Battle of Kherson
Based on Wikipedia: Battle of Kherson
Five hundred civilians showed up at the military headquarters that morning, asking for guns. It was February 24th, 2022, and Russian tanks were already rolling through the farmland south of their city. Within a week, Kherson would become the only regional capital Russia managed to capture during its entire invasion of Ukraine—a distinction that would haunt both sides for months to come.
How did it fall so fast? That question still lingers, wrapped in accusations of betrayal and the fog of war.
The First Day
At five in the morning, Dmytro Ishchenko learned his country was being invaded. As commander of the Kherson regional territorial defense brigade, he had perhaps the most impossible job in Ukraine that day: defending a city of nearly 300,000 people with volunteers who had never seen combat.
The numbers were staggering. Ukrainian military analyst Serhii Hrabskyi estimated that 35,000 Russian troops poured across the border from Crimea—the peninsula Russia had seized from Ukraine eight years earlier in 2014. They came with tanks, armored personnel carriers, and multiple rocket launchers, their columns snaking northward toward the Dnieper River.
By eleven that morning, Russian forces had already reached Nova Kakhovka and raised their flag over its hydroelectric dam. More critically, helicopters had deposited paratroopers near both bridges crossing the Dnieper—the Antonivka Road Bridge and the railway bridge nearby. With those crossings under Russian control, roughly 1,200 Ukrainian soldiers from the 59th Brigade found themselves trapped on the wrong side of the river, near the town of Oleshky.
This is where the territorial defense volunteers—those 500 civilians who had grabbed rifles that morning—would face their first test.
The Fight for the Bridge
At three in the afternoon, seventy-eight men from the newly formed 192nd Kherson Battalion began moving toward the Antonivka Road Bridge. Their mission was simple to describe and nearly impossible to execute: push back the Russian paratroopers and open an escape route for the encircled 59th Brigade.
Russian Ka-52 attack helicopters found them before they reached the bridge. The company commander, Oleksandr Berezovsky, was wounded in the air raid. One fighter was killed. Three others were hit.
They kept advancing.
Two more companies joined them. Despite additional airstrikes, the Ukrainians reached the bridge and held it long enough for the 59th Brigade to withdraw across the Dnieper to the city of Mykolaiv. The governor of Mykolaiv would later credit this desperate counterattack with preventing a Russian assault on his own city.
But holding a bridge is different from keeping it. Around midnight, the Russians unleashed everything they had: fighter jets, Ka-52 helicopters, FAB-500 bombs—those are 500-kilogram general-purpose bombs, the kind designed to level buildings—plus mortars and artillery. The tank battalion defending the bridge fought for an hour before retreating. Their commander, Yevhen Palchenko, later reported that only one of his companies remained intact.
The bridge changed hands again as Ukraine's 80th Brigade pushed back. Fighting continued through the early hours of February 25th.
The Tide Turns
War is chaos, and the next few days proved it.
On the morning of February 25th, a CNN crew visited the Antonivka Road Bridge. They found disabled vehicles, dead soldiers, craters from shelling. Ukrainian troops still held the northern end, with Russians positioned about three kilometers away near Oleshky. In a surreal detail, civilians were driving across the bridge in personal vehicles, passing between the two armies.
By dusk, that fragile equilibrium collapsed. Governor Hennadiy Lahuta announced the military had lost control of the bridge. The city's defenses had fallen.
Ukrainian forces retreated to the international airport in Chornobaivka on February 26th. Then the Russians came for that too, forcing another withdrawal toward Mykolaiv.
What followed was a stuttering collapse. The mayor, Ihor Kolykhaiev, announced on the morning of the 26th that Kherson remained under Ukrainian control. A Ukrainian airstrike reportedly forced Russian forces to pull back temporarily. Videos emerged showing destroyed Russian vehicle columns near the city's outskirts. A Russian Mi-24 helicopter was shot down.
But these were tactical victories in a strategic defeat. By February 28th, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War assessed that Russian troops had likely completed their encirclement of Kherson.
March First: The Fall
The final assault came at dawn on March 1st.
Commander Ishchenko divided his remaining territorial defense forces into five groups, deploying them to the five main entrances of the city. One company went to defend a lyceum near Bilozerka Square. Another took positions at Lilac Park. Three more covered shopping malls and the road from Chornobaivka.
What happened next was a massacre.
At Lilac Park, in the Korabelnyi district near the city's oil refinery, more than forty Ukrainian soldiers from the 2nd Company of the Bilozerka battalion expected to encounter light Russian infantry. Instead, they found tanks and armored vehicles.
The engagement lasted twenty to thirty minutes. At least twenty-four Ukrainian soldiers died. According to accounts that emerged later, Russian troops executed wounded Ukrainians they found after the battle. Only one Russian soldier was killed—though later reports suggested Russian casualties might have reached ten killed or wounded.
At the Fabryka shopping mall, defenders had a few hours' warning before the Russian convoy arrived. They dug trenches and built roadblocks. The Russians responded with mortar fire that destroyed the mall, then sent infantry to outflank the Ukrainian positions. When the ammunition ran out, the survivors retreated.
