A Trip to the Southern Front: Human Dignity and the War Zone in Your Head 

It’s not what you think. A warzone doesn’t announce itself with the crackle of small arms fire or the crump of heavy artillery. It creeps up on you insidiously like a psychological condition.

For some, approaching the frontline – especially in Eastern Ukraine – is like a journey towards Mordor in Lord of the Rings, black smoke on the horizon and the looming threat of a watchful evil eye. Others have compared it to approaching a swamp where something rotten and old makes you wrinkle your nose and feel sick at heart.

But what I sensed during my brief trip to the ‘zero line’ city of Kherson was neither menace nor disgust nor anxiety – but something unexpected and, in some ways, more disturbing.

Before this summer, the closest I’d been to a frontline was Sarajevo a few years after the siege. Signs of the three-year-long battering of the Bosnian capital were everywhere; bombed-out buildings, dragon’s claw marks of mortar shells on the pavements, but the carnage was over. Only memories of the dead remained. (For some reason I kept dreaming they were swimming in the air around my hotel window).

Other than that, my frontline experience has all been vicarious – through literature or film – the more memorable of which is George Orwell’s description of the “squalid misery” of the Spanish Civil War Aragon front in Homage to Catalonia  “turds, glass, toilet paper… and decaying food”. 

You won’t find any of that squalor in Ukraine, at least on their side of the conflict. As you cross the border, an obsessive emphasis on order and correctness would be a more likely impression.

War first manifests itself as a bureaucratic delay rather than a miasma, though no doubt the constant queues and checkpoints take their toll on impatient drivers. The first casualty I saw in Ukraine was a road accident. 

So where does the war zone begin? 

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The Russian World

On a hot summer day in Odesa, your eyes always turn to the Black Sea for relief, but then war stares you in the face like a jagged tooth. The tallest building in the port, above a cruise hub and exhibition centre, is the Hotel Odesa – its blue colours now burnt black and the windows gaping after it was hit by Kalibr and Onyx missiles late last year.

Odesa, built by Italian architects in the late 18th Century for the Russian Empress Catherine II, was always an outward-looking city. By the first half of the 20th Century, it had a majority Jewish population and remained a byword for multiculturalism under the Russian and Soviet empires.

At first glance, it may seem Putin has poked out its eyes, with many of the historic museums, mansions and department stores boarded up. But most of the time you can sit in the cafes, browse the opulent shops, visit the opera, dance in the nightclubs and forget the war.

Until the air raid sirens wail. 

If there’s a metric of destruction – which there shouldn’t be – about one in 30 buildings show signs of bomb damage which is much less than London in the Blitz. But it’s hard to tell because Ukrainians are so damn good at cleaning up.

Unbelievably, despite the war, cranes are erecting new skyscrapers and housing complexes on its western shore.

Much of the destruction has already been swept away. An empty lot opposite where one of Byline’s journalists was staying turned out to have been a large nineteenth-century building before last autumn’s missiles.

I thought the marble fascia of his apartment block had been removed for safety, but it had actually been blown away in the explosion and his nice new airy refurbished apartment had been strewn with rubble only weeks before. 

Of course, the physical damage and repair of the city is only the outward appearance of a deeper social rift and reconstruction underway in Ukraine after – what we must remember – has been a decade at war. 

The culture of the city itself, mainly Russian speaking, has been fractured by Putin’s ambitions to expand his territory back to Soviet or Tsarist times.

For understandable reasons, Odesan artists, musicians and thinkers are re-evaluating how many Ukrainian-born artists have been appropriated by Russia and how many of their myths and legends co-opted by the Kremlin’s imperial imperatives.

Should Ukraine give up on the Russian language, or preserve and cherish it and not let Putin tarnish it? 

Though these kinds of conversations in Odesan bars and cafes can get passionate – heated even –  there’s something deeply democratic about the debates, and a capacity for ‘civil’ engagement (in both meanings of the word) unimaginable these days in Russia.

In the end, the shift away from the Russian language to Ukrainian is being won in the streets and trenches rather than intellectual dinner table discussions about ‘decolonisation’.

As we headed to Kherson it felt as though the connotations of the Russian language, the association of Russky Mir – the ‘Russian world’ – with death, torture, terror and chaos, and the ‘Z’ militarist symbol of Putin’s “special military operation” may condemn it to death. 

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Facing the Grenade

My guide through Odesan culture and heritage, novelist and journalist Zarina Zabrisky, was also the one who managed to navigate me through the tricky checkpoints and accreditation issues to get to Kherson.

Driving us was Paul Conroy, whose debate with journalist John Sweeney about what constitutes the front line is worth watching. 

