The Retreat from Kherson

Seth Cropsey

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The War’s Next Phase Will Be Bloody

Russia’s announced withdrawal from Kherson has initiated a new phase of the war. Out of it come several considerations. Operationally, Ukraine has an opportunity to press retreating Russian forces and destroy them. Strategically, Ukraine must now consider its next offensive steps. And politically, the US and its allies cannot mistake temporary success for long-term strategic stability. Fundamentally, the war’s military factors still militate against a political resolution. If Ukraine is to negotiate a peace favorable to it and the West, the war must continue to a strategic equilibrium.

The Paradoxes of War

Russia’s retreat from Kherson is the greatest Ukrainian victory thus far of the war. It demonstrates the long-term viability of Ukraine’s anti-logistical strategy of corrosion. The terrain and unit frontage in Kherson Oblast made major frontal assaults extremely costly. Hence Ukraine, just as it did in the Donbas, targeted Russian logistics, employing long-range rocket artillery to degrade Russian supply depots far behind the front line, and to hit the bridges over the Dnieper so vital to Russian sustainment.

Yet war is paradoxical. Russia’s withdrawal may improve Moscow’s position in the medium-term.

Losing Kherson is a political-military defeat. The city is Kherson Oblast’s namesake and seat of government. Russia annexed Kherson Oblast just over a month ago, ostensibly with Kherson as its administrative center. Thus, Russia’s impending retreat from Kherson is a far greater blow to Putin’s credibility than its defeat at Lyman just days after Donetsk Oblast was annexed. Moreover, Kherson links to Russia’s long-term strategic motivations. Kherson city is a major Ukrainian port, and a vital transit point for goods farther up the Dnieper bound for the Black Sea. Controlling the city would increase Russia’s stranglehold on Ukrainian trade, even in peacetime.

More critically, Kherson Oblast holds the key to Crimea. Specifically, the smaller city of Nova Kakhovka, some 60 kilometers upriver from Kherson, marks the southern end of the Kakhovka Reservoir, the artificial body of water that provides the North Crimea Canal the water the Crimean Peninsula so desperately needs. Since 2014, Ukraine has cut off Crimea’s water supply, destroying annual crop yields in the Russian-annexed territory. Holding Kherson Oblast, and specifically holding a buffer on the Dnieper’s far bank that secured the Crimea Canal, was as central a political-strategic objective for Russia as the creation of a Donbas-to-Crimea land corridor. Hence the Russian retreat marks an abject failure to achieve one of Russia’s major war aims.

Additionally, absent its Kherson bridgehead, Russia will struggle to launch future offensives. The Dnieper is extremely wide and therefore defensible. Russia crossed the Dnieper in the war’s opening days because of good intelligence preparation – Kherson residents have claimed that Ukrainian soldiers and police officers left the city just before the invasion, potentially on the orders of a collaborator in the Ukrainian Security Services. Russia will have no similar benefits if it seeks to cross the Dnieper a second time. Given Russia’s extremely limited amphibious capabilities, Odesa is now safe from attack, and Putin’s dream of Novorossiya, and complete territorial dominance over the southern Ukrainian coastline, is now dead.

A new offensive from Belarus is possible, but not for some months considering weather conditions and the terrain. And the Ukrainian military has fortified Russia’s most likely Belarusian invasion paths, meaning a second northern offensive would probably mirror Russia’s efforts in March, culminating in a withdrawal, high casualties, and no material gains. Ukrainian defenses in the east, combined with Ukraine’s recent gains decrease the viability of a Donbas Offensive that will, even if successful, push far beyond the Bakhmut-Siversk line that Evgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group repeated assaults. An offensive from Mariupol or Melitopol towards Zaporizhzhia is possible. But Ukraine looks to have placed some of its best units along this line, including a high concentration of artillery, making any Russian attack costly and vulnerable to a Ukrainian counterstroke. Observers are likely to look back at Kherson, therefore, as the high-water mark of the Russian invasion.

Russia’s Strategic Logic

Russia, however, has decided to withdraw from Kherson for rational military reasons – in this case, much as for Snake Island, around Kyiv, and near Kharkiv in May, tangible military factors have overridden the Kremlin’s political objectives. By degrading Russian logistics, the Russian forces on the Dnieper’s far bank were incapable of immediate offensives toward Mykolaiv or Kryvyi Rih. Nevertheless, Russian units could have put up a tough fight, retreating towards Kherson and Nova Kakhovka, and forcing Ukraine to assault cities head-on in the same manner that Russia did in Severodonetsk.

This strategy, however, would have ceded Ukraine a significant advantage. Russia’s 20,000-or-so troops in Kherson would require supplies indefinitely along an extended logistics route vulnerable to Ukrainian disruption, either against the Kerch Strait Bridge, the roads in southern Kherson Oblast, or the makeshift bridges and ferries needed to supply Russian units across the Dnieper. All the while, Ukrainian forces, operating on interior lines, could shift units far more rapidly, and strike at other weak points, whether they appear in the east between Severodonetsk and Svatove or in Zaporizhzhia Oblast toward Melitopol.

Once it withdraws across the Dnieper, the Russian logistical system will be far less stressed. The same factors that make a future Russian offensive across the Dnieper unlikely complicate a Ukrainian offensive across it into Kherson Oblast. Attacking farther south, and striking towards Crimea overland from Kherson, would require a river crossing that resembles an amphibious operation. Ukraine has been operationally meticulous thus far, conducting major offensives only when the conditions are thoroughly favorable. An assault across the Dnieper, while possible, would be out of Ukraine’s strategic character: Kyiv would be placing tens of thousands of Ukraine’s best soldiers at risk of being stranded on the Dnieper’s southern bank without hope of extraction.

