Good day. And as I have said many times when we reach an anniversary of a profound moment in a conflict, the temptation is always to look back at the images, the headlines, the slogans. But if we are to understand what an event truly meant, we must look instead at its afterlives — how it has echoed through the months, how it has reshaped choices on all sides, and how it continues to weigh on the political and military imagination long after the cameras have moved on.

One year ago, Kherson was not merely a place on a map. It was the first regional capital seized after February 24th, declared “forever” part of Russia, adorned with referenda and administrative decrees. For the Kremlin, it was a trophy and a pillar of narrative. For Ukraine, it was a wound, but also a promise — that occupation did not equal surrender.

When Russian forces finally withdrew from the right bank of the Dnipro in November 2022, we observed that this was not simply a tactical repositioning. It was a psychological rupture. Today, a year on, we can see just how deep that rupture has become.

Let us begin with Russia. The withdrawal from Kherson shattered the notion of territorial permanence that Moscow had been so eager to project. It forced Russian officials to explain how “forever” could, in practice, mean “for a few months.” That rhetorical contortion has never been resolved. The Kremlin has, since then, tried to substitute escalating language about other regions, more referenda, more declarations. But the specter of Kherson hangs over every new assertion of permanence.

Politically, Kherson has become an unspoken boundary in the Russian system. It is the precedent no one wishes to name. It demonstrated that, under sufficient pressure, Moscow will choose the survival of a grouping over the prestige of a symbol. And since that moment, we have seen a quiet, halting recalibration: fewer grand proclamations about “forever,” more talk of “tactical necessity,” “lines of communication,” “force preservation.”

Militarily, the consequences are equally clear. The right bank of the Dnipro is no longer a forward Russian staging area. It is a Ukrainian-controlled zone from which pressure can be exerted southward and eastward. The river, once treated as a vector for Russian advance, has become a barrier behind which Russian forces must perpetually guard, wary of crossings, raids, and long-range strikes.

Ukraine, for its part, has treated Kherson not as a finished chapter but as a reference point — a demonstration that carefully applied pressure can make even politically sacrosanct positions untenable. The methodical approach that succeeded there — targeting bridges, depots, command posts; refusing to be rushed into frontal assaults; accepting the logic of attrition over the seduction of spectacle — has reappeared in subsequent campaigns.

In the months since, we have seen variations of the Kherson pattern in the Black Sea, where Ukraine has eroded the Russian fleet’s sense of sanctuary, and in the depths of Russia’s own energy infrastructure, where long-range strikes and sanctions have combined to make certain economic positions similarly untenable. Kherson was, in many ways, a prototype: a demonstration that the right combination of military patience and political resolve can force Russia to abandon what it once declared indispensable.

There is also the matter of memory, which in war is never neutral. For Ukrainians, the images of returning to Kherson — of flags, embraces, testimony — have become part of the moral architecture of their resistance. They are proof that liberation is not a fantasy but an achievable outcome. In a long, grinding conflict, such proof is invaluable. It sustains endurance when other metrics fluctuate.

For Russia, the memory is more complicated. Official narratives have tried to minimize it, to recast the withdrawal as an act of prudence, even magnanimity. But among the pro-war commentators and the officer corps, Kherson remains a source of bitterness. It exposed the limits of the Kremlin’s willingness to support forward positions that could not be supplied. It showed that once a position becomes logistically unsustainable, political symbolism offers no shield.

As we mark this one-year point, then, we should resist both extremes: the view that Kherson solved the war, and the view that it was a mere episode. It did something more specific and, in its way, more enduring. It altered expectations. It taught Ukraine that the liberation of occupied cities was not merely aspirational. It taught Russia that even its most prized gains could become liabilities. And it taught external observers that the apparent solidity of a front can conceal deep structural vulnerabilities.

Future historians will catalogue everything that has happened since Kherson — the battles, the negotiations, the economic blows. But they will also, I think, look back to this week in November 2022 and this anniversary in November 2025 and say: here is where a particular myth about irreversibility died. Here is where the war’s territorial map ceased to be a one-way street.

Ukraine made that myth untenable. A year later, the shock has faded. The lesson has not.