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A new video that has surfaced online appears to show Ukrainian soldiers destroying a Russian military boat close to the front lines in Ukraine's southern Kherson region.
The clip showing the targeting of the Russian boat was posted on Instagram by Ukraine's 126th Territorial Defense Brigade on Sunday.
"Coordinated work of mortars and aerial reconnaissance do not allow the enemy to easily move along the Dnieper," the Ukrainian military said, sharing the footage that was likely captured by a drone.
The post did not specify the location of the attack, but a former Kherson resident who regularly posts about the Ukraine war on X, formerly Twitter, under the name "Special Kherson Cat", said the video was shot near the Kherson village of Kozachi Laheri.
It is "certainly possible" that the video shows a mortar, rather than artillery, strike on Russian forces, according to military expert David Hambling.
"The relatively low speed—you can see the projectile descending—argues for mortar rather than artillery," he told Newsweek.
The video also appears to show an airburst round, likely capturing a clip of a single warhead being used, Hambling added. All of the fragments strike the water at the same time, unlike the more staggered little explosions you would expect to see with cluster munitions, he argued.
Kozachi Laheri lies on the east bank of the Dnieper River, which broadly marks the current front lines in southern Ukraine.
Russia controls territory to the east of the river, and retreated to positions east of the Dnieper in November 2022 after Ukraine's first counteroffensive pushed back the front lines.
"Not a single unit of military equipment or weapons have been left on the right (western) bank," Russia's Defense Ministry said in mid-November. "All Russian servicemen crossed to the left bank," it added at the time.
The front lines in Kherson—one of four regions Russia said it was annexing in September 2022, along with Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk—have stayed broadly consistent in recent months, even as Ukraine hopes to grind down Russian defenses in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine is now braced for the tougher fall and winter conditions that have started to appear in the country, as the counteroffensive carries on into its fifth month.
In mid-August 2023, Russian military bloggers suggested Ukraine was active on the east bank of the Dnieper around Kozachi Laheri, the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War think tank said at the time.
These influential and often Kremlin-aligned voices claimed that Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups were operating west of Kozachi Laheri, but that Russia still controlled the territory, the think tank said.
"Certain tasks were performed by certain units there," Hanna Maliar, who served as Ukraine's deputy defense minister at the time, said on August 14.
About the writer
Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ... Read more