Southern front of the Russo-Ukrainian war (2022–present)

• 1. Introduction

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  The southern front of the Russo-Ukrainian war opened at 4:00 on the morning of the 24th of February 2022. More than thirty Russian military aircraft lifted from Crimea and turned north. By 5:00, missiles were hitting military facilities across Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. Russia had spent months massing troops in Crimea, and on the eve of the invasion an estimated 90,000 were positioned there. Waiting for them were the main units of Ukraine's 59th Motorized Infantry Brigade, stationed at a camp in the Oleshky Sands. Some 250-300 marines of the 137th Marine Battalion guarded the entrances from Crimea. Together, those units numbered around 1,300 soldiers and a few hundred marines, and they were operating at only 50-60% strength. A planned second brigade had never been assigned, and territorial defense units had yet to be staffed. How this thin line bent, where it broke, and how Ukraine eventually fought its way back forms the story of the southern front.

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• 2. Russia's Strategic Blueprint

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  Russian documents captured by the Ukrainian military laid out the invasion's southern ambitions with precision. The plan called for bypassing Mykolaiv entirely and landing forces at Odesa within five days. Russian commanders expected to seize Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky by the ninth day and reach the Moldova-Ukraine border by the eleventh. According to Major General Andrii Sokolov, who commanded Ukraine's Operational Command South, the Russian southern force numbered up to 20,000 troops. They were organized into 25 battalion tactical groups, including the entire 22nd Army Corps and at least one division of the 58th Combined Arms Army. Around half of the 7th Air Assault Division was also committed.

  The North Crimean Canal had supplied 85% of Crimea's drinking water before Ukraine blocked it following Russia's annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Russian troops moved on Nova Kakhovka on the 24th of February and seized control of the canal in the invasion's opening hours. Sergey Aksyonov, head of the Republic of Crimea, immediately ordered local authorities to prepare the canal to receive water from the Dnieper. He told them to resume supply the following day.

  Viktor Kevliuk, a Ukrainian military expert, later assessed that protecting the canal was a central strategic purpose of Russia's Dnieper bridgehead. Holding the "land bridge" between Crimea and mainland Russia was equally important to the operation. Russia also intended the bridgehead as a staging area for a future push toward Transnistria, which would have severed Ukrainian access to the Black Sea.

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• 3. Cities Won and Lost

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  Ihor Kolykhaiev, the mayor of Kherson, surrendered the city to Russian forces on the evening of the 2nd of March. Russian commanders planned to establish a military administration there. Kherson became the first major Ukrainian city to fall in the 2022 invasion. On the morning of the same day, Russian forces had seized the city's central square. They had been advancing from Kherson International Airport since before dawn on the 1st of March. A Ukrainian airstrike on the 26th of February had briefly driven Russian troops out, but the momentum had not held.

  Melitopol, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, surrendered to Russian forces after a small skirmish on the 25th of February. The coastal city of Prymorsk was captured by 13:40 on the 26th of February. Berdiansk also fell, with Russian forces seizing its port and the Berdiansk Airport. One local authority reported one person killed and another wounded during the takeover. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant fell under Russian control on the 4th of March, following clashes that caused fires in the complex. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed essential equipment was undamaged, and no radiation leaked.

  Mykolaiv took a different course. Russian tanks entered the city's outskirts on the evening of the 26th of February, and Mayor Oleksandr Senkevych ordered citizens to stay indoors. Ukrainian forces drove the Russians back the following day, and subsequent attacks through early March were also repelled. A more determined Russian effort was already forming to Mykolaiv's north, at the bridge town of Voznesensk.

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• 4. The Bridge and the Spit

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  Combat engineer Vitalii Skakun planted the explosives on the bridge connecting Henichesk with the Arabat Spit. The mission was to slow the Russian advance from Crimea, buying time for Ukrainian forces to retreat and regroup. Skakun ran out of time to escape before the detonation. He triggered the mines himself, destroying the bridge and dying in the explosion. His was one of the war's earliest recorded acts of individual sacrifice on the southern front.

  Voznesensk, a town north of Mykolaiv, held a bridge over the Southern Bug River. Russian paratroopers landed at a forested ridge near the town, and an armored column approached from outside. Ukrainian officials estimated the Russian force at around 400 troops. The Russians captured the village of Rakove and set up sniper positions in its houses. They established a base at a gas station near the town's entrance and attacked the local Territorial Defense Forces' headquarters. Ukrainian forces struck back with artillery that night, using coordinates provided by local volunteers. By the next day, those volunteers and Ukrainian soldiers had forced most of the Russian troops to retreat roughly 40 miles to the east. Around ten survivors fled into nearby forests and were later captured. Ukrainian officials said Russian forces had lost 30 vehicles and around 100 soldiers at Voznesensk. Ten civilians died in the fighting. While Voznesensk and Mykolaiv held on, Mariupol, encircled from two directions, had entered a siege that would last for months.

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• 5. The Siege of Mariupol

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  By the 15th of March, the Mariupol City Council reported that 2,357 civilians had already been killed in the city's siege. Units of the Donetsk People's Republic advanced on Mariupol on the 25th of February and were defeated near the village of Pavlopil. By evening, the Russian Navy had reportedly begun an amphibious assault on the Azov coast, roughly 70 km west of the city. By the 3rd of March, Ukrainian officials alleged that hundreds of civilians had already been killed amid heavy combat.

