
Ukraine’s Zelenskyy vows to keep driving out Russia after Kherson success
Global News
Ukraine's president vowed to keep pushing Russian forces out of his country after they withdrew from Kherson, leaving behind devastation, hunger and booby traps.
Ukraine’s president vowed to keep pushing Russian forces out of his country after they withdrew from Kherson, leaving behind devastation, hunger and booby traps in the southern Ukrainian city.
The Russian retreat from Kherson marked a triumphant milestone in Ukraine’s pushback against Moscow’s invasion almost nine months ago. Kherson residents hugged and kissed the arriving Ukrainian troops in rapturous scenes.
“We will see many more such greetings” of Ukrainian soldiers liberating Russian-held territory,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address Saturday.
He pledged to the people in Ukrainian cities and villages that are still under occupation: “We don’t forget anyone; we won’t leave anyone.”
Ukraine’s retaking of Kherson was a significant setback for the Kremlin and the latest in a series of battlefield embarrassments. It came some six weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the Kherson region and three other provinces in southern and eastern Ukraine– in breach of international law– and declared them Russian territory.
The U.S. embassy in Kyiv tweeted comments Sunday by National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, who described the turnaround in Kherson as “an extraordinary victory” for Ukraine and “quite a remarkable thing.”
The reversal came despite Putin’s recent partial mobilization of reservists, raising available troop numbers by some 300,000. That has been hard for the Russian military to digest.
“Russian military leadership is trying and largely failing to integrate combat forces drawn from many different organizations and of many different types and levels of skill and equipment into a more cohesive fighting force in Ukraine,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, a think tank that tracks the conflict, commented.