Thus, by withdrawing across the river, Russia can redeploy a significant proportion of the soldiers it held in the southwest elsewhere, reinforcing its lines in Zaporizhzhia Oblast and the East, and creating the mass of reserves needed to counter a Ukrainian offensive. Come spring, Russia could even resume its slow, grinding advance in the east, employing the 200,000 new mobilized soldiers who have yet to deploy to Ukraine.

In the medium-term, then, Russia’s withdrawal demonstrates a degree of strategic prudence the Kremlin has seldom demonstrated. Indeed, Sergei Surovikin, Russia’s new commanding General in Ukraine, has received support from Defense Minister Shoigu, Chechen Warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, and Wagner PMC owner Evgeny Prigozhin. If this venomous coalition holds, Surovikin will have more operational flexibility than other commanders, thereby improving Russia’s military prospects.

The Next Phase

A fighting retreat is the most difficult of military operations. Few can execute it with skill. Hence it is worth examining Surovikin’s operational picture with care.

Surovikin has two competing objectives.

First, he must withdraw his forces across the Dnieper as rapidly as possible. Now that the withdrawal order has been given, heavy equipment is being moved, and the morale of the men across the Dnieper will sink the longer they are ordered to die for territory they are abandoning. Indeed, this factor makes it nearly impossible that the Russian withdrawal is a feint or trap. Russian morale is already low, and new Russian reservists thrown into combat will have little ability to discern their high command’s intellectual machinations. The withdrawal must be fast, otherwise Ukraine will pounce. Ukrainian forces can maul Russian units pulling back across the river, reducing the combat power Russia’s withdrawal is meant to recoup or redeploy forces elsewhere and attack before Russia can regroup.

Second, however, Surovikin must conduct an orderly withdrawal. Simply abandoning all position in Kherson Oblast and dashing headlong for makeshift bridges and rafts will be disastrous. Russian soldiers will clog loading areas as every man itches to reach the southern bank and the safety of new Russian trench lines. Hence Surovikin must determine which positions must be held until the last possible moment to delay Ukrainian forces, hot on the heels of the retreating Russians, who will exact a bloody price for the eight-month Russian occupation of Kherson. However, this risks extending the withdrawal process: the longer the retreat takes, the greater the risks that Russia ends up fighting for the territory it sought to abandon, with attendant effects on Russian morale.

Surovikin, meanwhile, is aware that Ukraine gains military from Russia’s withdrawal as well. An assault across the Dnieper is highly unlikely for the reasons identified above. But Ukrainian rocket artillery in Kherson can hit targets in northern Crimea, namely the logistical hubs on the Isthmus of Perekop that connects Crimea to mainland Ukraine. With ATACMS, moreover, Ukraine could hit any target in Crimea and the Azov Sea.

Ukraine will press Russia as it retreats. But Ukraine’s commanders, particularly General Zaluzhnyi, the military’s Commander in Chief, must consider whether to press elsewhere. The Svatove-Kreminna line is weakening but still holds. And the Russians know full well that Zaporizhzhia Oblast is a target: an offensive that reached Melitopol could unravel the entire Russian position in the south. Ukraine may have a limited window of opportunity to strike before Russia can extricate its forces from Kherson and redeploy farther east.

Strategic questions, however, are paramount. Ukraine’s minimally viable political conditions include control of all of Kherson Oblast. Otherwise, Russia retains a chokehold on Ukrainian trade even with Kherson city in Ukrainian hands. Ukraine would most certainly seek Crimea as a prize. Even if the Donbas remains in Russian hands, a Ukrainian Crimea would secure Kyiv’s economic future and give it the broader political-strategic position needed to deter another Russian offensive. The West, in turn, has no rational need to make peace until Ukraine’s minimally viable territorial conditions are met, and may be willing to see the war prosecuted for longer.

What might Russia accept? Kherson, and the North Crimean Canal, are no longer supreme strategic objectives: war is calculative, and Russia has taken too much punishment to make these prizes worth fighting for. From where else might Russia retreat if pressured? Ukraine and the West’s task is to identify Russia’s minimally viable strategic conditions and press them.

But these conditions are not sacrosanct, for the life of the Russian state does not depend upon victory in Ukraine. Perhaps Crimea is a part of Russia’s minimally viable conditions, albeit not for economic reasons – Putin may have expended too much political capital upon the peninsula to release it. Yet the most viable route to victory, the most effective way to push the Russian army from Ukraine’s economically critical south, is to attack to Zaporizhzhia while pressing Crimea.

Russia will continue its war of the cities, hitting Ukrainian critical infrastructure, sapping Ukrainian resources, and forcing Ukraine to deploy its limited tactical air defenses to protect power stations against long-range bombardment. Additional air defenses may be necessary, but the Russian bombardment will stop only when Russia’s conventional forces in Ukraine have been defeated and Ukraine has the long-range weapons to respond to Russian attacks.

One thing is certain: this war will go on. It will go on through the winter and into the spring of 2023. It will go on through the summer and into the autumn of 2023, and perhaps even into 2024. And it will go on if Russia refuses to end its bombardment and the West clothes isolation and appeasement in the garb of statecraft.