Kherson ours: Zelensky

Kyiv, Ukraine: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday that Kherson was “ours” after Russia announced the completion of its withdrawal from the regional capital, the only one Moscow captured in nearly nine months of fighting.

“As of now, our defenders are on the outskirts of the city. But special units are already in the city,” Zelensky wrote on Telegram, posting footage apparently showing Ukrainian troops gathering with residents.

Ukraine´s parliament had published pictures of people carrying Ukrainian flags in the centre of Kherson, the capital of the eponymous region and close to the Black Sea. Hours earlier, Russian strikes killed seven people in Mykolaiv, a nearby city in southern Ukraine that the Russians have failed to capture but subjected to months of attack.

“Kherson is returning to Ukrainian control and units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are entering the city,” Kyiv´s defence ministry said on social media. It added that its artillery teams had clear views over Russia’s routes to retreat and warned: “Any attempts to oppose the Armed Forces of Ukraine will be stopped.”

Russia’s defence ministry said “more than 30,000 Russian servicemen, about 5,000 pieces of hardware and military equipment and materiel have been withdrawn”. Kherson was the first major urban hub to fall after President Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine on February 24.

Its full recapture by Kyiv would be a political and symbolic blow to Putin and open a gateway for Ukraine’s forces to the entire Kherson region, with access to both the Black Sea in the west and Sea of Azov in the east.

“Ukraine is gaining another important victory right now and proves that whatever Russia says or does, Ukraine will win,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on social media. He posted an amateur video showing Ukrainians removing a billboard near Kherson that proclaimed: “Russia is here forever”.

In Ukraine’s capital, the news was met with joy. Wrapped in flags, popping champagne corks and belting out the Ukrainian national anthem, residents of Kherson living in Kyiv gathered in the city’s Maidan square to celebrate.