To the third anniversary of liberation – Ukraїner” data-current_id=”93569″ data-active=”yes” data-url=”https://www.ukrainer.net/en/pryfrontovi-mista-kherson/”>
On the eve of the third anniversary of Kherson’s liberation from the Russian occupation, we walk through its centre and suburbs, descend into shelters, and speak with doctors, soldiers, children, and those who still tend roses — to see and feel what this city looks like today: a city that has survived and remains alive.
Frontline towns
Text by Myroslav Laiuk and photos by Viacheslav Ratynskyi
Entering the city
The road to Kherson is constantly under enemy fire — you can tell by the burnt-out cars scattered along the roadside. Soldiers advise driving as fast as possible and carrying a drone detector at all times since the Russians have been deliberately hunting people with drones.
The road passes a stretch where anti-drone nets are already being installed. Ahead lies a city that seems half-empty, half-underground. Yet around 60,000 people still live here — in one of the most vulnerable cities in Ukraine. They buy vegetables for pickling, go to the dentist, ride bicycles — in certain districts, on certain streets shielded by nets, and, of course, in basements.
Just a few streets from the Dnipro River begins the so-called kill zone — an area constantly shelled by the enemy from the occupied left bank. The river, as during the floods from the destroyed Kakhovka dam, kills again. And so does the land, strewn with anti-personnel mines known as “petals” for their distinctive shape.
Chakra
“Chakra! Chakra!”
An elderly woman calls out to her Alabai dog near a burnt-out car.
She glances around the gate peppered with shrapnel and the splintered trees — and calls again. There is ash in her hair and soot on her hands.
“They got into the car,” she says, short of breath, “and then the shell hit. My daughter managed to pull the children out, but both are wounded.” She looks around once more. “Two birch trees were blown down…”
It hit here about an hour ago. This woman’s daughter was driving to get dog food and took her two school-age sons with her.
“I was in the kitchen,” she recalls. “I heard the bangs. I heard the screams. I ran outside.”
The burnt-out car looks like the body of an animal after a forest fire, the air thick with smoke. People from nearby houses are gathering at a distance. Three elderly women watch everything from the side of the road.
“I was just sitting there, watching TikTok,” says the first. “And then — boom!”
“My curtains fell down,” says the second.
“I quickly locked myself inside and wrapped myself in a blanket,” adds the first. “Then I heard the children shouting, ‘Mum! Mum!’”
“You could see the boy’s legs, the bones,” says the second. “The younger one.”
“Both of them,” a neighbour cuts in, then quickly walks away.
The third woman, who had been quietly listening, turns to the second.
“You see, and you were for Putin at first!”
The other doesn’t reply. Later, she explains that she was born in the Urals (in Russia — ed.), and that everything seemed different to her at the start.
As for the victims, we later learned that the younger boy’s leg had been amputated and he was in intensive care. The elder brother also suffered leg injuries, and their mother had a concussion and wounds to her face.
“Chakra!” the woman at the gate shouts again.
A police officer tries to comfort her: he’ll be driving around a lot today — maybe he’ll spot her dog somewhere.
Underground
A few blocks from the impact site stands a large bomb shelter, built after the Second World War. Now it serves its original purpose once again — every evening, around a dozen people come here, in the centre of Kherson, to spend the night. According to the guard, most of them are “tiny old ladies”. Sometimes, when the shelling starts, passers-by rush in too.
A familiar bark echoes through the shelter — the guard recognises it instantly. Each time explosions are heard, a coffee-coloured mongrel dog named Linda runs in for safety.
Two women, a middle-aged daughter and her elderly mother, arrived early today, around five o’clock. There had been heavy shelling, and they feared more would follow. They have been coming here every evening for three years. The women settle onto their beds; Linda curls up beside one of them. Earlier that afternoon, when the shelling began, the dog had gone missing — but before long, they found her here.
Another woman, in her eighties, arrives at the shelter. She says that when she spends the night alone, she starts to feel unwell — but here there’s a television, warmth, and company. Linda slips out from under the blanket and runs to the door, but she doesn’t bark — there are no strangers here, just another elderly woman coming into the bunker. Down here, it’s quiet — it feels like another world. Above ground, the war goes on.