The front line is “not a red line on a map” Paul says, but “varies and fluctuates” and can be many miles back from the grey zone of no man’s land. “How far do you have to go to die?” is the crucial question. And the answer to that – the range of heavy artillery. 

Paul would know. He spent years in the Royal Artillery as a target locator and is intimately aware of all the munitions that could come at you – at some personal cost. 

Retrained as a photojournalist and documentary maker, Paul covered war zones all over the world and was one of the first journalists to enter Libya when the uprising there began in 2011. He teamed up with the Sunday Times’ Marie Colvin and stayed on to report from the besieged city of Misrata for two months.

The following year, he and Colvin went to Syria to cover the atrocities there and were deliberately targeted by a rocket attack in Homs in February 2012. She was killed, and Paul was badly injured when grad shrapnel tore through his left leg.

It has taken Paul years of surgery and physiotherapy to get back to full mobility. Ukraine is the first war zone he has returned to since the horror at Homs.

Over the last year, he and Zarina have lived in Kherson under constant bombardment, much of which looks like more deliberate targeting of journalists.  

We stop after the main military checkpoint on the outskirts of Kherson and don our body armour and helmets. The ever-present danger of war reporter vanity is stripped away when I’m told not to actually wear the helmet on the ‘zero-line’ of the city because the Russian drone operators will go for you. 

I’m also prohibited from putting on my seatbelt, even though we are driving fast through the back streets because the dangers of going through the windscreen are less than getting burned alive by not getting out of the car quickly enough when targeted by a drone, rocket or shell. 

So begin the subtle behavioural changes – the side effects of war – which I’d noticed in the car crash just over the border.

An internal front line has been crossed: not wearing a safety belt.

You have to fight your trained habits, and after 40 years of living around the shock waves of explosive violence, Paul can capture striking photographs of civilians and combatants responding by resisting that instinct to flinch and flee and snapping his camera shutter instead

I found that kind of self-control impossible. Though I heard and saw distant incoming fire, the only ordnance I experienced close at hand was outgoing: two Ukrainian rockets fired from behind a destroyed hypermarket complex we were parked next to.

The force of that propellant was like nothing I’ve ever felt. Your whole body moves involuntarily as if someone had come up behind you and shaken you at the same time as yelling “boo” and dousing you with cold water. 

It’s not fear. It’s something more primitive and reptilian. A few seconds later, you just feel embarrassed by your body. And that body can get you into trouble.

The instinctive thing to do when faced with incoming munitions, Paul says, is to run. But that just exposes you to shrapnel and you’re better off lying quiet and still on the ground.

His counterintuitive knowledge also extends to what to do if you find yourself in the proximity of a live hand grenade: don’t turn away and expose your soft tissue to the burning jagged fragments of metal. Lie down and face it, using your forearms crossed in front of your skull as a double layer of protection. 

I think of Paul’s “face the grenade” philosophy as a bit like the principle that you have to confront your demons. Paul has transformed that into an art form, and forced himself to catch those reflexes (his company is appropriately called Reflex TV) of humanity in conflict – confused, scared, violated – in iconic photos. He turns apprehension into comprehension. 

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Reports From a Besieged City

Very few journalists report from Kherson, even though it’s only four hours away from the thriving port of Odesa. That’s partly because it’s difficult to get to, and because it is difficult to understand.

Unlike other front-line towns which are dramatically evacuated, Kherson, with a pre-war population of 360,000 (just a tad smaller than Liverpool) has suffered innumerable fates. 

Sitting on the broad banks of the Dnipro River as it sweeps into the Black Sea, Kherson – like Liverpool – is a strategic port which was occupied soon after the full invasion of February 2022 as part of the Russian army’s southern thrust into Odesa. 

But the Russian troops, as in the north around Kyiv, were stopped by stalwart Ukrainian army defence on the outskirts of the next big town, Mikolaiv.

The threatened amphibious assault on Odesa never came as the Russian tanks stalled. In Kherson, the population rose up in protest against occupation. 

In a gesture reminiscent of the solitary man in the white shirt stopping Chinese tanks on the way to Tiananmen Square, a protester even mounted a Russian personnel carrier in the main square waving a huge Ukrainian flag. But the occupiers soon opened fire and the city entered six long months of occupation. 

In a new ‘museum of resistance’ hidden close to the current front line, we were told the rest of the story: the beginnings of sabotage, assassinations of collaborators, underground print presses and patriotic graffiti. Zarina and John Sweeney talked to some of the survivors of the murder and torture in Byline’s documentary Under Deadly Skies.

Then, in November 2022, despite being officially annexed to Russia, liberation came to Kherson. The US precision-guided HIMARS rocket system had downed the bridge over the Dnipro and the Russian army was having problems supplying its troops to the north.

