Eight months of fear and resistance. Stories heard and seen in Kherson

More than eight months of occupation have significantly changed Kherson and Kherson residents, say the locals themselves. The city's infrastructure is destroyed, it is on the verge of survival, but at the same time, the locals were not so united before the war. No one knows for sure how many people were killed or injured by the Russians and how the occupation will affect the life of the city in the long term.

hromadske journalist spent three days collecting stories about life and survival in occupied Kherson. All these stories are very different: from happy to tragic. Through them, we will try to recount how the city lived during these eight months.

"No one deserves to be eaten by a dog"

Russian troops entered Kherson on March 1 from the direction of Chornobayivka and Komyshany. By that time, they had already occupied the entire adjacent territory on the east bank of the Dnipro River and surrounded the city.

On Naftovykiv Street near Lilac Park, the attackers' heavy armored vehicles were met by 43 Kherson territorial defence fighters armed only with Kalashnikovs, twenty F-1 grenades, two Mukha grenade launchers and Molotov cocktails, which were never used, recalled Stanislav Vazanov, a participant of that battle and territorial defense fighter. The battle lasted no more than half an hour. Its outcome was predictable as the forces were too unequal.

Maryna was one of those who collected the bodies of fallen Ukrainian defenders in the park the next day. Many of them did not even have time to get military uniforms.

She recalls that terrible day clearly and consistently, only once she cannot stand the memories: "I saw a big white dog pulling a human leg. My son did not believe it, he said it was a cow bone. And I said to him: "Son, where have you seen cows come to the park to die?"

Local residents collected 16 whole bodies and four bags with human remains. It was the priest of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine Serhiy Chudynovych who held a funeral service and buried the fallen heroes.

"No person, no matter what nationality they are, deserves to be eaten by a dog," Maryna cries.

The next morning her husband, who also helped to collect the dead, was found with a stroke, but the ambulance took him only on March 7 as nothing worked in the city.

Read a more detailed account of how the victims were buried and honored in Lilac Park on hromadske soon.

"Whom shall we call: Zelenskyy or Biden?"

Yuriy is a former civil servant, I meet him in a line for water in one of the districts of Kherson. The man was detained by the occupiers on May 7. They blocked the entire lane where he came to the market. They checked the phones of his wife and son, and said: "We will talk to him and bring him back". He was “declared" a fire spotter and subsequently interrogated for three days in a row.

"They called it ‘let's go to work’. On the first day, they beat me right in the corridor. They poured water on me, forbade me to sit, let alone lie down, and I stood all night. The most fun was at night, they have a special team there, five men. They electrocuted me, beat me with batons, and broke a rib. Once they stood on me to prevent me from escaping, and one of them was tasering me, while the other was simultaneously burning my leg with fire," Yuriy recalls.

The man remembers the "electrician" with outright hatred, considering him the greatest sadist of all. Electricity is traditionally tortured using a TA-57 “Tapik" (a military field phone with an induction coil), attaching wires to the limbs. The torturer had his own twisted kind of entertainment: he asked before the torture "who will we call – Zelenskyy or Biden?". If Zelenskyy, the "Tapik" would be spun for a slightly shorter time, if Biden – longer.

The prisoners were kept in the building of the local detention center. The first day Yuriy was given only army biscuits, the next day – only tea, and only later did they start to bring something from time to time. At the same time, they often fried kebabs right under the open cell windows.

Yuriy was released 16 days after his arrest when all the bruises from the first interrogations had faded. During his imprisonment, he lost 20 kilograms of weight. His back and shoulders still hurt, and he wakes up from the sounds of car engines driving through the city because he still remembers the Russian Ural trucks.

At the end of the conversation, the family half-jokingly asks: "Do you know if Crimea is ours?". And then they try to ask more about the situation at the front. Communication in the city is intermittent, so many Kherson residents continue to live in a certain information vacuum.

"I was killed on the Moskva cruiser”

Before becoming a taxi driver, Serhiy worked in the police. And even earlier, from 1991 to 1993, he served in the navy in Sevastopol on the very cruiser Moskva, which was later sunk by the Ukrainian military.

"I was taught to live there. They were practically killing me there, I was washing myself with my own blood,” he recalls with indignation.

