Russia ordered its troops to abandon the west bank of the Dnipro River just hours after Yevgen Gamiy had another lucky escape from incoming fire to the east.

The Kremlin’s announced withdrawal from the city of Kherson and about half of the region of the same name appeared to mark a new low for President Vladimir Putin in the ninth month of his grueling war.

Kherson was the only regional capital to be conquered by Russia and is Ukraine’s gateway to the Kremlin-annexed Crimea and the Sea of ??Azov.

Wednesday’s announcement of the withdrawal came two months after Russian forces in the north were routed – and seven months after they gave up attempts to seize Kyiv.

Ukraine has reacted skeptically to the announced pullout, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has hinted that Russia may be more likely to feign strategy than face a major setback.

The 51-year-old owner of the last working tractor in Stepnogirsk, one of the last inhabited villages before Russian positions on the eastern half of the Southern Front, didn’t seem to mind.

Gamiy had been assigned – both by bad luck and by mistake – to haul water from a spring to cellar dwellers in the village.

The jack-of-all-trades had to learn the hard way that the Russians still felt comfortable on his side of the Dnipro border.

“Seemed quiet this morning, and then this,” the tractor driver said, holding a loaf-length fragment of a Grad rocket.

“It whistled for a split second and then exploded. And then another,” he said. “It’s going to be spooky on this tractor.”

Ukraine’s main river is becoming a natural shield for Putin’s troops.

Virtually the entire Zaporizhia region of Stepnogirsk is removed from Kherson and the advancing army of Ukraine across the yawning banks of the Dnieper.

The Russians have been entrenched in fields stretching a few kilometers south of the villages since the first days of the war.

Few villagers know why the sides are firing rockets at each other along a completely frozen stretch of front line.

But the exchange has forced the roughly 1,500 remaining residents of Stepnogirsk to spend most of their lives underground.

“We hear about the events in Kherson,” said engineer Lyudmyla Okopna, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm in her voice.

“We keep thinking that our guys are also moving in our direction. But it just didn’t happen,” said the 58-year-old.

“Our front hasn’t moved.”

The big concern in such remote locations is that Ukraine will have to halt its counter-offensive if snow falls in the coming weeks.

Winter complicates the fight for both armies. Soldiers freeze in their foxholes and engines won’t start.

And few can predict how the Russians will fight in the spring if they don’t get a chance to regroup.

Lyubov Gazhula worried about winter while eating an apple pie that she and her neighbors baked on a makeshift stove in their well-appointed basement.

“If the war suddenly stops, we’ll get what has been happening in Donetsk for eight years,” said the 62-year-old.

A 2014 uprising by pro-Kremlin proxies in eastern Ukraine escalated into a small-scale conflict that left thousands dead without the land changing hands.

“Eight years of shooting and nothing that moves. I wouldn’t want that,” said the former farm worker.

Another concern for Zaporizhia is where the Russians will pursue Cherson.

Neither part of the two southern regions was under Kremlin control before the war.

A Kherson debacle could make Zaporizhzhia — an industrial and agricultural region stretching south to the Sea of ??Azov — Putin’s major wartime victory.

“The front line has been in place here for so long that we’ve started to think the Russians aren’t likely to reach us,” Okopna said.

But Zaporizhia’s connection with the rest of the Russian force to the east makes it more vulnerable to a possible new Kremlin push.

“Those Russian liberators – they obliterate everything in their path. You can’t trust them,” Gazhula said indignantly.

The tractor driver was equally depressed.

Shortly before the war broke out, Gamiy took out a bank loan to pay for his tractor.

His plan to repay the money through farming in the village failed due to Putin’s invasion, and now the bank wanted the tractor back.

“I got this job because everyone else took away their equipment,” he said.

“I’ll tell the bank to come and get the tractor if they want it. But nobody comes here.”