The Russian bridgehead in the Cherson region is under pressure as a result of the Ukrainian counter-offensive. The video of a Kremlin fighter seems to show that Moscow has long since started clearing the western bank of the Dnipro.
The situation of Moscow’s armed forces on the west bank of the Dnipro is apparently getting more and more precarious. In view of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, the occupation authorities announced their withdrawal from the city of Kherson on Wednesday. The day before, the Russian Commander-in-Chief in Ukraine, General Sergey Surovikin, spoke on television about a difficult situation in the sector of the front.
Apparently, the Kremlin’s troops have already begun to clear the bridgehead bit by bit. A research team from the broadcaster Radio Liberty has identified a pro-Russian separatist from the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Luhansk who documented the evacuation of war material on the Internet.
According to the journalists, the fighter is Makar Teplinskiy from the village of Biryukove in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk. On October 10, he posted a photo on the VKontakte social network showing him on a ferry with military trucks. Three days later, he posted a short video on board the same ferry crossing the Dnipro.
The Radio Liberty team was able to locate the recording location. Accordingly, the video was shot near the village of Kosazke, in the immediate vicinity of the dam and hydroelectric power station at Nowa Kachowka. During the recording, the ferry moves east from the west bank to the pier in the town of Nowa Kachowka.
The ferry service used by the Russian army at this point on the river is well known. The Ukrainian armed forces had repeatedly attacked the loading points on the bank with rockets in the past few weeks. For example, images from the European observation satellites Sentinel from September 23 show smoke rising from the ferry dock on the east bank of the Dnipro near Nowa Kakhovka. The route of the shuttle ferry here follows an old shipping canal that connects a branch of the Dnipro with the main shipping channel on the east bank.
Originally, Moscow supplied its troops on the west bank mainly via the Antonivka Bridge near Cherson and via the road bridge at the dam at Nowa Kakhovka. Since Kyiv fired on the river crossings with precision strikes, Russia has had to use ferry services since the end of July to bring supplies, ammunition and reinforcements to the front. Supply by ferry is slower and more complex, but offers an advantage: the mobile barges, pushed convoys and pontoon rafts are harder for Ukrainian artillery to hit than fixed bridges.
At least four places are known where the Russian military operates improvised ferry connections across the Dnipro: Immediately next to the Antonivka Bridge near Cherson, around six kilometers upstream at the railway bridge that was also damaged, on the Dnipro knee near Lvowe and at Nowa Kakhovka. Transfer by boat or ferry is not easy: the river has a strong current. The eastern bank, where the Dnieper meets the flat steppe plain of southern Ukraine, is bordered in many places by a wide swampy zone. On the western side, on the other hand, there is a pronounced steep bank on the Dnipro, which is not always easy to overcome for vehicles that have landed.
According to Radio Liberty, the satellite images show that the Russians have not brought any equipment to Kosazke for days. The town on the west bank of the Dnipro is now only a good 40 to 50 kilometers away from the front line. The latest resupply transport can be seen in satellite imagery from Planet.com on October 4th. A day later, the ferry drove to the east bank with a full load. Since October 8, footage has shown boats arriving on the west bank unloaded, only to return to Nowa Kachowka fully loaded. Teplinskiy’s video must have been taken on one of these crossings.
On the day that Teplinskiy posted the video on the ferry, he also posted a short clip titled “Birthday of an Air Force Friend.” In it, men in military uniform are sitting in a bar. One of them plays the guitar. There is a photo from the same celebration on Teplinsky’s VKontakte profile, which was shared on October 10. According to the research, the recordings were made in a restaurant in Nowa Kachowka.
Teplinskiy himself is no stranger. He has already been the subject of research in the past because he shared pictures from his everyday wartime life on social networks. As Radio Liberty reports, Teplinskiy has been fighting alongside Russia in the Donbas since at least the summer of 2015.
