Vitaliy Savchenko showed off the damage from a Russian shell that had landed right across the street. Shrapnel tore holes in his garage and blew off the kitchen door. There were three neat gaps in his car. “When it’s a mortar you have five seconds to react. With a Grad missile it’s a bit longer – about 18 seconds,” he said. “A tank round is instantaneous. There’s no time to hide.”
Savchenko lives in Kherson, the southern city triumphantly liberated on 11 November by Ukrainian forces. He spent nine months under occupation. When friendly troops came down the main Ushakov avenue, Savchenko waved a blue and yellow flag he had hidden under the stairs, along with his mobile phone. The next evening he held a party with friends. They clinked glasses in celebration.
The euphoria didn’t last. The Russians retreated across the Dnieper River, a mere 800 metres away. Ever since they have been bombarding Kherson from the opposite left bank. At first they hit the city according to a rough timetable: mornings and afternoons. Now they bomb it all the time. Nobody can predict when the next shell will fall, or where. Or on whom.
Last weekend bombs landed on the railway line, residential buildings and a warehouse. One guard was killed and several people injured. An S-300 ballistic missile gouged a vast crater. Another projectile hit the Soviet-era jubilee cinema and theatre, where Savchenko had once watched a promising young comedian – Volodymyr Zelenskiy – perform his sketches. He also saw the English rock band Smokie play there.
Close to Savchenko’s home a large lime green cuddly toy marks the spot where a child died walking along the road. In recent months many families have left. The exodus sped up after 10 people were killed on Christmas Eve while out shopping in the central market, and dozens hurt. The children’s hospital and maternity unit have repeatedly come under fire.
The Russians can surveil the city by flying drones above their side of the river. They don’t need to: after spending most of 2022 in Kherson they can plot everything on a map. The Red Cross building has been hit three times. A volunteer and mother of two, Victoria Yaryshko, was killed in December by a shell as she handed out bread. An elderly man died too.
“We’ve learned to distinguish between their artillery and ours,” Savchenko said. “If it’s outgoing my cat stays asleep. When it’s Russian she gets up and hides downstairs.” About 60,000 people from a pre-invasion population of 300,000 remain in Kherson, a majority of them pensioners. The city’s fate resembles that of Kharkiv, the north-eastern metropolis grimly pummelled by Russian field guns for much of last year.
Savchenko said he preferred freedom with missiles to harsh foreign rule, when eight Chechen soldiers lived around the corner in Crimea Street, in a comfy white villa visible from his balcony. They parked an armoured personnel carrier in front of his garden, and patrolled in a Jeep with a blue flashing light. “They loved turning it on,” he said. He added: “We are different from Russians. I can’t submit to anybody. They are serfs.”
There is little prospect the Ukrainian army will be able to evict the Russians any time soon. They have built two large defensive trenches on the left bank, 10km (6 miles) apart. To overcome them would require a Ukrainian military breakthrough in the Zaporizhzhia region, and then a push into occupied southern Kherson. For now, commandos do plucky raids using speedboats on Russian-controlled islands.
As the anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion approaches on 24 February, there is a sense that neither side can decisively win Europe’s biggest war since 1945. In the east, the Russian war machine grinds slowly forward. Ukraine appears to be preparing its own mid-spring counter-offensive. “With our current forces we can’t hope to liberate the country,” one Ukrainian officer admitted. “We have the people. They are idiots and untrained. But we need more western weapons: tanks and aviation.”
For now, those stuck on the wrong side of the river live in a state of fear and terror. Last week Russian troops grabbed one of Savchenko’s friends from the occupied town of Nova Kakovkha. They arrived at his house in an armoured vehicle, smashing down the fence, and took him away. A neighbour found blood in the kitchen. The Russian methods seen in Kherson – torture, rape and killing – continue elsewhere.
Savchenko’s friend Vasyl Averchenko said “orcs” had recently moved into his dacha in Hola Prystan, a rustic district of apple and cherry trees on the left bank. Russian soldiers settled in empty private houses, he said. Averchenko – a dental surgeon with a practice in Kherson – said he last visited his cottage in September: “I took a boat across the Dnipro. I harvested grapes from my garden and made 60 litres of wine.”
During their takeover, Kherson’s Moscow overlords tried to create “Russky Mir”, the Kremlin’s term for Russian cultural space. They flew the Russian flag over civic buildings, played patriotic Soviet songs, and erected billboards with the slogan: “Russia and Ukraine – one people.” One poster had a distinctly fascist flavour, residents said. It showed a pregnant woman and a Russian tricolour with the words: “Maternal capital”.
The occupiers launched a campaign to win over hearts and minds. They promised pension handouts of 10,000 roubles a month – paying these only twice – as well as social benefits for new mothers, and for parents who enrolled their children in Russian curriculum schools. “I wanted nothing to do with them,” Dima Shvets – aged 73 – said. “But a couple of my acquaintances took the cash. They were disappointed when the Russian went.”
“It was a nightmare,” building engineer Ludmila Gordeeva added. “There were checkpoints all over the city. They even checked papers on trolley-buses. It was to intimidate people.” Gordeeva said vendors from Crimea sold glasses of vodka from tables on the street. “We had nothing like this in Ukraine, even in the 1990s,” she said. “I have relatives in Moscow. Propaganda has brainwashed them. It’s similar to world war two.”
Local journalist Iryna Uhvarina said the mood in the city was overwhelmingly anti-Russian. “We were all mini-partisans,” she recalled. When Russian personnel carriers and infantry rolled in last March, there were large protests in the main square. Troops allowed these rallies at first but then broke up them up, using live rounds and grenades. They identified the most active protesters and later arrested them, she said.
Uhvarina said after her photographer colleague went into hiding she learned how to take pictures discreetly with her phone. Her online newspaper, vgoru.org, continued to appear. Post-liberation Russian shelling was remorseless, she said, and anyone who walked along the embankment could be shot by a sniper. “I haven’t seen the river this year.” she said. Asked if Ukraine will win, she teared up and answered: “Yes. But it will take a lot of blood”.
Nataliya Shatilova, the head of the city’s Red Cross branch, said Kherson was being slowly strangled. “It’s just vandalism. There are no Ukrainian soldiers here,” she noted. “This used to be a wonderful tourist city. Now we can’t swim in the Dnipro or collect mushrooms in the forest because of mines.” Her organisation delivered medicines and hygiene products to patients, so they didn’t have to congregate in the open, she explained.
Savchenko, meanwhile, said he had no intention of exiting Kherson, however bad the bombardment got. He looked after three houses and four flats belonging to friends who had gone. He watered their plants, fed the fish and shut the odd window blown open by pressure waves from explosions. He and his neighbour Sergii Gnatkovskyi – a former naval captain – sent their own families out of the city because of the risk.
Gnatkovskyi was sceptical Moscow would be able to prevail. “Something will change over there. Why not? There will be a coup, or a revolution,” he predicted, standing in front of his house, its windows recently smashed by shrapnel. Savchenko said there could be no reconciliation with Russia this century. “They have become addicted to imperial nostalgia,” he observed. “If you live in the past you get stuck there. It becomes very difficult to imagine anything new.”
A retired military officer who served in the Soviet far east, Savchenko said his religious faith helped him to get by. He showed off an icon that fell to the floor when the shell struck. The frame broke but the figure was miraculously undamaged. “A Chechen stopped me last year at a checkpoint and asked whether Russia or ‘Nato’ would win. I told him: “You believe in Allah. I believe in God. I’m sure he will make the right decision.”
