Passengers waiting for the arrival of a train going west in Kherson, Ukraine. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
IT was just after 1pm when the first of three artillery shells shrieked past Maryna Korifadze’s bomb shelter in Kherson, Ukraine, landing nearby with a bone-rattling crump.
Her regular group of neighbours, some with children in tow, shuffled down the basement stairs and into the bunker. They passed around chocolate, coffee and tea. The younger crowd played table tennis in the next room.
“Sometimes it’s between 20 and 30 people a night here,” Korifadze said.
More than 20 months since Russia invaded, the war in Ukraine has been a test of endurance for the country’s civilians as they endure relentless Russian bombardments and missile strikes.
But the southern city of Kherson, captured by Russian forces early in the war and liberated by Ukrainian troops a year ago, holds a special place among Ukraine’s cities: it resides in a purgatory between liberation and occupation – free of Russian troops but in range of much of Moscow’s arsenal.
Kherson’s residents have endured week after week of random violence since Russian troops fled, hoping for deliverance but receiving little as the city and its environs remain a bloody flashpoint.
But there is some hope. A series of secretive assaults across the Dnieper River – which serves as Kherson’s southern and eastern boundary – helped Ukrainian forces secure a sliver of land on the Russian-held bank in recent weeks.
What comes next is unclear, but Kherson’s embattled residents believe that, if successful, the attacks could push Russian formations and artillery farther away from their city.
Korifadze, buoyed by the news, recently called one of her colleagues who lives on the Russian-occupied side of the river and assured her: “You will be liberated.”
That may or may not come true. For now, the Russian strikes in and around Kherson continue unabated.
Russia’s use of glide bombs – guided airdropped munitions capable of flying long distances – has increased by more than 2,000% in recent months, Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, a spokesperson for the Kherson region’s military administration, said recently.
Two months ago, there were one or two of these bombs a day across the region, he added, and now there are somewhere between 30 and 40.
Although his statistics could not be independently verified, Kherson’s residents have described a distinct change in the types and frequency of Russian ordnance being lobbed, dropped and fired at their city and surrounding towns. In recent days, Iskander ballistic missiles have also landed in Kherson, a violent breach of the normal rhythm of artillery.
Anna Hordiienko, who runs a small hardware store near one of Kherson’s more shelled neighbourhoods, mouthed the different acoustics of booms and bangs that she has heard. She now feels as if she is an expert in analysing them.
“Kherson is a military training ground for them. They’re just shooting everything they can at us,” Hordiienko said.
Behind the seemingly unending supply of Russian ordnance is the stream of civilian casualties, the by-product of the port city clinging to some form of normalcy only a few kilometres from Russian artillery positions.
Ukrainian troops, as often occurs in front-line cities, live among the population, meaning non-combatants are also at risk. Russian shelling is haphazard and inaccurate, although Russia also has routinely targeted civilians.
Roughly 20% of Kherson’s population remains in the city, scattered across various neighbourhoods.
Weeks ago, Ukrainian troops posited that Russia’s shelling of Kherson had declined since the winter, when the bombardment was at its worst and electricity and heat were scarce. Over the summer, Ukrainian and Russian armies battled farther east as part of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
Those operations gave Kherson residents some respite, as did the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in June, which flooded both banks of the Dnieper and pushed Russian artillery positions farther inland, away from the city.
But with Ukraine’s main offensive stalled and Russian forces attacking in the east, Moscow has shifted its attention back to Kherson and the Dnieper.
Ukrainian forces have slowly gained a foothold on the Russian-held bank of the river through a series of amphibious landings that remain shrouded in secrecy. The increase in air attacks and shelling has almost certainly been focused at disrupting those assaults, Ukrainian officials and soldiers said.
“Some say they’re there; others say they’re not,” Hordiienko said about the river landings. “Only God knows.”
In previous months, the cross-river operations were more limited, with Ukrainian troops attacking for only a day or two before withdrawing. They were often supported by forces on the Ukrainian-held western bank: snipers and grenade launchers firing on Russian positions.
Now, Ukrainian soldiers involved in the operations describe a frantic and bloody battle where small craft move across the Dnieper River at night to avoid Russian drones before depositing infantry on the muddy eastern bank.
Ukrainian units have described running out of ammunition and food, suffering from hypothermia and having little cover to protect themselves from Russian tanks and other armoured vehicles.
Wounded soldiers sometimes have to wait for days on the small strip of land held by Ukraine before they can be picked up and ferried across the river to emergency care.
But what was once seen as a Ukrainian diversion to keep Russian troops occupied along the river appears to have vexed Russian forces to the point at which Moscow switched out one of its key commanders in the area, according to Russian state media.
“The sooner the Ukrainian troops push the Russians away from the river, the sooner we’ll be left without artillery strikes,” said Vasyl Pererva, a Ukrainian veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan who stayed in Kherson when Russian soldiers occupied the city last year.
The Russian occupation of the city reminded him of the Soviet army’s misguided invasion of Afghanistan, he said.
“All these years later, I think, ‘What the hell was I doing there’,” he recalled. “I was an invader.”
Once home to around 280,000 people, Kherson now has a population of about 60,000, and that number is expected to decline as winter sets in, especially if Russia begins to bomb Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as it did last winter.
A city resident named Mykola, 62, was boarding one of the regular evacuation trains from Kherson recently after a Russian shell riddled his home with shrapnel days.
“Most of the neighbours have moved out,” he said. — ©2023 The New York Times Company