Across the road from the shelter, teenagers Viktor and Angelina sit on a bench, holding hands. They recall how they used to love walking by the river port, but now they stay closer to the city centre. Angelina has a fresh manicure, done nearby for 900 hryvnias (around 20 US dollars — ed.).
“The prices here are inflated, because it’s a dangerous area.”
At the start of the full-scale invasion, Viktor went to Poland, while Angelina spent all this time in Kherson. She says she painted blue-and-yellow flags around the city when the Russians were still there. Her brother was killed last year near Bakhmut.
Dusk is falling, and Viktor will soon have to go home. Not long ago, he was cycling through his neighbourhood when he heard a drone. He dropped his bike in the street and jumped into the bushes. The drone flew on and exploded somewhere nearby.
We start to say goodbye. In the distance, two girls Angelina knows from school are walking towards us, smoking and laughing loudly. The air smells of smoke, coffee and autumn. When the girls notice our glances, they giggle, say “Oops!”, and quickly walk away laughing.
Why roses?
We need a coffee. The best in Kherson, they say, is made by Oleksii at Prostir. It’s in the city centre — dangerous enough these days — but we decide to go anyway.
Halfway there, we meet Ksenia, a 19-year-old barista sitting outside at a café table. She says she would leave Kherson if she could, but she doesn’t have the money. Ksenia dreams of buying the perfume she has smelled on a few people — Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue. Her whole salary, she says with a small smile, is worth about two bottles of it. There are hardly any people on the streets.
“When do you finish work?”
“At three.”
“Why so early?”
“After three o’clock, no one is coming.”
Before long, we do make it to Oleksii. It’s getting dark, and he’s about to close Prostir. In June 2023, when parts of Kherson were underwater and chaos reigned, you could still come here for a perfect espresso or a cold brew. Now, every day, Oleksii crosses the city to work in his café — one that has already been hit by shelling.
He says that before the full-scale invasion, the café would get 200–300 orders a day. A month ago, around twenty people came in on average; now it’s closer to ten. This morning there was an IT guy with his dog. Then Iryna, a volunteer. After that, two soldiers. And now us — that makes five.
“Does it ever happen that no one comes?”
“Not once.”
“Why do you keep working? Do you see it as something symbolic?”
“I wasn’t just born in Kherson. I was born in the maternity ward next to this coffee shop.”
A few blocks closer to the centre, there is a market. Rufina is selling pork — trotters, legs, tenderloin, lard.
“You need to boil an ear for exactly fifty minutes.”
“What if I cook it longer?”
“Then it’s rubbish. Honestly.”
Rufina lives in the Dnipro district — she’s driven over petal mines and come under fire more than once.
“We’ve aged during the war,” she sighs.
She says there used to be far more people at the market last year. Many have left — especially since last autumn, when Russian drone attacks became more frequent. Still, she says she often thinks about 1941 and 1945: “It was scarier then,” but there were no drones.
“Such filth. But someone invented them! I always think — where was your head, to come up with such filth?”
Market Square. Across the road, an accordion player performs as people wait for the trolleybus. The musician begins the national anthem. A man with a cut on his forehead places his hand on his heart, closes his eyes and gives himself over to the moment. A few minutes earlier, smelling of alcohol, he had asked if we were Americans.
By the underpass, two buckets of roses stand on the pavement — crimson, cream, pink. Some are huge; others are small and tight like a clenched fist. They look like exotic birds.
“The war goes on, but people still buy roses,” says the flower seller.
There are not only cut flowers here, but roots too. Iryna Semenivna, who buys three rose bushes, says she’ll plant them outside her apartment block. She used to have a countryhouse and grew her own roses, but it’s on the occupied side of the Dnipro river now.
An explosion. People glance up wearily, then return to what they were doing.
“To understand us, you have to live here,” another seller says.
