Rivers At Their Backs And Ukrainian Brigades Closing In, A Lot Of Russian Troops Might Need To Learn To Swim

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Russian paratroopers are fleeing their positions in a critical sector of the front in southern Ukraine. While at least one Ukrainian brigade chases after the Russians, other Ukrainian formations are cutting across the Russians’ likely avenue of retreat.


Russian paratroopers are fleeing their positions in a critical sector of the front in southern Ukraine. While at least one Ukrainian brigade chases after the Russians, other Ukrainian formations are cutting across the Russians’ likely avenue of retreat.

For the umpteenth time in Russia’s eight-month-old wider war on Ukraine, Kyiv’s forces are in a position to surround a significant number of demoralized Russian troops. When the Ukrainians last enveloped a Russian force, around the eastern town of Lyman last week, potentially hundreds of Russians and Ukrainian separatists died.

To avoid getting trapped, the Russian paratroopers—part of Russia’s 49th Combined Arms Army—soon might face a choice. Either ford the Inhulets River on the western edge of the sector, or the Dnipro River on the southern edge.

Considering how adept the Ukrainian army has become at dropping bridges and destroying river lodgments, both options are unhappy ones for the Russians. It’s possible “the entire 49th CAA will have to find a way … to swim,” quipped Tom Cooper, an author and independent expert on the Russian military.

Ukraine’s southern counteroffensive has been months in the making. As far back as the spring, Ukrainian rocketeers, gunners and saboteurs began targeting bridges, railroads, supply dumps and command centers in and around Russian-occupied Kherson, a strategic port on the Black Sea. The deep strikes on logistics and command isolated and weakened the 49th CAA even as the Kremlin shifted forces from the east to the south in a desperate bid to shore up defenses around Kherson.

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