A Ukrainian flag has been raised on the Kinburn Spit, a territory under Russian occupation since 2022. The regional command of the South Territorial Defense Forces reported this and published a video showing the flag.
The Ukrainian military says that over the past 24 hours, 78 Russian servicemen were killed or wounded on the spit and 57 pieces of equipment were destroyed. According to the Ukrainian side, Russian positions there are being hit by aircraft, drones, missiles, and artillery, leaving their logistics almost completely disrupted.
“The supply of ammunition, food, and fuel has virtually stopped. A soldier without food and fresh water cannot fight. Therefore, according to intelligence data, [Russian troops] are now evacuating,” said Colonel Denys Nosykov, commander of the Odessa operational tactical group.
The Russian Defense Ministry has not commented on reports that it may have lost full control over the Kinburn Spit.
Why the spit matters
The Kinburn Spit is part of the Kinburn Peninsula between the Dnipro-Buh estuary and the Black Sea in the Mykolaiv region. Russian forces occupied it in March 2022 after advancing from the Kherson region.
Oleksandr Kovalenko, a military and political analyst with the Information Resistance group, told Novaya-Europe that the main difficulty in holding the area is logistics. He said Ukrainian forces had shelled the spit with artillery and struck moving equipment with drones, sharply complicating supplies for Russian units both in the Kherson region and on the spit itself.
Kovalenko suggested that the flag may have been placed by a small Ukrainian sabotage group that landed on the spit and later withdrew to Ochakiv. In his view, the very appearance of the Ukrainian flag shows that Russia has lost full control of the peninsula. He also said that from the Kinburn Spit, Ukrainian forces could expand their control deeper into the Kherson region, and that this could become one stage of an operation to liberate Crimea.