At the market appears Nadiia, she’s almost ninety. She wears a red blouse, a polka-dot neckerchief and a denim jacket embroidered with silver thread. Lipstick. Carefully set grey hair.
She goes out every day. She prays — for the army, for Ukraine and for herself — asks to survive another day and make it home, and tucks a clove of garlic into her pocket. She leaves the house with pruning shears and, wherever she sees unkempt rose bushes, she snips them back.
“Why do you love roses so much?”
“I love all flowers. And I want Kherson to bloom. When we win, I want flowers everywhere.”
Twisting
Where once flowers grew, vines wound and apples ripened, there are now impact sites. Beauty has turned grotesque; it has vanished. An investigative team from Kherson is heading to Chornobaivka after an attack with a multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS). Several rockets struck. Here is one courtyard with a crater and a collapsed brick fence.
“What hit here?”
“From the initial signs, the calibre and the damage, it looks like an Uragan MLRS,” the investigator says cautiously. He doesn’t want to share his name because he has relatives under Russian occupation. “The front is less than two kilometres away. There’s shelling every ten to fifteen minutes. Ballistic missiles have come in as well.”
We did drive past the scene of a recent strike — smoke and rubble still linger.
Further on, we can see a sheet of metal hanging from the power lines. Once there was a small car workshop and a house here. Concrete slabs from the fence are scattered and shattered.
“See? These kinds of slabs are used to build dugouts somewhere…” someone says.
Among the ruins a woman gathers hundreds or thousands scattered heads of garlic.
“I don’t know how we survived,” a man sighs. He points to the cracks in the walls. “Look — the house has been twisted. Look how it’s been twisted!”
It really does look as if the house has been wrung out, like a plastic bottle.
Windows are blown out, the veranda smashed, everything gutted. A few cars were burnt.
“What am I going to tell the owners?” he asks, then shouts, “To survive such a strike and stay alive!” His voice shifts, “There won’t be any Kherson. Run, guys, while you still can.”
Here’s another place that’s been hit. People are clearing the rubble. Suddenly, someone says a Molniya drone is flying overhead, and everyone rushes inside.
In the kitchen, at a table already laid, sits Olia — the wife of a soldier — and their four-year-old son, Misha.
What happened? They were asleep when her husband got up to get ready for duty and heard the first shots. He woke Olia, but she said she wanted to sleep a little longer, hoping the shelling would pass them by. But soon the explosions came closer. Still in their dressing gowns, they ran to the neighbours’ house, where there’s a shelter.
Homemade varenyky and pelmeni are on the table — Olia had defrosted them for the people helping to clear the house — and a pot of boiled corn. The boy is crying; she takes him on her lap. She remembers how, during the shelling, he covered his ears and said, “Mum, tell the men not to be so loud,” or, “Mum, please make it quieter.”
They’ve lived here for the past year and a half, together with her husband.
“My son has delayed speech development. He’s been treated at the Kherson Regional Hospital. In the last seven months, he’s started to speak.”
Then she adds, “The little one wanted his dad.”
“He’s actually very much against us staying,” she says, meaning her husband.
“Every day I tell them to go,” he shouts from the other room, half-joking.
“I understand him,” I say.
“And I do too,” Olia replies. “But… I feel that if something happens to him, and I’m here, I’ll be able to act faster. Besides, the little one’s doctors are here, and I don’t really want to start over somewhere else. It’s frightening everywhere. If we leave, we should leave Ukraine entirely. I won’t go without him. A family apart isn’t really a family.”
Game
In the basement of one of Kherson’s apartment blocks, there are children. They come here for clubs — drawing, sewing, sambo, and more. Most are from the neighbourhood. I ask Ihor, the volunteer who helped set up the centre, whether he thinks projects like this encourage people to stay in Kherson. He shakes his head: otherwise, he says, the children would simply be out on the streets, unprotected, without a chance to learn or socialise. Some, even at four or six years old, barely speak at all.
Speech therapist Iryna Hlushenko, who works here, explains that across Ukraine, especially after the pandemic and years of online schooling, parents are struggling to find speech therapists and developmental specialists. I show her a photo of a boy from Chornobaivka.
