As Ukrainian forces mount a counteroffensive towards the occupied city and its mayor is abducted by Russian soldiers, Elena Kostyuchenko has early eyewitness accounts of resistance, propaganda, abductions and protests. Translated from Russian by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse
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The Russian army occupied Kherson on 3 March 2022. First, the city was surrounded: they took the outlying villages and the Chernobayevka airfield. Then troops entered the city. But only Kherson, of all of Ukraine’s regional centres, has been occupied and held by the Russian army. How did they take it?
“Idiocy or betrayal, or maybe both,” says Andriy Gordeev, the former governor of the Kherson Region.
As his colleagues tell it, as soon as war broke out the acting governor Gennadiy Laguta placed his keys on the mayor’s desk, saying “I’m not going be involved in this,” before leaving the region entirely. The top brass from the police, prosecutor’s office and the courts left with him – on the first day of the war. The Security Service evacuated their staff soon after.
The battle for Antonovskiy Bridge, which lay across the Dnieper, lasted two days. Vitaly Skakun, a marine battalion’s engineer, gave his life to destroy one of the transport bridges: he stayed behind to set off the explosives. Zelenskyy posthumously created him a Hero of Ukraine.
The Russian tank column, meanwhile, was looking for a way around – and naturally, it found one. According to Konstantin Ryzhenko, a local journalist:
“The deputy head of the regional council, he kept on posting these cheery talking points, how everything was going to be fine. And people were completely confident that we had a defender corps, the military had some clever plan too, we were going to lure the enemy to some key staging points then lob a bunch of Molotov cocktails at them, and then our soldiers would come charging in from around the corner and rain down artillery fire, and the defenders helping on the sidelines, finishing off the enemy wounded.
It was a kind of euphoria, I guess, for people who had never actually seen war. I must have believed in it too, to some extent, because if you look at how it went down in the other cities… they put up the heaps of car tyres, the sandbags, you know, they were holding out somehow. You could see they were resisting. So I was like, great, we can do it too!
But it turned out that Teroborona, the volunteer corps, managed to get only 200 people together, bussed them out somewhere on the very first day – the enemy hadn’t even crossed the bridge yet – gave them one rifle between five guys, a handful of bullets, and told them to sit and wait. Nothing happening. They made them do some kind of physical fitness, just short of jogging and push-ups. I mean, honestly… They sat out there for 24 hours, and then the military guys came and told them to go back home. Two days later it was, no, come back. One minibus came, space for 20 guys. They told the rest to go on home.
This was an unofficial volunteer militia. When they heard “go home” they took it to mean the city was about to be given up, so they thought, fuck this. They got the bit between their teeth and went off on their own, to fight. And they all got killed.”
The City
The martial commandant’s HQ has taken over the former regional council building on Freedom Square. The name of the commandant remains a mystery. The curfew order and the proclamation forbidding public gatherings – unsigned – float about the local Telegram chat groups.
Both the city council offices, which belong to the Ukrainian side, and the regional council building, occupied by the Russians, are actually located on the same main street, 500 metres apart. Kherson’s regional council recently issued a resolution confirming there was no plan for a KNR – a Kherson People’s Republic on the LNR and DNR models – in the works.
“The representative members of Kherson’s regional assembly will never accept any attempt to create a “people’s republic” on Kherson territory, and make off with a piece of Ukraine,” the council said.
Yuri Sobolevsky, the regional council’s deputy head, explained that since the council’s building itself is occupied by Russian troops, they had to take a vote on the resolution via Zoom, and only 50 out of 64 people were able to dial in. 44 voted against a KNR.
Russian flags fly above the abandoned Security Service building and police headquarters. Curfew is between 8 pm and 6 am. On the third day of the occupation, Russian television channels began to broadcast in Kherson.
Those who are plugged into the antenna directly, without a cable box, still have access to Ukrainian TV. The city’s own media have more or less ceased working. Kherson gets its information from Telegram channels.
The city is without police. The top brass left Kherson on the first day of the war, with the suggestion that beat cops might want to dress in mufti and make their own way out.’The municipal guards and a cadre of volunteers have taken on policing duties.
Looting, which began two days after the Russians arrived, is no longer a concern. After Fabrika, the largest shopping centre (it was shelled), the ‘Citrus’ appliance store and a few of the food shops were hit by looters: the Greenline and Sel’po supermarkets didn’t wait to be broken into, they simply opened their doors to the public.
There are burned-out cars everywhere in the streets, with no one to move them.
