The fact that the Ukrainian forces had to abandon those territories in the first place was the result of a miscalculation. They had been taken by Russian forces in the early days of the invasion. According to Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National #Security and Defense Council of #Ukraine, as he noted in a Liga.net article on June 18, Ukraine had expected the main Russian attack to come from the territory of the self-proclaimed #DNR and #LNR and consequently concentrated its most combat-ready units there.
This blunder left the south relatively unprotected for an invasion from #Crimea, which enabled the rapid Russian advance toward #Mariupol and the occupation of #Kherson and #Zaporizhzhia regions. It also created the threat of #Mykolaiv and #Odesa being occupied, while for some time part of the Russian strategy seemed to be to take the entire Black Sea coast of Ukraine, in effect creating a land bridge from Russia all the way to #Transnistria in #Moldova.
Though that has not been achieved and is unlikely to be achievable in light of the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, what Russia did achieve after the fall of Mariupol is a land corridor to Crimea, which was among #Moscow’s key strategic objectives from the beginning.

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