“Mishka!” she exclaims.
It turns out that Iryna is the very specialist who treated the boy with a speech delay. She says the work here brings visible progress.
Sewing teacher Kateryna adds that the children have become much more open since joining the classes. And art teacher Iryna says:
“I could see they were so withdrawn at first. But now they’re opening up — like a cage, you know, it just opens right before your eyes.”
The centre’s director, Olena Borodina, who was wounded in the courtyard during a shelling, says they’re now looking for a boxing coach. Ihor admits it took effort to convince foreign donors that children really do need boxing. They kept saying it was about violence. Some of the equipment has already been salvaged from a sports school that was flooded after the Kakhovka dam explosion.
Rhythmic gymnastics coach Halyna remembers once showing the children an innocent cartoon — Kapitoshka. One girl whispered, “I’m scared.” They switched it off immediately.
“It was just Kapitoshka,” Halyna says — “a bubble, jumping around, showing how it became friends with a wolf.”
Now and then, another adult enters the room, holding a child by the hand. The group keeps growing — most of the children are between five and ten years old.
Little Myroslava arrives with her mother. Before her mum can even leave, the girl is already shouting across the hall:
“Freedom! Freedom!”
She grabs a hoop and starts spinning it wildly. Then she runs into the next room, where a sambo training dummy lies on a mattress. The children call him Stepan. Myroslava props Stepan against the wall and leaps into his “arms”.
Soon, a five-year-old named Sonia arrives. When Myroslava jumps down and runs off to tug at another child, Sonia drags Stepan to the floor. Another girl appears and tries to claim the mannequin for herself. A scuffle breaks out — but the third girl retreats when Myroslava reappears wearing boxing gloves.
Sonia holds Stepan down while her friend lands punches. Soon Stepan is on the floor again, and the third girl joins in.
“We’re strong girls,” Myroslava declares.
At the same time, Andrii is dragging a few gym mats across the floor. He’s about four years older than the girls. Using whatever he can find, he builds a house and keeps an eye on little Denys to make sure he doesn’t knock it down.
While the girls were busy with Stepan, Andrii suggested another game — “carry the wounded soldier”. His stepfather is in the army. When Stepan is dragged off again, Andrii calls out, “Artillery! We need cover!”
Eventually, Andrii finishes building his house — a place, he says, “to hide from the drones”. But soon little Denys runs over, wrecks it, and ends the game.
Artist
“What’s your call sign?” I ask soldier Andrii Andriushchenko, who is fighting in the fields near Kherson.
“Artist,” he says.
During the Russian occupation, he painted patriotic slogans on the walls. He remembers one night, taking cans of blue and yellow paint, trying to leave secret handprints on the walls — when two children joined him. Fortunately, they weren’t caught.
On the first day of the full-scale invasion, Andrii called a friend and joined a local defence group that was gathering at one of the community clubs — the same place where he had once worked as a presenter. He remembers about three hundred people showing up — some with knives, others with electroshocks. They organised themselves, delivering food and medicine to those in need and taking turns on patrol. The club still had toy rifles that were once used for PJ shows. When Russian soldiers arrived, they beat several of the men and filmed them holding the fake guns against a backdrop of the Ukrainian flag, declaring they had “exposed a nest of Banderites”.
In early August, while Andrii was sitting in a café, they came for him. He was taken to a separate room and beaten with a chair, a hookah pipe and a hammer, then thrown into one of Kherson’s torture chambers. There, the occupiers conducted what they called a “call to Zelenskyy”:
“They used an old field telephone that can give electric shocks. They attach the wires to your genitals and start asking questions. You say, ‘I don’t know,’ and they turn the handle. The pain is so wild you pass out, then they pour water on you and start again. But it made no difference — I really didn’t know what they wanted. They tortured me every day. These weren’t interrogations anymore — just torture. They even took me out to be shot, made me lie in a pit while they fired over my head.”
“Why did they do it — from a pragmatic point of view?”
“I think it gave them pleasure. A kind of inhuman thrill.”
