Europe is once again a theatre of a major war, beginning on the 24th of February 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Hopelessly outnumbered the Ukrainians have proven them themselves a worthy opponent of the regional hegemon Russia. In the fall of 2022, the Ukrainians served Putin his greatest defeat thus far with a counteroffensive which liberated Kherson and all Ukrainian territory west of the Dnepr. The goal of this thesis is to examine the Ukrainian counteroffensive and how Ukraine managed to achieve success at the tactical level. The thesis does this by studying available information about the counteroffensive and analysing it with the help of manoeuvre warfare theories and satellite imagery. The thesis shows that Ukrainian tactical success during the Kherson counteroffensive can be attributed to their use of combined arms and the fact that surprise was achieved. However, it is worth noting that other factors may have contributed to Ukrainian tactical success and that more information about the counteroffensive may become available with time.

While there are plenty of published materials concerning survival in Ukraine during World War II, most of those bypass the Kherson region and focus primarily on the German occupation. This thesis is an attempt to study the complex history of people's survival in Ukraine during a large portion of the twentieth century, through a micro-history of the city of Kherson and the neighboring villages, and towns of the region. The study analyzes the actions and the consequences for the various social, political and ethnic groups of changes in the ruling regimes, emphasizing the period of the return of the Red Army to the region in 1943-1944. This work attempts to provide an answer to the question of why the population of a provincial city, which endured no major combat, was reduced from about 100,000 residents in 1941 to less than a hundred on the day of return of the Soviets in 1944? / text