The army withdrew to a more defensive line on the other side of the river, and the Ukrainian troops returned to be greeted with sunflowers and tears. President Zelenskyy delivered an address promising that this was the forerunner of the liberation of other cities like Mariupol and Berdyansk. 

But the suffering wasn’t over for Kherson. Just a few hundred metres over the river, the Russians could continue their revenge on the city and start destroying it at will. Glide bombs and rockets began to systematically inflict punishment on the civilian infrastructure, particularly targeting hospitals and schools.

The Ukrainian army raided over the river in boats and stopped the artillery fire for a while. I was told that so many Russians were killed, the abandoned dogs there developed a taste for human flesh and many strays could now be dangerous. 

But then came the Russian sabotage of the Nova Khakhova dam 45 miles upstream. Twenty cubic kilometres of water were unleashed, flooding the lower sections of the city and wiping away many houses and settlements on the occupied left bank.

Since the Russian occupiers provided no figures (and very little humanitarian aid) the death toll from the floods is unknown but could amount to many thousands on top of the bombings. 

After the floods came another biblical event – a swarm of locust-like drones. As Zarina Zabrisky has reported, Russian drones are killing and injuring residents every day – over 150 casualties in July alone.

Unlike indirect fire, there’s no excuse that civilians are caught up as collateral damage in area bombardments or imprecise targeting. There are dozens of videos of Russian drones using their FBV ‘first person viewpoint’ to identify ordinary members of the public.

They show aerial views of children, women, men, and old people peacefully going about their business – just walking back from shopping, or parking their cars, in buses and even ambulances – scythed down without remorse or warning. 

Zarina calls this a kind of “human safari” and the predatory premeditation of it is undoubtedly a war crime. Nearly half all the casualties in the city are drone-related these days, according to the head of the military administration. There’s no safe space from drones in Kherson. They can fly through windows, and even into bomb shelters. Miles out of town in the suburbs, we had to hide our car because a drone was near. A couple of young school girls walked down the lane as smoke arose a few hundred metres away. 

All this deliberate micro-targeting of people is reminiscent of the sniper’s alley in Sarajevo, the machine-gunning of crowds or lobbing mortars into busy marketplaces.

The number of casualties could well exceed the 10,000 or so killed in the siege of the Bosnian capital. But back in the 90s, the atrocities of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, or the Bosnian Serb leaders Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, attracted widespread international outrage and a war crimes trial in the Hague.

By comparison, Kherson seems forgotten. 

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Rallying Around Watermelons

At least 60,000 people remain in Kherson, despite every third building in the old town or Soviet-era avenues showing marks of bombardment and the place now dubbed “the city of wooden windows”.

But like Odesa, on an even more intense and dramatic canvas, Ukrainians show their spirit and resistance in every corner they can. 

The vast buckets of sand put in front of a housing block to protect it from bomb blasts are planted with sunflowers and watermelons – two symbols of Ukraine and examples of the fecundity of the black chernozem soils.

Around the corner, a mother has created a whole series of miniature lakes and castles in an abandoned courtyard for her five-year-old son and painted the whole apartment entry block with patriotic symbols and Ukrainian folktales.

While looking at the site of a recently bombed-out cafe where the heat of explosions had melted the street lamps, an old woman was carefully sweeping up broken glass. Some men were removing blackened beams. It may take months, maybe years, but the charred remains would be cleared away. 

Our guide to this part of the journey, Volodymyr, was a key figure during the resistance and now spends most of his days providing aid and succour to the inhabitants.

Having warned me not to step on the fallen leaves (Russians drop anti-personnel mines that look like fallen leaves) he handed me some of the shrapnel from the children’s playground near where the grad rockets had rained down. 

It was heavy, jagged and nasty like a bullet cross-fertilised with an orc axe.  Each grad warhead (and they fire several at a time) explodes in thousands of such vicious fragments, just one of which had almost taken off Paul Conroy’s leg in Homs.

Volodymyr compared it to the debris of a drone grenade he’d also recovered in the playground – much lighter metal, but still as sharp as a flechette. 

More extraordinary still, Volodymyr kept on picking up shrapnel for the next half an hour while Paul, Zarina and their co-producer, George Llewelyn, interviewed a resident. And each bit of metal he picked up he meticulously placed in a public bin, even though the bin had been partially destroyed itself. 

This reminded me of anecdotes I’d often heard about the tidiness of Ukrainians compared to their Russian invaders.

The director of Under Deadly Skies, Caolan Robertson, told me how, down on the Eastern Front, he came across a platoon of muddy, bloodied, battle-worn soldiers at a cafe who had just returned from combat. As they smoked, their hands still shook. But they all carefully collected their cigarette stubs and went round the back of the cafe to deposit them in the proper bin. 