After some time, Andrii was assigned a new investigator — someone who knew nothing about his case. So, as Andrii puts it, he “played dumb”: he told them he had once written “Glory to Ukraine” for money promised by Ukrainian politicians, but they’d run off and left him to take the blame.
Andrii and I walk past his old school, past what used to be the ice rink. He remembers the children laughing there, and the serious-looking men on skates who kept falling over. In the spring, a Russian guided bomb hit the rink and completely destroyed it. Now the place looks like a head of a crushed cabbage — sheets of metal torn in every direction, rebar jutting out, the inside blackened and decaying.
Nearby, a group of teenagers race around on mopeds — sixteen-year-old Milena, thirteen-year-old Yarik, sixteen-year-old Yehor, and eighteen-year-old Sasha.
“What do you do all day? What’s life like in Kherson now?”
“It’s fine, we just ride around,” Yarik says.
Sasha speeds up and lifts the front wheel off the ground. He does a loop and pops up again, balancing on the bike. The boys bought their mopeds recently — 16-17 thousand hryvnias each (around 380-400 US dollars — ed.). Andrii studies them, wondering whether that’s a fair price.
“Are you thinking of leaving Kherson?”
“I already did,” Milena sighs. “But I came back. I didn’t like it abroad.”
“You need a licence to ride a moped there,” Yarik laughs.
The teenagers keep revving their engines as Andrii finishes his story — Russians did let him go.
“I’m walking and I see a girl I’ve known for years, someone I’ve always been close to. I go up to her, but she doesn’t recognise me. I call her by name — still nothing. Well, I must have looked like a tramp — beard, stench, bruises everywhere, ribs smashed in.”
When Andrii called her by her childhood nickname, she finally recognised him and ran to hug him.
The Hunt
You could say Andrii was lucky. So were these teenagers — and many of the others we’ve met. But for some, things are much harder.
The hospital courtyard is draped in anti-drone nets. Parts of the building are shattered. The river flows just beyond.
“The windows face that side,” says surgeon Vitalii Khomukha. “The hospital wasn’t designed for war.”
When the shelling starts, patients are moved out of their wards. There’s also a shelter that can function as a makeshift hospital.
“There was a time when we had to move a patient from one operating theatre to another during surgery because of artillery fire.”
Even now, through the windows sealed with sandbags, you can hear distant explosions. Usually, the police alert the hospital in advance when casualties are on their way. Early this spring, for example, they reported a strike on a minibus.
“A few minutes later, the driver brought in his passengers. All of them. Sadly, the dead as well.”
Several people were hospitalised. One woman died. The driver had only minor injuries.
“Can’t he see it’s a minibus?” the surgeon says, meaning the Russian drone operator. “Can’t he see people getting on and off at the bus stop — that they’re not soldiers?”
Just a few days ago, Russian forces hit another minibus in central Kherson. The site remains untouched — pieces of metal, black oil spilled across the road, branches of plane trees and chestnuts shattered. We didn’t stay long; the sound of gunfire carried from nearby.
“When it’s at its worst, I have fifty beds in my ward. Thirty five patients have mine or blast injuries. We’ve never seen wounds like these before the war — so many, and so vicious.”
We step out of the doctor’s office. Through a half-open door, patients can be seen having lunch. In another room, a nurse carries trays herself from bed to bed. In the corridor stands Olha, another nurse. She lives nearby and was caught in Grad rocket fire that very morning. She first heard the strikes while still at home — and then again, crossing the park on her way to work.
We walk into the wards where patients lie with amputations, some fitted with Ilizarov frames. Here is Serhii, a municipal worker who lost part of his heel — doctors had to amputate. His left leg was also injured but could be saved. And here is Olha, a trolleybus driver. She says the job is her calling — she loves driving through the city, surrounded by people and traffic, loves working with people. She smiles as she speaks. Olha used to drive a route that was later closed — it ran along the line of fire. Until recently, she worked on routes 8, 9 and 12.