His position was technical, he was among those who took care of auxiliary boilers on the boat and constantly suffered from beatings by sailors.

During the occupation, there were three Russian checkpoints in Kherson – in Antonivka, on Avtorynok (“car market”) and the most terrible one – on the island (Korabelnyi district), says Serhiy. At the last checkpoint, they were constantly standing in line for several hours, going through everything up to messengers and social media in their phones, wondering why people did not have their own page on VKontakte (Russian social network – ed.).

Serhiy's car has a tattered yellow and blue flag. He drove with it before the occupation, and then constantly hid it from the Russians. Local residents warned each other via messenger when the Russian military came to the area with searches and could hide the flag if necessary.

I caught Serhiy's car by chance on the way to the cemetery. He willingly drives me around the city, shows me the TV tower destroyed by the Russians on the eve of their withdrawal, and buildings partially destroyed by Ukrainian shelling – the result of the hunt for traitors.

Oleksiy Zhuravko, a former Party of Regions MP, who later became a United Russia MP and returned to Kherson to the occupation administration, was killed in the Play Hotel by Ribas. The office of the collaborator Kirill Stremousov was located in another damaged building.

Serhiy is glad that Kherson was not heavily damaged, although after eight months of occupation the city was on the verge of survival.

"Somehow it happened that we just survived," the driver says and adds later: "We did not have such unity and friendship before the war. Everyone wanted to do something over the heads of others. Now, on the contrary, those who remained have somehow become more or less united."

In the end, the man refuses to take money for the driver's services:

"We have waited for you for a long time – and we have witnessed it. Now we owe you our liberation. When I saw the flag of Ukraine on November 11, I cried with joy".

But Kherson was liberated not by journalists, but by the military.

Rock stars in military uniform

Freedom Square is the heart of Kherson. It was here that mass protests took place at the beginning of the occupation. It is here that most of the humanitarian aid needed by the locals is brought. It is here that from the first day of liberation, November 11, people constantly stop the military to take their autographs, thank them and just talk.

Most often they ask to write their call sign. Autographs are left on large and small flags of Ukraine, jackets, backpacks, ribbons, etc. as long as there is a marker. The military still have a lot of work to do in the city, they sometimes come to the square to relax, have a snack in one of the few fast food places left in Kherson, and feel a little bit like rock stars.

"Mudryi" and "Bad" are scouts, one of them is from Kherson. They came to the square for a short time after they completed the clearing of the city. They say that there are still many collaborators in Kherson, many Russians disguised in civilian clothes, and it is difficult to find them: "We count on the local population to point them out. Many people help, but there are those who are not very happy with us".

One of these two scouts was committing sabotage in Kherson back in September. He worked in the rear, and was engaged in blowing up collaborators. He left the city using undercover ID because he was already wanted.

Real-life rock stars in military uniforms also made some noise on Freedom Square. The "cultural landing" of rapper Yarmak, Kolya Serga with a guitar and violinist Moisei Bondarenko gave several concerts on the stage between the image of Valeriy Zaluzhnyi on the pedestal of the Lenin monument and flowers and watermelon. And it does not matter that in the whole city there is constant electricity only at the railway station — as long as there is a generator.

The bumper of Russian Ural truck in your face

Oleksandr Ivanovych himself comes to me on Freedom Square to tell me about the trauma suffered by his friend Serhiy Volodymyrovych from the Russian military.

He says that from time to time in the city there were cases when Russian military trucks deliberately ran over civilian cars. He recalled about 10 such cases, some of which he saw personally.

His friend Serhiy Volodymyrovych, a lawyer, director of the Kherson Institute of Interregional Academy of Personnel Management, suffered a stroke when he saw how the Russian military smashed everything in his dacha, just threw the TV set from the wall on the floor and stabbed the ball with a knife.

On May 28, a Russian military Ural truck rammed a lawyer's car twice at the intersection of Potemkinska and Ilyusha Kulyk streets.

"He woke up, and the bumper of the Ural truck was right in his face. The man's throat, lungs, eight ribs were punctured, a shoulder blade was broken," says Oleksandr Ivanovych and mentions the concussion on top of everything else.

