On June 8, two days before Russia would have celebrated its four-year anniversary of the capture of the Kinburn Spit – Moscow’s westernmost military position in Ukraine – a member of the Crimea-based Ukrainian partisan group Atesh had astonishing news to report: Russian troops seemed to have abandoned the disputed land strip between the Dnipro-Bug estuary and the Black Sea, located on the tip of the Kinburn Peninsula, northwest of Crimea.
The main reason, the agent reported, was that their supplies had been “completely disrupted” by Ukrainian drone strikes. Vital deliveries of ammunition, fuel and food had come to a total standstill, said the agent, who was cited by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and Ukrainian media outlets, and most members of Russia’s 337th VDV Regiment had been redeployed elsewhere.
A relic of Russia’s initial plans for Odesa
Russia has not confirmed the reported loss of the 10-kilometre-long sandbar, which at its base measures around 4 kilometres in width, and at its peak, some 100 metres.
Yet in 2022, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kinburn Spit became a strategic priority for Kyiv because it lies at the mouth of the Dnipro River – between the Dnipro-Bug estuary and the Black Sea, south of Kherson – and controls access to the key port of Mykolaiv and nearby Ochakiv, while allowing artillery and missile attacks on Ukraine’s southern coast.
Although the spit is tiny, it has offered Russia plenty of military vantage points. © Wikimedia Commons Since then, Ukraine has made repeated attempts to take it back. Kyiv deems Kinburn Spit as so important that it last year asked the United States to include it in any future peace plan Washington may present to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.
In the early days of the war, the spit was indeed of crucial importance.
“In the beginning of 2022, the Russians wanted to go all the way to Odesa,” Tor Bukkvoll, an expert on the Russian military and the war in Ukraine at the Norwegian Defence and Research Establishment, explained. The plan, he said, was to use the spit as a springboard to go deeper into southern Ukraine.
Will Kingston-Cox, a Russia specialist at the International Team for the Study of Security (ITSS) Verona, said that by taking the strip, Russia has been able to control the Dnipro-Bug estuary and the access to Kherson.
Could it affect Black Sea shipping?
As the war has worn on, however, experts say the Kinburn Spit’s strategic importance has steadily decreased.
First off, because Russia seems to have dropped its plans to take Odesa, Bukkvoll said. Secondly, because the situation around the city of Kherson – which was recaptured by Ukraine at the end of 2022 – as well as along the Dnipro River, seems to have largely stagnated. Instead, the focal point of the war has moved to Donbas and the Zaporizhzhia regions.
Still, if the report is confirmed, it would be a significant win for Ukraine. Kingston-Cox described it as “a step towards restoring safer navigation” in the Black Sea.
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But, noted Frank Ledwidge, a senior lecturer in war studies at the University of Portsmouth, “the Kinburn Spit has no importance at all as long as the Russians occupy the left bank of the Dnipro, which they do”.
But a Russian withdrawal would still remove a major obstacle for Ukrainian exporters wishing to use the ports in Mykolaiv.
And, Kingston-Cox said, “Russia would also lose its ability to use the spit as a forward position for observation, which it has been doing, and for its artillery and for drones, and for electronic warfare, and the harassment of shipping routes.”
But the most important result would be the symbolic value – perhaps even more so than the military one, Bukkvoll said.
At the end of 2022 and at the beginning of 2023, Ukrainian forces pushed the Russians out of the outskirts of Mykolaiv. But Moscow still managed to hold on to Kinburn Spit.
“If Ukraine can confirm control, it would be able to say that Mykolaiv Oblast has been fully liberated,” Kingston-Cox said. That, he said, would have “serious political value” for Ukraine. Not the least since President Volodymyr Zelensky would be able to use it as an argument to convince its backers that Kyiv is holding the military initiative.
Supply lines and drones
Ledwidge also said it would be a way for Ukraine to shift the world’s focus from the battlefields that are not going so well, and “show you what it wants you to see”.
In Donbas, or the Kharkiv region, the situation for Ukraine still remains difficult. Further south, however, Kyiv has in the past few days claimed a series of successful drone attacks against important infrastructure in Crimea, including a bridge that links the peninsula (which Russia illegally annexed in 2014) with southern Ukraine, a railway, and several oil facilities.
But beyond the symbolic value – and the impact it would have on Ukrainian propaganda – a Russian withdrawal from Kinburn Spit would also underscore Kyiv’s increased capabilities to conduct medium-range strikes and have the enemy retreat by itself by cutting vital supply lines “without a direct assault”, Bukkvoll said.
It also shows how vulnerable the supply lines that were established at the beginning of the war have become in a conflict that is now dominated by drones. So far, the Ukrainian drones have had the upper hand in disrupting supply lines to troops in exposed areas.
Bukkvoll argued that Russia may have decided that it now costs more to defend its supply lines to the Kinburn Spit than to just let it go.
If the Russian withdrawal is confirmed, it remains to be seen what the future will hold for Kinburn Spit. Will Ukrainian forces occupy it – and potentially become targets for Russian drones themselves – or will it become a no-man’s-land? What is certain is that if Kyiv moves in, it will first have to clear it from mines and set up solid air defence systems.
This article was adapted from the original in French.
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