She was on her way home after her shift when a drone attacked her street. Olha dropped her bags on the road and hid under a tree. The drone circled overhead, then went silent — searching for her. Then came the strike. The blast wave threw her to the ground. When she looked down, blood was running from both legs — the drone had found its target.
Underfoot
“Watch the sky and the ground,” everyone tells us.
The ground — because that’s where the “petals” might be. On the streets, there are many people on crutches; this type of mine often blows off the heel.
We leave the hospital on foot — our next meeting place is nearby. The leaves have fallen, and a “petal” could be hidden beneath. Here, you have to walk under the trees so the drones can’t see you.
Between the houses, under the tall trees, a woman on crutches walks towards us, smiling from afar.
Olena is the head of Sadove, a nearby village. She says twenty-three people still live there, mostly elderly. From time to time, someone brings them bread across the fields by mopeds.
Almost a year ago, Olena stepped on a petal mine. It tore off part of her heel.
“My head was such a mess,” Olena says. “I kept thinking: God, how will my son get an education? He’s just finished school, and I won’t have a job — I’ll be disabled. When you’re the only breadwinner in the family…”
They brought her to the same hospital we’ve just visited — the nearest medical facility to her village.
“I have a prosthesis, but it’s uncomfortable, it rubs terribly. I can’t use it now. For the first four months it felt like being constantly electrocuted. There were moments when I even wanted to jump off the balcony. You take and take medicine, but nothing helps.”
Olena is on her way to the hairdresser to finish dyeing her hair. She now works at a volunteer centre, continues helping with village matters, and stays at a flat of a former classmate. Her son and mother have gone to Germany.
We say goodbye and walk another block. The street ahead is covered with nets. There are more people here — at a market and a café. A girl rides a scooter. Dogs run about. On a terrace, two elderly men drink tea and talk about chess — one of them has just bought himself a board and pieces.
A mother and daughter sit nearby. Twenty-four-year-old soldier Anzhelika has come home to visit her hometown during a few days of leave. She serves near Kramatorsk, a city even closer to the frontline.
“How would you compare Kramatorsk and Kherson?”
“It’s more dangerous in Kherson,” she says.
Anzhelika’s mother used to live by the river, but has since moved higher up. She’s happy to see her daughter — but within a moment, tears come. Tomorrow Anzhelika returns to the front. Today she plans to visit her former schoolteacher. She says, “Take care of yourself. Watch your step.”
A decade ahead
The Kherson police now work out of a basement. Commenting on recent Russian attacks — the strike on the bridge to the city island, the hit on the minibus. The regional police chief, Roman Koziakov, says that, despite everything, life in Kherson continues, thanks to the work of the police and local authorities.
Roman introduces his deputies. They briefly explain their duties and suggest which of their officers we should speak to.
Near the bus station, we meet Yevhen (name changed for security reasons), an officer from the criminal investigation department.
He says that during the eight months the occupiers were in Kherson and the surrounding region, they looted, tortured, raped and killed on a massive scale. He and his colleagues, he adds, will have work for many years — perhaps decades — to come.
“Sometimes someone who fled abroad contacts us months later, after finally processing what happened. In Kherson alone, by our count, more than five hundred people were tortured.”
What shocks Yevhen most is the cynicism and cruelty with which civilians are killed. Just three days ago, he says, in a village on the occupied territory, Russian soldiers came to a local man in his sixties and shot him in the leg with an automatic weapon. Then they shot his neighbours who tried to help him.
The police gather information from open sources, but mainly from eyewitnesses. In one torture chamber, for example, each prisoner was given a spoon of porridge and one boiled egg a day. One day they overheard someone say “139 eggs”.
We meet another police officer, Dmytro (name also changed), a hundred metres from Svoboda Square. His unit searches for criminals and missing people. He says that locals often tell them where people killed by Russians may be buried, but they are far from finding everyone. He adds that close to here, on the left bank, some of the fiercest battles of the Second World War once took place.
“Even now, eighty years on, you can still see white bones in the open sand,” Dmytro says.