Throughout the day, Russian forces flowed into the city from multiple directions. They surrounded the city council building and the maritime university. They captured the river port and the railway station.
By nightfall, they had reached the city center.
The Sacking
Pavel Filatyev was a member of Russia's 56th Guards Air Assault Regiment. He would later write a book about his experiences in Ukraine, one of the few Russian soldiers to publicly document what he witnessed.
His description of Russian troops entering Kherson's port was vivid: he compared it to paintings of barbarians sacking Rome. Soldiers looted valuable goods and ate everything they could find. The word he used was "savage."
On the morning of March 2nd, Russian forces appeared in Freedom Square, in the heart of Kherson, where the regional administration building stands. A group of about ten Russian officers, including a commander, entered the city council building where Mayor Kolykhaiev waited.
That evening, Kolykhaiev announced he had surrendered the city. A military administration would take over. The Ukrainian military was gone.
The Cost
How many people died in the battle for Kherson?
Mayor Kolykhaiev, speaking immediately after the city fell, estimated as many as 300 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians had been killed. Bodies were being buried in mass graves, many unrecognizable. Schools and apartment towers had been damaged. Residential buildings had been fired upon.
In May 2022, researcher Valentyna Romanova published a grim assessment: Ukraine had sustained 300 military casualties during the battle, with the entire defense force either killed or injured.
Russian losses are harder to verify. Governor Lahuta reported the Russian military took "heavy losses" during the fighting at the Antonivka Road Bridge on February 25th, but specific numbers remain unclear.
The Betrayal Question
In November 2023, Gilbert Merkx, a professor at Duke University, published an analysis in the Journal of Advanced Military Studies that described Russia's capture of Kherson as happening with "little resistance." This seems to contradict the desperate fighting that occurred—but Merkx was pointing to something else entirely.
Kherson fell too easily. That was the uncomfortable truth.
Orysia Lutsevych, a researcher at Chatham House—a prominent British think tank focused on international affairs—offered an explanation: "Russia had its agents infiltrated into the Ukrainian security forces."
On April 1st, 2022, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy dismissed the head of the Security Service of Ukraine's Kherson regional branch, along with a general. He called them traitors and "anti-heroes," saying he had trouble determining where their loyalties lay.
An aide to one of the generals was arrested for handing over maps of minefields to Russian forces and helping coordinate Russian airstrikes in the region. Those minefields should have slowed the Russian advance. Instead, the invaders knew exactly where they were—and weren't.
Strategic Significance
The Spanish newspaper El País later called the fall of Kherson "Ukraine's worst defeat in the war." This wasn't hyperbole.
Kherson was the only regional capital Russia managed to capture during the entire invasion. Every other major city—Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv—either held or was never seriously threatened. But Kherson fell in less than a week.
Geography explains why this mattered so much. Kherson sits at a strategic crossroads. Military analysts have described it as "a gateway to Crimea"—control Kherson and you control the land bridge connecting Russian-occupied Crimea to the rest of Ukraine. The city also dominates a key crossing of the Dnieper River, one of the largest rivers in Europe.
Russia's original plan, according to Merkx's analysis, was even more ambitious. They attempted to execute an amphibious landing assault along the "Kherson-Mykolaiv-Odesa axis"—in other words, they wanted to sweep westward along Ukraine's Black Sea coast and capture Odesa, Ukraine's largest port. Ukrainian coastal defenses stopped this plan in its early stages, but capturing Kherson gave Russia a critical foothold.
What Came After
The fall of Kherson was the beginning, not the end, of the city's suffering.
Russian forces began a military occupation that would last for months. They used force to suppress protests by the local population. By March 22nd, Ukrainian officials warned that Kherson faced a "humanitarian catastrophe"—the city was running out of food and medical supplies. Russia was accused of blocking civilian evacuations to Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Reports emerged of human rights violations: torture, arbitrary detention, forced disappearances. The occupation followed a grim playbook that had been seen before in other Russian-controlled territories.
On March 23rd, Ukrainian forces launched counterattacks against Russian positions in Kherson Oblast. This was the start of a long campaign that would eventually, in November 2022, force Russia to withdraw from the city—the first and only regional capital they had captured.
But that story belongs to another chapter.
The Volunteers
There's one more thing worth remembering about the Battle of Kherson.
The night before the final assault, a group of thirty to forty civilians gathered at one of the city's entrances. They had seen rumors on social media that Russian forces would be coming through. They were unarmed except for two policemen with assault rifles.
They felled trees across the roads, hoping to slow the tanks and create opportunities for ambushes with Molotov cocktails—homemade firebombs that date back to the Finnish resistance against Soviet invasion in 1939.
By one in the morning, they went home. The next day, the city fell.
Vitalii Kim, the governor of Mykolaiv, later credited the territorial defense forces who fought at Kherson with delaying the Russian advance—buying time for other cities to prepare their defenses. Whether those extra hours and days made a difference in the larger war is impossible to know.
What we do know is that five hundred civilians showed up at the military headquarters on the morning of February 24th, 2022, asking for guns. Most of them had never fired a weapon in combat. Within days, many of them would be dead, wounded, or captured.
They fought anyway.