The man survived, although he recovered in hospitals for a long time. Russian military came to apologize, promised to compensate for the destroyed car by taking it from one of the local businessmen. But they did not fulfill their promise.

When asked about his experience of communication with Russians, Oleksandr Ivanovych answers "in an old-fashioned way": "Two bags of money are fighting, and we are suffering. I do not believe anyone, I am not afraid and I do not ask for anything".

Most of the people I talked to in Kherson were clearly pro-Ukrainian, but there were also many who did not care about the government as long as they were fed. There was a woman who "recalled" that "the city was founded by Catherine the Great" and it was originally Russian.

Kherson watermelons had to be fed to pigs

I meet Petro and Vladyslav at the source of the Vodokanal ("aqueduct"), one of the few places in Kherson where you can get drinking water. The Dnipro is very close by, which serves also as a constant pilgrimage site for technical water. The guys have a huge number of six-liter bottles in their hands, they came to provide water not only for themselves, but also for their loved ones.

Until recently, these guys were students, then they worked together in the local "Healthy Food Shop". Their car is covered with yellow and blue ribbons. Petro speaks pure Ukrainian, to which the velar plosive Russian "g" is constantly mixed instead of the glottal fricative Ukrainian sound.

"For the first month and a half, Vladyslav and I were on vacation. Before that, I had been working for three years without a break," Petro recalls the occupation.

Then he recovered a bit and started working in a pottery workshop. Meditative manual work calmed him down, his products were bought, which allowed him not to think about money.

He says that the local markets often did not recognize the ruble and did not want to accept it, for which the Russians could punish the sellers. The Russians would come and threaten to close the disloyal shop.

During the occupation, food prices sometimes doubled or even more. Bananas cost from 150 UAH ($4) per kilogram, mushrooms - 160 UAH ($4.30) and more, buckwheat - 80-120 UAH ($2.15-3.25), red lentils - up to 150 UAH ($4), meat - 250-320 UAH ($6.80-8.70).

Only the price of vegetables has not changed, and watermelons cost only 5-6 UAH ($0.14-0.16) per kilogram. They joke that there were so many unsold watermelons that even pigs had to be fed with them.

When the sham referendum "on joining Russia" was held in Kherson, many people, including Petro, simply locked their doors and tried not to go outside.

"They knocked on elderly people's doors and asked: 'Your vote. Are you for the Kherson people's republic or for Russia?' And those who said they would vote for Ukraine were told that they had one day to pack up and leave, otherwise they would come and do 'pow pow'," Petro says.

Vladyslav adds that mostly it were elderly people and alcohol addicts standing near the boxes, and there was always a soldier with a weapon nearby.

"I waited for three days to get home"

A week after the liberation, the first train from Kyiv went to Kherson. Almost 200 passengers who bought a charity "ticket to victory" went on the festive trip. The proceeds from the sale of these tickets should be used to purchase transport that will help connect cities and towns in the de-occupied territories with the nearest railway junctions.

Yevhen sits nervously in a second-class carriage, clearly waiting for the first train to finally leave Mykolaiv station for its final stop. He lived through months of full-scale war in Zaporizhzhya, working as a welder, and now he is finally returning to his parents. He has not heard about any charity event – he just bought a ticket to Mykolaiv, hoping to get there for free. This is his second attempt to get to his hometown.

"When I found out about the liberation of Kherson on November 11, I immediately went to Mykolaiv and waited for three days at the bus station to get to the city. But I could not, because no civilian car was allowed to pass," says Yevhen.

The train to Kherson is moving slowly, as if cautiously. From time to time, we are greeted with a wave of the hand by the military and local residents. The city station is unusually crowded, there is a lot of press.

A woman, who was also traveling with us in a reserved carriage, is crying for a long time and hugging her loved ones right at the exit of the train. A man, who was waiting for someone on the platform of Kherson railway station with a rose in his hands, meets his woman. A boy and a girl, former students, who at first did not know that their Mykolaiv train was going to their native Kherson and did not have time to inform their relatives about their arrival, were met by the girl's father, and they happily took pictures at the station.

Because everyone needs to return home, especially if they have been waiting there for a long time.

This report was created with the financial support of the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation as part of a series of articles entitled "Traumas of War".