The Ukrainian military appears to have taken control of the town of Vysokopillya in the southern Kherson region.
“There is a flag of Ukraine above the hospital on Gagarina Street, where my grandmother and grandfather’s house was. And that’s great,” Dasha Zarivna, an advisor to the Head of the President of Ukraine’s office Andrii Yermak, said.
One social media image shows Ukrainian soldiers raising a flag on the roof of a building, said to be in Vysokopillya. CNN cannot independently verify the location of the image.
A post on a pro-Russian Telegram channel said Sunday that Russian forces had “retreated in battle order from Vysokopillya (Beryslav district). The Armed Forces of Ukraine wanted to take them, surrounded by two pincers, from Olgyne and Potiomkyne.”
Those are two neighboring settlements to the east and west of Vysokopillya, which had a population of about 5,000 before the war.
Some context: Ukrainian forces appear to have made limited territorial gains in Kherson to date. But the Institute for the Study of War said Saturday that according to Ukrainian officials, the offensive was “an intentionally methodical operation to degrade Russian forces and logistics, rather than one aimed at immediately recapturing large swathes of territory.”
One Ukrainian official, Oleksiy Arestovych, told the Wall Street Journal on Saturday that the current goal of Ukrainian forces in the south is the “systemic grinding of Putin’s army, and Ukrainian troops are slowly and systematically uncovering and destroying Russia’s operational logistical supply system with artillery and precision weapon strikes.”
