Home › Opinion › Kherson's return and the war's wider costs
Kherson's return and the war's wider costs
Summary
A look back at 13 November 2022, two days after Ukrainian troops entered Kherson and as the war's economic toll kept mounting.
What did the recapture of Kherson mean in the days after it happened? On 13 November 2022, the question was still fresh: 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.
The entry into the city was the product of the southern counteroffensive. Ukraine had launched it on 29 August 2022 to expel Russian forces from the southern regions of Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts. By mid-November, that effort had reached the regional capital.
The retreat left physical damage behind. As they withdrew from the west of the Dnieper, Russian forces destroyed the Antonivka Road Bridge, as reported on 11 November.
Sanctions and food bills
The same day brought other signs of how far the war reached beyond the front line. Russia's 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 Food and Agriculture Organization, meanwhile, 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 the increase to currency depreciations and the war in Ukraine. The bulk of the extra spending, it said, would come from high-income countries, and food import volumes were also expected to rise.
That forecast sat within a wider pattern. During 2022 and 2023, several regions faced food crises marked by rising prices, and the Russian invasion was one of several contributing factors alongside supply chain disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic, the global energy crisis and extreme weather.
A weekend in context
Taken together, the reports around 13 November 2022 showed a war moving on several levels at once: a battlefield advance in the south, a diplomatic exchange of entry bans, and mounting costs in global food markets. Kherson's return was the clearest of these developments, and the one most closely tied to the months of fighting that preceded it.
