President Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces were slowly moving towards the Russian city of Kherson.
Ukrainian troops damaged bridges in Kherson which serve as supply lines for Russian troops.
British military intelligence said the loss of supply routes to Kherson “would be a significant military and political setback for Russia”.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces were slowly moving towards the Russian city of Kherson, according to the BBC.
The president’s announcement comes as Ukrainian forces claim to have damaged two important bridges over the Dnipro River, vital to supply lines for Russian troops in and around Kherson, Reuters reports.
The British Ministry of Defense said that “the supply lines of the Russian forces west of the river are increasingly threatened” and that if the Russian forces in Kherson were cut, “it would be a significant military and political setback for Russia”.
On Saturday, British defense officials reported heavy fighting near Kherson.
The Antonovsky and Daryivskyi bridges over the Dnipro River, connecting Kherson to southern Ukraine and Crimea, were damaged by Ukrainian shelling, according to reports.
The deputy head of the Russian-installed regional authority said the Daryivskyi Bridge was hit by seven rockets on Saturday from US-supplied High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), but the bridge was still working, Russian news agency TASS said, according to Reuters. .
Serhiy Khlan, adviser to the governor of the region, wrote on Facebook: “Each bridge is a weak point for logistics and our armed forces are skillfully destroying the enemy system. This is not the liberation of Kherson yet, but a preparatory stage seriously in this direction.
Ukraine’s state media channel Euromaidan quoted presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych as saying there would be no humanitarian (or “green”) corridor for Russian troops to leave Kherson.
“We have a very strong temptation to bury them all,” he said before adding, “but, firstly, we don’t fight like the Russians, we don’t miss our word. -secondly, I think that the very humane Ukrainian Armed Forces will simply offer them to surrender.”
“We won’t provide a corridor. If they don’t want to surrender, their fate will be decided,” he said.
Dr Mike Martin, Visiting Fellow in War Studies at King’s College London, tweeted that “if I were a Russian soldier in Kherson, I would be rather scared right now”.
He added, “I will be watching Kherson very closely over the next ten days.”
Russian forces seized Kherson, a strategically important port city of 300,000 people, on March 3. It was the first major city to fall after Moscow invaded Ukraine.
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