ODESSA, Ukraine – After capturing the strategic city of Kherson, Russian forces pushed west on Thursday, moving along the southern Black Sea coast towards Odessa. They continued to besiege the critical port city of Mariupol in eastern Ukraine, although there were no indications that they had captured it.
After eight days of war, Russian troops stationed in Ukraine’s southern theater are finally seemingly gaining momentum. But their progress is much slower than military analysts would expect given their huge advantages over the Ukrainian military.
For eight years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been building something that is a vast military base on the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014. The forces stationed there had to be well equipped to leave their bases and capture sections of southern Ukrainian territory at the time the invasion order was issued. Russia’s nearby naval monopoly in the Black and Azov Seas was to provide additional firepower to support ground forces.
Instead, their progress is slow, burdened by logistical problems and the seeming inability of commanders to coordinate different military forces, which, if combined effectively, should easily overcome Ukraine’s defenses.
“I thought that along the Black Sea coast they would achieve their best success immediately, due to the huge advantage of this bridgehead in Crimea,” said Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, a former US military commander in Europe.
Mariupol continued to hold on Thursday despite a waning Russian bombing that cut off electricity, water and heat in the city. But Mayor Vadim Boychenko painted a grim picture of the Russian siege.
“Mariupol is still under fire,” he said in a statement on Facebook. “Women, children and the elderly are suffering.”
Despite Russian artillery strikes in Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, there has been very little progress in recent days among troops stationed in the north.
In the south, the campaign to capture the southern coast was boosted this week with the capture of Kherson, a city of 300,000 people that is an important center for shipbuilding. From there, Russian troops move in the direction of Nikolaev, another port city on the Black Sea.
On Thursday, the mayor of Nikolaev, Alexander Senkevich, said about 800 Russian vehicles, including a column of city missile launchers, were heading to the city, which has one of Ukraine’s three largest ports, north, east and south. As of Thursday morning, there was no shelling in the city. But Ukrainian forces on the outskirts of the city have been fired at with long-range missiles, forcing them to move positions permanently, Mr Senkevich said.
“The city is ready for war,” Mr Senkevich said.
But an attack down the coast could put Russian forces in danger of stretching too thin, said Michael Coffman, director of Russian research at CNA, a research institute based in Arlington, Virginia. Already forces in southern Ukraine and elsewhere are emerging, in some cases outpacing logistics units, forcing them to stop and wait for fuel and other supplies.