These are signs of resistance, a kind of victory in themselves, as important as waving a flag on Russian tanks. With them, Ukrainians assert their identity and refuse to let the invaders define it with chaos and horror. You can see this in the way they treat Russian prisoners of war. You can see it in the way they treat foreigners at the front. And the way they treat interlopers like me. 

I could barely believe it, but as we left Kherson and grabbed some much-needed refreshment at the surprising modern petrol station, some front-line troops refilling their vehicle insisted on giving me a watermelon. 

I knew the Kherson watermelon was a symbol of the resistance, and since heard that liberating troops even carried watermelon flags during combat. But it was a long and hot day, and despite everything they were going through, those soldiers could see I was tired and thirsty. 

It was the sweetest melon I’ve ever tasted.

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Revolutions of Dignity

Back in the shattered playground in Kherson, Zarina was interviewing a vivacious dark, curly-haired resident called Sveta – in Russian or Ukrainian I didn’t know.

But as she started talking, and Volodymyr began to bin the shrapnel, her voice changed. I didn’t know at the time what she was talking about, but I heard an unmistakable tone – something tragic and elegiac that had the resonance of an operatic aria.

After she’d hugged us all and gone, Zarina, Paul and George told me Sveta’s story. Her mother had been killed in the shelling and soon after that, her husband’s car was hit by Russians. He was burned to death, and all that was really recognisable was the charred wedding ring she still kept.

Here was grief doubled, but refined to something beyond wrath or regret. Here was something much more indestructible than the charred wedding ring. It reminded me of one of my favourite poems, by the great Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert, which I recited many years ago to friends in Sarajevo.

It ends with the lines:

Herbert is talking about Warsaw and the centuries-long struggle for Polish self determination. He’s particularly talking about the Warsaw uprising in 1945 and the consequences for Poles as Stalin sat on the east bank of Vistula and refused to come to their aid, allowing the Nazis to crush the Polish independence and systematically level the city.

It took forty years for the Poles to rebuild Warsaw free from oppression as a truly European capital. 

Back on the beach in Odesa, I was offered yet another watermelon: this time by a group of refugees from the Donbas. They couldn’t speak English and I had no Zarina to interpret, but that same generosity in loss echoed there.

Many of these tragedies are subtle. On that same beach, I got talking to a man whose wife had gone back to Byelorus when the war began. She found someone else and she broke off contact. He hasn’t heard from his son for months, and doubts he’ll ever see him again.

So much is broken in Ukraine, and it’s not just limbs or buildings that need reconstruction: hearts also need to be rebuilt. The glories of Ukraine’s renascent culture help. 

Mikhail Reva, an artist whose witty public sculptures of doors and chairs adorned pre-war Odesa, has since turned his hand to making sense of the detritus of explosive violence.

Having collected hundreds of pieces of shrapnel from all over Ukraine, he formed them into the sharp black fur of a huge Russian bear he calls Moloch, with a stomach full of shells. He studded a vast turning matryoshka doll with bullet casings to further make the point of the Russian war machine.

When I asked him whether dealing with this grim debris made him sad or angry or traumatised, he told me: “None of that. I just follow the materials and feel what they tell me.”

Other artists are even more discreet. Taking us through a series of double blinds and meetings in order to hide its location, one artist revealed to us his current pride and joy: a full-size battle tank occupying an entire barn, but which he could push with one arm because it was made entirely of expanded polystyrene.

Unlike some Damien Hirst or Banksy self-destructing artwork, this installation could save lives, because the missile it wastes can’t be used against flesh and blood.

It has been ten years since I last visited Ukraine, soon after the Maidan uprising in 2014. Though I knew that was a seminal hinge in modern European history, I was always a bit wary of the Ukrainian description of it — ‘The Revolution of Dignity’ — until now. 

Everything I saw in Ukraine was filled with dignity. Not just the stuffy middle-class kind you might see in Odesa’s gorgeous Opera House (though to be fair, one of the few good Soviet legacies is the proletarian access to and appreciation of opera and ballet).

Odesan nightclubs are famed for their wild fun and raucousness. There you can rave to some folk punk, and down tequilas with soldiers or aid workers who dance like it may be the last night of their lives. Which it might well be. 

Music is everywhere. Down on the beach, someone plays a piano quietly somewhere, while soldiers due to head to the meatgrinder in the East the next day sit and hold hands with their girlfriends, looking at the moon rippled on the Black Sea.

Earlier, at the opera, I’d heard a Ukrainian tenor singing the famous aria from Puccini’s Tosca to a standing ovation. In the story, the hero, Mario Cavaradossi, awaits his inevitable death at dawn, thinks of the woman he has lost and sings: “I die in despair. But I have never loved life so much. So much!”