On Tarle Street someone is patching up a metre-wide hole in building No 2, next to a pocket balcony that’s been turned inside out, with sheet metal. The houses along this street were the first to be shelled as the Russian army rolled into town.
Aleksandra Kaznacheeva is sorting out the humanitarian aid parcel she’s just received – ten loaves of bread to be distributed across the building. A piece of paper on top of each loaf denotes the apartment number. There are flowers on her table. They fell off the windowsill during a bombardment, but she managed to revive them.
“I mean, I can understand it when it was Hitler, they were Fascists over there, foreigners, you know, it was just not the same at all… I can’t even think of what to call that man, something worse than the devil, I really don’t know what. I have no words. No words. To rip away all the joyous things in life!” She gives herself barely a minute to cry, already she’s dry-eyed.
“They started bombing before lunchtime, you know. Because I was right here by the kitchen counter. No one expected it, least of all me! I shot into the bathroom without thinking. I sat down, and then I heard the glass breaking, all the glass.
Our building got hit, you see, number 2, and also number 4, a shell flew into the side of the building. The shockwave ripped through all the ground and first floors. When it went quiet I opened the door and came out, then I saw my flowers all over the floor, the window glass sprayed everywhere. Two big explosions, basically. By the time I came out of the bathroom, there wasn’t a single window left in my apartment.
Meanwhile, in apartment 6 – that’s the one opposite me – their granny who was living with them, she was sitting in the kitchen, and that saved her. She started screaming. Hysterical… Their front door was locked, a good solid door that didn’t even stave in. We couldn’t get the granny out through the door. We had to pull her out through the balcony, the hole where the balcony was before. We called an ambulance. She was all covered in blood. Probably the shattering glass, it cut her. We asked her if there was anyone else in the house. She says, “Not nobody there,” we thought she was in shock, eighty-two years old, you know. If there’s nobody else there, there’s nobody else there.
But the next day the phone rings, and it’s her grandson’s army commander. He says, your neighbour is looking for his wife. I tell him: “We were told she’d gone to her parents, back to her village. There was only the granny here.” I told him what happened. But it turned out, the wife was there all along, under the building panels, she… It all just fell on top of her.
You see that cement panel there, the balcony doorway and the big window? That whole thing fell on top of her. Even if we’d got to her straight away… When they found her eventually, her face was badly cut. She was probably killed instantly.
She was 29, Tanya Ermolaeva was her name. A real sharp cookie she was! The granny’s name is Valentina, she’s 82. Her grandson’s called Sasha, he’s serving near Luhansk right now. And that’s the whole family right there.”
Blockade
The city is, in effect, blockaded. Russian troops control all exits. The most acute problem is the lack of medicines. The pharmacies have run out of heart and blood pressure medication.
There’s no L-thyroxine, which is a life-and-death matter for people with malfunctioning thyroid glands – in fact, there is no L-thyroxine to be had in all of Ukraine right now. They managed to literally smuggle some insulin into the city and parcelled it out between hospitals. Every pharmacy has a list of unavailable medications posted outside. The lists are usually 40-50 items long and most of these are for chronic conditions. There are no chemotherapy drugs. There are no psychotropic drugs.
Food prices have roughly doubled, and the price of eggs tripled. There is plenty of gingerbread and jam, brie and frozen salmon – special occasion food – still on offer at the larger supermarkets. There is no pasta to be had, or cooking grains, or bread and sugar. The old signs, “no more than 1 kilo per customer”, are all that remains of these staples. You can find anything at the food markets, but it’s more expensive. A week ago, the wholesale warehouse near Bolshie Kopani started operations again, so the city is supplied with vegetables once more. Bread is available from smaller, independent bakeries – a loaf can cost up to 25 hryvnyas (around 75p in British currency).
Military action left the Chernobayev poultry farm without electricity, water or chicken feed. They gave away the entire stock – around three million live chickens. The birds were brought in through the checkpoints, unloaded by ninety prisoners, and driven into the city proper by private car. It is said there’s not a fridge left in Kherson that hasn’t stored a Chernobayev chicken.
The daily search for food takes two or three hours. Every day, people assemble by the train station where humanitarian aid packages are being given out. This is aid from Russia; Ukrainian aid is not allowed through. The queue today is half-hearted: they’ve been told that there won’t be anything today, but thirty or so people hang around just in case. They’ve been here since 6 a.m.
‘They Have their Own Version of the Truth. We Are Living Ours’ Sandbagging in Odessa
Elena KostyuchenkoA youth comes up to say something quietly to a woman in the queue.
“I’m standing here, young man, because I need the help! I might ask why you’re here, too?”
“Your nice Russians blocked a l