Nikolai Bohun showed off the spot where the cab from a tractor landed in his potato field. Not far from the blue metal carcass was a giant tyre. Both objects had flown over the road last month after a Russian S-300 rocket landed on a nearby agricultural building. The attack happened at 3.15am. “It’s a miracle I’m here,” Bohun said.
He and his wife, Lubov, live in Mala Oleksandrivka, a village on the frontline in Ukraine’s southern Kherson province. In March, Russian troops swept in, setting up checkpoints and parking their tanks behind a school. Soldiers from the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) moved into Bohun’s once quiet neighbourhood of School Street.
From time to time, the Ukrainian army lobbed missiles at the Russian occupiers. Over the summer, a bomb demolished Bohun’s wall and an outhouse. Another fell in a shed, killing most of his chickens. Afterwards, his dog was deaf. Bohun collected the missile fragments and put them next to his store of walnuts and quinces. “I’m still finding shrapnel in my onion patch,” he said.
The Russians left Mala Oleksandrivka on 5 October, moving about six miles (10km) down the road. Earlier this week the sounds of battle were all around. There was a constant whump from outgoing Ukrainian artillery and mortars. Late on Tuesday morning, two Russian missiles came screaming over Bohun’s roof with a terrifying thunderous clap. One went off nearby; the other did not.
Then on Wednesday, Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, announced he was pulling his army out of the city of Kherson and the rustic settlements along the west bank of the Dnipro River. It was a significant strategic setback for Moscow, after a failed attempt in the spring to overrun Kyiv and Ukraine’s late summer counteroffensive in Kharkiv. The exit came five weeks after Putin annexed the territory and said it was Russia “for ever”.
Ukrainian troops have since gradually liberated communities close to the existing frontline. In some places, local people have raised the Ukrainian flag themselves.
In the early hours of Friday morning, Ukrainian forces pounded Russian troops as they tried to flee. According to local Telegram channels there were multiple explosions at the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, a crossing point over the Dnipro next to the city of Nova Kakhovka. Russian military bloggers suggested 20,000 troops were practically trapped in and around Kherson on the right bank.
Some fear the Kremlin will now seek to destroy the city, turning the port into another Mariupol. But whatever happens next, the war appears to be turning slowly but surely in Ukraine’s favour.
In Mala Oleksandrivka, Bohun said his biggest wish now was peace. “Kherson is Ukraine, Crimea is debatable,” he said. The war had exacted a huge personal toll, he added. Crying, he said his beloved 23-year-old grandson Maxim was killed in April while fighting with the Ukrainian army near Odesa. His village was without electricity, gas and central heating as winter approached.
The departing Russians have left behind a prodigious mess. At an abandoned checkpoint, Putin’s troops had constructed a foxhole using green ammunition boxes. There was a sleeping bag, discarded cigarette packets and a solitary boot. Nearby was a dumped anti-tank weapon and an oil drum, branded with the red and white logo of the Russian energy company Lukoil.
In some villages there is not a single surviving shop, pharmacy or cafe. Homes and businesses have been pulverised. The road to the frontline follows the curling reed-lined Inhulets River and a bucolic landscape dotted with roofless cottages and wonky electricity pylons. A burned-out Russian armoured personnel carrier sits in a field, not far from an abandoned car marked with a “V”, the sign of Putin’s faltering invasion.
Bohun’s neighbour Nadia Kotula said she had measured the crater left by October’s night-time S-300 missile strike – the one that landed on the tractor. The hole was 5 metres deep and visible just beyond her wooden fence. She said two DNR soldiers had lived in her house. “They were well behaved and very religious. They left behind their bible and a packet of coffee. Not all of them were bad,” she suggested.
Hungry DNR soldiers knocked on Bohun’s door back in March, begging for food. They said they had not seen bread for five days. “I asked them what they were doing here. They said: ‘We are following orders.’ They told me: ‘If it wasn’t for our commander we would have gone home by now.’ We were fortunate that they were not worse.”
The war has been a disaster for animals, too. Bohun’s son Andriy, a drawing teacher and amateur theatre director, said mines had blown up several of the village’s cows. Starving dogs ate most of the ducks. “It was like Chernobyl,” he said, adding that he fled soon after occupation. Back then the Russians believed they would stay indefinitely, he said.
Andriy showed off the primary school where soldiers had lived for seven months. All of its windows were broken. A projectile poked out from the roof. In the rear of the building was a homemade shower block. There were abandoned vehicles and ghostly track marks left by tanks. “My children studied here. The soldiers used it to have discos with women. You could hear the music on Saturday evening,” he said.
The Russians made another base in the palace of culture, in the neighbouring village of Velyka Oleksandrivka. Nikolai said he had previously put on several productions there including a show called Solaris, after the film by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. When the war began he hid two projectors under costumes. The soldiers stole one but did not find the other.
They obliterated a statue of Ukraine’s national poet, Taras Shevchenko, leaving a broken column. After they left, locals discovered that the palace had been turned into an Aladdin’s cave of stolen household goods. Washing machines were piled on top of each other. “One woman found her machine. She produced a certificate proving ownership. The Ukrainian police gave it back to her,” Nikolai said.
Amid relief at Moscow’s withdrawal, there were tales of horror and loss. Local prosecutors said they had found more bodies this week of civilians killed by the Russian military. It was the same grim pattern seen in other occupied areas, including the Kyiv suburb of Bucha. At least five people were killed in the Kherson region village of Arkhanhelske, local people said. One was a drunk man who ignored a command to stop.
The others – two married couples – were shot after witnessing Russian soldiers looting private houses. Lena Sluzhinskaya said they murdered her brother Kolya and his wife, Tanya on 23 August. “Kolya saw them throwing clothes down from next door’s balcony. At night they broke into his home and killed him,” she said, standing with a crowd of pensioners in the village’s main square.
Lubov Kravchenko described the invaders as zombies. “They said they had come to liberate us and that we were Americans and Banderivtsi,” she said, a reference to the militant Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera. She added: “They stole everything. Women’s clothes, TVs and kids’ stuff. They put it in their armoured vehicles.”
Kravchenko said her village experienced 10 brutal military rotations. Each new Russian unit would pilfer any remaining items and drive off with them. “When our Ukrainian boys arrived, I cried. It was a wonderful moment. People didn’t leave their homes when the occupiers came because we had relatives to look after or cows to feed. We are all for Ukraine.”
Back at School Street, Nikolai Bohun said he had no intention of going anywhere, after months in which flags and maps had changed at dizzying speed. He said: “I’m 77. The graveyard is at the bottom of my garden. When the time comes I’ll move over there.”
