Vitaly Kim, governor of Mykolayiv Oblast, said the entire Russian command staff was withdrawing from the west bank of the Dnipro River that runs through the occupied city of Kherson in the southeast. If confirmed, this would leave some 20,000 or more Russian troops isolated from their commanders and cut off from supply lines by the half-mile-wide river, over which the main bridges in the Kherson region have been destroyed by Ukrainian attacks. “I feel a little – but not a lot – sorry for the stupid orcs who were abandoned on the right bank of the Dnipro,” Kim said in a message posted on the social media app Telegram, using his favored derogatory term for Russian. troops. “All commanders move to the other side.” Early in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces poured north from the annexed Crimean peninsula and quickly seized territory to link up with separatist enclaves in eastern Ukraine. They also moved west, hoping to link up with pro-Russian separatists in Moldova, creating a land bridge that would completely cut off Ukraine from the Black Sea. While Russian forces captured Kherson, the only regional capital to fall to the invasion, their advance stalled east of Mykolayiv, leaving a vulnerable pocket of Russian-controlled territory between the fronts, the broad Dnieper River to the east and the Black Sea to the east. South. Since then Ukrainian forces have repeatedly targeted the bridges through which almost all Russian supplies must pass.
