Has Russia given up on Kinburn Spit, its westernmost foothold in Ukraine?

ANALYSIS

At the start of the war in Ukraine, the Russian capture of Kinburn Spit – a narrow piece of land that holds the key to several Ukrainian ports – was hailed as one of Moscow’s most significant victories on the southern front. From there, Russia could launch attacks on the Ukrainian mainland, and use it as a springboard should it make an attempt to take Odesa. Now, Russian forces appear to have pulled back from the once so-strategic spit. What is going on?


Issued on: 10/06/2026 - 

FRANCE24
By: Sébastian SEIBT

Kinburn Spit was seen as one of the most strategic important locations in Ukraine at the beginning of the war in 2022. © Darkngs/Creative commons

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.

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.

Russia's conscripts recount pressure to fight in Ukraine

Warsaw (AFP) – After Russian police started using facial-recognition cameras to identify men wanted by military authorities, a young bank worker spent weeks avoiding the Moscow metro.


Issued on: 11/06/2026 - RFI

Russia's has hardened its once-avoidable conscription system amid the war 

© Alexander NEMENOV / AFP

But on snowy Friday evening in late 2024, heavy traffic pushed him underground to visit his mother. At the next station, two officers entered the carriage and detained him for draft evasion.

Within three days, he was sent to a military unit near Moscow for year-long mandatory service.

Like other Russian conscripts who described their experiences to AFP, he spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

The cases show how, amid the war with Ukraine, Russia has hardened its once-avoidable conscription system and the pressure draftees -- officially not sent to war -- come under to sign contracts to fight in Ukraine once inside the military machine.

"Before 2022, there were many ways to avoid the draft without doing anything illegal," said Artyom Klyga, a lawyer with the Movement of Conscientious Objectors.

"Now very few legal ways remain."

'Record numbers'

It used to be relatively easy to secure a medical exemption, perform alternative civilian service, or avoid the draft by staying in education.

Since invading Ukraine, Russia has made conscription year-round, raised the upper age limit from 27 to 30, tightened medical exemptions and introduced an online summons system.

Timofey Vaskin of Shkola Prizyvnika, or the School of Conscripts, said the demand to find ways out of service had "risen sharply".
In Moscow, facial-recognition cameras and a unified recruitment system have made men easier to find and faster to process © Alexander NEMENOV / AFP

In Moscow, facial-recognition cameras and a unified recruitment system have made men easier to find and faster to process.

Once conscripted, the pressure to sign a fully-fledged army contract often starts within days.

"They are without means of communication, without access to parents, right groups or journalists," Klyga said.

One common tactic is to present a military contract as a normal job, Vaskin said.

Conscripts are told they can work "from nine to six", earn far more and avoid routine duties.

Others are promised roles as drivers or clerks, or that the contract will last "just one year".

In fact, army contracts are effectively open-ended.

"It is a major success of the Russian authorities that they have convinced many people that conscripts simply serve for a year," Klyga said.

"As a result, conscripts are now ending up in the war in record numbers."
'People like you'

Last year, 422,000 Russians signed voluntary contracts to fight in Ukraine, according to ex-president Dmitry Medvedev -- six per cent down on 2024.

At the same time, some 295,000 people were called up for military service.

Last year, 422,000 Russians signed voluntary contracts to fight in Ukraine

If conscripts sign a contract to fight, they can end up on the front "within a month," Klyga said.

After being caught on the metro, the former bank worker was held for three days in a detention centre without a shower or change of clothes.

No one forced him to sign-up, he said, but the idea was constantly present.

"You're a good fit, we need people like you," he was told.

"You could get a decent role, earn money and not do the usual duties," he recalled his superiors saying.

Some in his unit agreed immediately. For a while, he considered it.

A DJ from Moscow who tried to avoid service told AFP he could not obtain a driving licence or international passport without proper military papers.

He gave in and was assigned to an army medical unit for a year -- where he met contract soldiers trying to find a way out.

"None of them want to serve," he said. "They all want out."

He recalled some commanders telling him: "Don't sign anything. Don't ruin your life."

- 'Break a person' -

In one case, Vaskin reported a prohibited phone was planted on a conscript, who was told to choose between detention or signing a combat contract.

Klyga's organisation has documented complaints from conscripts being kept awake all night in heavy chemical protection suits, forced to dig holes and then refill them, and others who said their signatures were forged on enlistment documents.

If conscripts sign a contract to fight, they can end up on the front within a month, rights advocates say © STRINGER / AFP

"Under constant pressure they break a person," he said.

One conscript told AFP that a man in his unit swallowed a needle in an attempt to get discharged.

"He was covered in blood when they brought him in," he said.

He survived and was eventually discharged.

Those that end up fighting -- through pressure or coercion -- often do not tell their relatives.

"They simply leave, and the family only finds out later," Klyga said.

In some cases, parents only discover what happened after their son has been killed at the front.

© 2026 AFP