Ukrainian Marines Are Advancing—And Expanding Their Dnipro Bridgehead

While many pundits and politicians in the West declare the war in Ukraine a “stalemate” and demand the Ukrainians negotiate with the same Russians who have abducted Ukrainian children, bombarded Ukrainian cities and murdered Ukrainian civilians, the Ukrainian marine corps has gone on the attack.

Three weeks ago, the marines crossed the wide Dnipro River in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast and secured a bridgehead in the settlement of Krynky on the Russian-dominated left bank.

From Krynky, the marines have advanced south—expanding Kyiv’s five-month-old counteroffensive and challenging foreign observers who seem eager to appease the regime of Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. But what happened before to make the Krynky crossing possible increasingly is becoming clear. The Ukrainian military electronically and logistically isolated Russian forces in Kherson, repositioned their own best forces for a riverine assault then attacked along several axes under the cover of some daring helicopter crews.

The Krynky op actually began this summer, months before the first Ukrainian marines slipped across the Dnipro in small boats. As early as June, there were reports the Ukrainians were positioning powerful radio-jammers on the Dnipro’s left bank in order to create a 12-mile-deep zone where Russia’s explosive first-person-view drones cannot reliably operate, but Ukrainian drones can operate.

“Ukraine fielded a number of powerful river-mobile drone-jammers while at the same time deploying slightly larger FPV drones with different radio operating frequencies that the jammers don’t cover,” noted Trent Telenko, a former quality auditor with the U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency who specializes in electronic warfare.

At the same time, Ukraine’s own drones and manned warplanes began hunting down Russian jammers in southern Ukraine, effectively preventing the Russians from preventing Ukrainian drones from flying over the Dnipro. Evidence abounds of Ukrainian precision strikes on Russian jammers—even mobile jammers fitted to trucks.

This electronic counterair campaign escalated in parallel with Ukrainian efforts to interdict Russian supply lines threading into southern Kherson Oblast via Melitopol and Tokmak.

The Ukrainian army and air-assault forces’ costly summer advances through Robotyne toward Tokmak, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast just east of Kherson, brought Russian logistics well within range of the Ukrainians’ longer-range weaponry.

“This logistics corridor becomes increasingly narrow for every inch the Ukrainians liberate,” explained Jan Kallberg, a non-resident senior fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, D.C.

“As winter approaches, the logistic situation west of Melitopol is likely to get worse and worse,” Kallberg predicted. But it apparently already is bad enough that the Kremlin is struggling to feed and fuel its forces on the Dnipro’s left bank.

There was a window of time, shortly after Ukrainian marines from the 35th, 36th and 38th Brigades redeployed from Donetsk Oblast and landed in and around Krynky starting on Oct. 19, when Russian motor-rifle regiments on the left bank might’ve counterattacked and forced the marines back into the river.

But the Russian vehicles that rolled toward Krynky—including at least one T-72 tank—got plinked by drones. Every day that passed without a successful Russian counterattack was an opportunity for the Ukrainians to shuttle more and heavier forces across the river aboard small boats and amphibian vehicles and, possibly, pontoon bridges.

Cross-river ops are extremely vulnerable to air-attack, but it quickly became clear the Ukrainians, not the Russians, control the air over the Dnipro in Kherson Oblast. The Ukrainian army even has deployed Mil Mi-24 attack helicopters for extremely low-level rocket attacks. One Russian observer called the Mi-24 raids “daring tactics.”

As the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson enters its second month, it’s only expanding and accelerating. This week, Russian sources reported Ukrainian marines crossing the river at two new locations west of Krynky: Poima and Pidstepne.

Winter is coming. And, with it, the winter mud. The apocalyptic mechanized battles raging in eastern Ukraine—around Bakhmut, Kreminna and Avdiivka—could ebb as vehicles get mired.

But the marines in Krynky might not mind the mud so much. Advancing mostly on foot, in assault teams of 10 to 15 people, they could sustain the counteroffensive even as the weather worsens.

“The weather can be a serious obstacle during an advance,” Ukrainian general Oleksandr Tarnavsky told CNN. “But considering how we move forward, and we mostly advance without using the vehicles, I don’t think it will heavily influence that stage of counteroffensive.”