  By the 18th of March, Mariupol was completely encircled and fighting had reached the city centre, hampering civilian evacuation. Russian forces demanded full surrender. President Zelenskyy and several other Ukrainian officials refused. On the 24th of March, Russian forces entered central Mariupol and seized the Church of the Intercession of the Mother of God. Russian troops reportedly shouted false claims of Ukrainian defeats, including statements that Odesa had been captured, to demoralize residents.

  A United Nations rescue effort on the 1st of April was turned back. Russian troops refused safe passage to 50 buses allocated to carry hundreds of civilian survivors out of the city, while peace talks continued in Istanbul. In a phone call with Emmanuel Macron on the 29th of March, Putin stated that the bombardment would stop only when Ukrainian troops fully surrendered. They ultimately did. Ukraine's deputy prime minister Olha Stefanishyna, speaking on the 27th of March, said that Mariupol "simply does not exist anymore." She added: "They don't have access to water, to any food supplies, to anything. More than 85 percent of the whole town is destroyed." Mariupol fell after months of siege. Its fall freed a portion of the Russian forces committed there to consolidate their positions on the broader southern front.

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• 6. Reclaiming Kherson

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  On the 11th of July, Ukraine struck the Russian-occupied city of Nova Kakhovka with HIMARS rockets. Ukrainian officials claimed the attack killed Major General Artyom Nasbulin, chief of staff for the 22nd Army Corps, along with five colonels. They said total losses reached 150 soldiers. Russian forces confirmed the strike but disputed the claimed deaths, saying the rocket had hit a chemical warehouse rather than a military target.

  On the 29th of August, Ukraine launched its counteroffensive on the Kherson front. From the 2nd to the 4th of October, Ukrainian forces liberated 11 settlements in northern Kherson Oblast. Among them was Davydiv Brid, a village that had changed hands more than once in the preceding months. On the 9th of November, Russia announced the withdrawal of its troops from Kherson. Ukrainian forces entered Snihurivka the following day.

  On the 11th of November, Ukrainian troops entered the city of Kherson. Crowds of Ukrainian citizens were waiting in the streets, chanting "Slava Ukraini" and "Glory to the ZSU." They lifted soldiers onto their shoulders and waved Ukrainian flags. Kherson was the only oblast capital Russia had managed to capture in the 2022 invasion. Its liberation marked the furthest point of Ukrainian territorial recovery on the southern front. But the fighting was far from over across the Dnieper.

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• 7. Years of Stalemate

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  By May 2022, Russian forces held a bridgehead over the Dnieper approximately 160 km wide and 50 km deep. They were already building second and third defensive lines, fortifying airfields and railway stations, and mining the coast of the Kakhovka Reservoir. Ivan Fedorov, the Ukrainian mayor of Russian-occupied Melitopol, reported on the 23rd of December 2022 that Russia was transforming his city into a fortress. Dragon's teeth defenses had been installed across the city. By the 15th of May 2023, Ukrainian military intelligence estimated that Russia had stationed 152,000 troops in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. They were anticipating a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

  That counteroffensive arrived in early June 2023, targeting positions near Orikhiv and Velyka Novosilka in eastern Zaporizhzhia Oblast. Then, on the 6th of June 2023, the Kakhovka Dam in Nova Kakhovka was destroyed while under Russian control. Experts assessed that Russian forces likely blew it up. The flooding halted combat along the river for a time. When Ukrainian forces resumed their push, they had recaptured Neskuchne, Blahodatne, Storozheve, Makarivka, and Novodarivka by the 11th of June. Robotyne fell on the 23rd of August, but progress slowed sharply after that.

  Tokmak, which General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi had described as the counteroffensive's "minimum goal," was never reached. In early November 2023, Ukrainian general Valerii Zaluzhnyi characterized the war as having arrived at a "stalemate." Observers widely interpreted the statement as an admission that the offensive had not achieved its objectives. By the 15th of May 2024, Russian forces had fully recaptured Robotyne. War analyst Emil Kastehelmi told The New York Times that the village, now little more than ruins, "lacks strategic importance to Russia." Its recapture was nonetheless "a symbolic blow to Ukraine after fighting so hard to win it back."

  Ukraine had established a foothold at the village of Krynky on the left bank of the Dnieper in December 2023. Russian forces fully recaptured Krynky on the 18th of July 2024. By early October 2024, Russian forces had restarted combat operations around Kamianske in western Zaporizhzhia Oblast. They also advanced near the neighboring village of Plavni, following an unsuccessful Ukrainian attack in the area. Ukraine had announced on the 3rd of March 2024 that it was spending a record amount on fortifying Zaporizhzhia Oblast on the southern front.

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• 8. The Wounded Landscape

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  Two cornflower species native to the Kinburn Spit, Centaurea breviceps and Centaurea Paczoskii, grow in an ecosystem that the war has severely disrupted. Bombs and the pollutants they released killed dolphins in the surrounding waters. According to Doug Weir, research and policy director at the UK-based Conflict and Environment Observatory, chemicals from the fighting seeped into the sand and soil, opening the area to the threat of invasive species. In May 2022, rockets ignited a fire that burned roughly 4,000 hectares of the Kinburn Spit, approximately 10,000 acres. The blaze inflicted lasting habitat damage on the perennial forests and salt marshes of the spit, an ecological toll that will continue to accumulate for as long as the fighting persists.

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