Divided forces risk big defeat

Russia has rushed thousands of troops to southern Ukraine to bolster forces that are split precariously by the Dnipro River and face a humiliating defeat.

The reinforcements brought the Russian force in the area to more than 25,000 troops, a frontline Ukrainian reconnaissance and intelligence team said. It said nine Russian battle groups, each with 500 to

800 men, had been moved there from Donbas and Crimea.

More than 10,000 Russian soldiers are now on the west bank of the Dnipro, separated from their supply lines by three bridges and a kilometre of water. Ukrainian missile strikes using the United States-supplied precision Himars system have rendered two of the bridges unusable.

‘‘We have a surprise in store for the Russians,’’ grinned Sergeant ‘‘Hulk’’, commander of a 28th Mechanised Brigade intelligence squad.

Four rivers define the landscape in the battle for Ukraine’s south. The natural barriers to mechanised warfare are up to 4km wide.

The Southern Bug River sweeps through the shattered city of Mykolaiv. A tributary, the Inhul, cuts a protective curve around the city before the waters join those of the Dnipro and the Inhulets rushing towards the Black Sea.

The Kremlin’s troops have been lured into this confined landscape by Ukrainian announcements of a counteroffensive in the south, calls for civilians to leave the area, and the slow but

steady recovery of territory.

Ukrainian attacks are becoming bolder. Last month a special operations force filmed themselves walking right into the Russian-held city of Kherson, storming a building and releasing five Ukrainian prisoners.

It is these these incursions across Russia’s 300km front line that have forced the Kremlin’s lurch to the south.

The core of the men moved from Donbas are Russian airborne assault troops, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s military

adviser Oleksiy Arestovich, and there are signs that the Russians are planning their own push to encircle Mykolaiv from the northwest.

Ukrainian troops’ optimism in the south is tempered by the devastation being wrought nightly on Mykolaiv, and the hellish experience of their compatriots in Donbas, who endured weeks of concentrated Russian artillery fire.

A new offensive here relies on getting supplies across the Dnipro. Videos posted on Russian social media appeared to show Russian pontoon bridges

being loaded on to antiquated 1980s trucks, likely to have been taken out of Soviet-era storage.

‘‘You can’t compensate for a four-lane motorway bridge with a pontoon,’’ said Oleksiy Melnyk, a retired colonel and director at Ukrainian think tank the Razumkov Centre. ‘‘This is something the Russians really miscalculated when they decided to cross the Dnipro.’’

Clinging to the Dnipro’s west bank could end in a disastrous defeat. ‘‘Moscow has two choices,’’ Hulk said. ‘‘Withdraw now, or watch their men try to swim across.’’