin’s ego. He would sooner see the Russian Army itself buried in the fields of Kherson Oblast than humble himself and admit that the Ukrainians have outplayed him there.

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