Above us, the branches of the plane trees form a dense canopy. Broad leaves fall onto the pavement as Dmytro sips his coffee. Suddenly, the faint hum of a drone cuts through the air. It lasts only a few seconds before an explosion sounds nearby — right on the corner of Svoboda Square. Dmytro doesn’t even flinch. He keeps talking about how they search for the missing.
Once, he says, they found human remains near a blown-up armoured personnel carrier — a fragment of a finger bone. DNA tests confirmed it matched a missing person.
“Then we started checking — and it turned out the guy was alive!”
He’d been previously listed as missing. But he only lost a finger.
In addition to this kind of work, the police still deal with many of the “old” cases, the everyday ones.
Grapes lie on the ground, rotting on the branches, shrivelled and diseased. We walk into the yard of a “troubled family”.
Community police officer Yaroslav Maslo says that a mother and her two sons live here. The mother drinks; the children are unwell. The television blares in the house. Thirteen-year-old Vasia, wearing blue tights with Mickey Mouse on them, is lying still — he seems not to be breathing. He has epilepsy, and recently had a seizure.
His brother, twenty-six-year-old Ruslan, has gone to the shop. Their mother, Tetiana, sits on the bed, her head in her hands. She cries that she needs to go to the doctors in Mykolaiv — she has a brain tumour.
“It’s hard for me,” she says. “I’m dying, boys.”
The television is so loud that it drowns out every voice. The elder son returns from the shop. He behaves like a child.
The walls of the city
For a city to stand, its walls must be supported.
Around twenty members of the Krishna Consciousness community now live in Kherson. We enter the courtyard of an ordinary house. Food for the needy is cooked here in an unfinished swimming pool, in a large boiler brought from a festival. During the war, the community launched the Food for Life programme. The meals are left for a time for “God to taste”, then distributed to seven locations across the city — when the bridge was intact, even to the island.
In the ordinary residential house, the singing and dancing begin. Someone approaches and asks us to hide the car — it’s parked in the place that attracts drones.
One of the community members, Kyrylo, tells us about their temple on the outskirts of Kherson, near Antonivka. There’s a beautiful view of the Dnipro from there, he says; they invested a great deal in the place, but it’s now inaccessible. During the occupation, there was heavy fighting there. The altar and kitchen are sacred spaces for the community, but Russians moved in and desecrated everything.
Kyrylo was recently wounded while praying (his dog was beside him). A drone flew in — the wall collapsed. He recalls that nothing on the altar moved, only settled under a layer of dust. He and his dog were lightly injured.
“Everything falls apart on its own,” says another member, Volodymyr. “If you leave a house unattended, it will collapse.”
“Can the same be said of Kherson?”
“Of anything. Where there’s no living soul to care for it, everything will fall apart.”
Kherson has many ruined buildings, though not as many as in Kostiantynivka or Pokrovsk. The city is fairly tidy, though it becomes visible that no one has walked near the river for a long time. Yet someone is still holding up these walls: healing, feeding, cleaning, evacuating from places where the walls no longer stand.
Volunteer Rostyslav Kulyk is preparing to head to Antonivka for an evacuation. The courtyard in Kherson where his foundation Strong Because Free is based — marked by a plane tree split in half — has been shelled repeatedly. But the place he’s going to is even more dangerous. Their armoured vehicle is riddled with shrapnel; its windows are cracked. It’s been hit multiple times, and they’ve driven over petal mines more than once.
Among the hardest evacuations Rostyslav recalls was that of a fourteen-year-old boy who weighed 120 kilograms and could barely move on his own. Another time, they evacuated two donkeys — difficult to load, but people had nothing left to feed them and asked that they be taken to Mykolaiv.
While Rostyslav steps away to confirm evacuation details, volunteer Ihor arrives, reporting that Chornobaivka is under fire. A request has come in to relocate people from there.
“It’s common,” Ihor explains, “that people don’t want to leave because they simply can’t afford to. They don’t know who’ll rent them a place. Fine, they can be housed temporarily in a school or kindergarten — but what if they have children? What if they’re immobile? Or have animals? There’s no arrangement with other regions for people to evacuate and be properly resettled.”
