What did Kherson's return mean by 13 November 2022?
A look back at the situation on 13 November 2022, two days after Ukrainian troops entered Kherson and as the war's wider costs were becoming clearer.
What did the recovery of Kherson actually change by 13 November 2022? Two days earlier, on 11 November, Ukrainian troops had entered the city, ending an eight-month occupation by Russian forces. Kherson was the only Ukrainian regional capital Russia had captured during the invasion, so its loss to Moscow carried a weight that few other places on the map could match.
The end of an occupation
The entry into Kherson came at the close of the southern counteroffensive. Ukraine had launched that operation on 29 August 2022, with the aim of expelling Russian forces from the southern regions of Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts. By 11 November, the city at the centre of that effort was back under Ukrainian control.
The retreat was not clean. As Russian forces pulled back from the west of the Dnieper, they destroyed the Antonivka Road Bridge on 11 November. The bridge was a reminder that the withdrawal was accompanied by damage to infrastructure, and that the river now stood as a dividing line between the two armies.
Sanctions and symbolism
The same day brought a different kind of measure from Moscow. The Russian Foreign Ministry banned 200 U.S. citizens from entering Russia. The list included the White House Press Secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, and three siblings of President Joe Biden. The step was diplomatic rather than military, but it showed how the war was also being fought through the language of entry bans and counter-measures.
The cost beyond the front
The economic consequences of the invasion were also in view. On 11 November the Food and Agriculture Organization forecast that global spending on food imports would rise by 10 percent from the previous year by the end of 2022, reaching an all-time high of US$1.94 trillion. It attributed this to currency depreciations and the war in Ukraine. The bulk of the increase, it said, would come from high-income countries, while import volumes were also expected to rise.
Later accounts placed this within wider food crises in 2022 and 2023, in which rising prices and shortages hit regions including Sub-Saharan Africa, Iran, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Iraq. Many factors contributed, among them supply chain disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic, the global energy crisis, floods and heatwaves in 2021, and the Russian invasion.
A weekend of reckoning
Taken together, the reports available by 13 November 2022 described a war with three fronts: the military one, where Kherson had been retaken; the diplomatic one, where Russia answered Western pressure with entry bans; and the economic one, where the price of feeding the world was climbing. For Ukraine's public life, the return of a regional capital after eight months was the clearest marker of how far the southern counteroffensive had come.