Ihor recalls a man who came to see the ruins of his home. When he realised nothing was left, he collapsed from a heart attack and died.
A car with foreign number plates drives into the yard. Out steps Oleh — a British citizen, Russian by origin, speaking Ukrainian. He says he hasn’t been to Russia in twenty years and doesn’t associate himself with it at all. He met Ihor in April at a petrol station. It was his birthday that day, but he’d been asked to evacuate a woman from Antonivka who was bleeding heavily. After bringing her to hospital, Ihor stopped for a coffee and was introduced to Oleh — who, that same day, had delivered an ambulance to one of the volunteer teams. So far, Oleh says, he’s supplied 41 vehicles to the Armed Forces and three to volunteer groups. He began volunteering in the first days of the full-scale invasion. Where did he learn Ukrainian, I ask.
“We’re students of war.”
Return
Here, in the courtyard with the volunteers, we arranged to meet thirty-five-year-old Denys Bordak. Despite having part of his foot amputated, his stride is firm and steady.
In 2023, Denys fought in the Donetsk region and suffered a mine-blast injury. He spent nine months in treatment, but, as he says, “the leg just wouldn’t work” — he couldn’t run, and there were fragments still inside. So he decided to return to Kherson and continue serving in the police.
Denys has three daughters — Sofia, Lilia and Kristina, aged sixteen, eleven and five. His younger brother, Volodymyr, a soldier, went missing in June 2025. Recently, DNA analysis matched. Volodymyr raised the Ukrainian flag in the newly liberated town of Bilozerka. He was one of the first to reach Kherson before noon on 11 November.
A few days ago, Volodymyr was buried.
Now Denys, working in the police, helps other veterans — guiding them through the bureaucracy, helping them find jobs. Some have been able to join the police themselves.
I ask why he didn’t look for work elsewhere.
“My parents are here, in Kherson,” he says.
“It’s just like Donetsk, but here I can finally breathe. I’ve come home. My wounds started to heal faster.”
His wife, brother and neighbours had all tried to dissuade him from going to the front.
“But when I was under occupation, I promised myself that when we were freed, I’d go and serve.”
He even drove through checkpoints on purpose, just to receive his draft papers.
Before he was wounded, his wife and daughters had come to visit him in Kramatorsk for his birthday. When he was later transferred to Kharkiv, his comrades brought his family there too.
“My legs were bandaged, my arms were bandaged. The two older girls came up and hugged me, but the youngest was scared — she said I looked like a mummy.”
His wife cried, but she was also relieved — her husband would finally be coming home.
Futurism
When people talk about life in this city, they often say it’s surrealism. But that word doesn’t quite fit.
The land that is now Kherson region was once known to Herodotus as Gilea. In the 1910s, the artist Davyd Burliuk — one of Europe’s leading futurists — gave the same name to his avant-garde group. Burliuk spent much of his life here. It was in Kherson that he formed his ideas, and it was from the local museum that, a century later, Russian troops fleeing the city stole one of his paintings.
Burliuk wrote the manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste — a call to break from old cultural traditions and create a new aesthetic. The futurists sought beauty where no one had looked before; they tried to find poetry in places most people associated with ruin or decay.
Kherson today is a life where life is not supposed to exist. It is roses blooming beside the scattered “petals” — the mines that tear off people’s legs and rip this city away from our ordinary understanding of what a city is.
As we leave Kherson, we stop to buy a watermelon. A woman behind us says that in Odesa, they cost fifteen hryvnias per kilo. I tell her they’re forty in Kyiv. Here, they’re eight. Then comes the usual small talk — about the occupation, the flooding, the shelling.
The seller adds, almost casually, that when the Russians were here, they beat him.
“Why?” I ask.
He answers sharply:
“For walking on my own land.”
The material is prepared by
Editor-in-chief:
Anna Yabluchna
Photographer,
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Viacheslav Ratynskyi
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Sofia Soliar
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Editor-in-Chief of Ukraїner International,
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Anastasiia Marushevska
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Bogdan Logvynenko
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Julia Tymoshenko
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