For the bloodied Ukrainian city, river crossings offer little hope of relief
It was just after 1 p.m. when the first of three artillery shells whizzed past Maryna Korifadze’s bomb shelter in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson and landed nearby with a rattling bang.
Her regular group of neighbors, some with children in tow, shuffled down the basement stairs into the bunker. They sat on sofas and chairs and handed out chocolate, coffee and tea. The younger crowd started playing table tennis in the next room.
“Sometimes there are between 20 and 30 people here every evening,” Ms Korifadze said.
More than 20 months since the Russian invasion, the war in Ukraine has been a test of endurance for the country’s citizens, who are enduring relentless Russian bombing and missile attacks.
But Kherson, captured by Russian forces at the beginning of the war and liberated by Ukrainian forces a year ago, occupies a special place among Ukrainian cities: it is in a purgatory between liberation and occupation – free of Russian forces but within reach of a large part of Moscow’s arsenal. .
Kherson residents have faced indiscriminate violence week after week since Russian troops fled. They hoped for liberation, but received little, as the city and its surroundings remain a bloody flashpoint.
But there is some hope. A series of covert attacks across the Dnipro River – which serves as Kherson’s southern and eastern border – has helped Ukrainian forces secure a sliver of land on the Russian-occupied bank in recent weeks.
What comes next is unclear, but embattled residents of Kherson believe the attacks, if successful, could drive Russian formations and artillery further from their city.
Ms. Korifadze, heartened by the news, recently called one of her colleagues living on the Russian-occupied side of the river and assured her: “You will be liberated.”
That may or may not come true. For the time being, Russian attacks in and around Kherson continue unabated.
Russia’s use of glide bombs – guided air-drop munitions that can travel long distances – has increased by more than 2,000 percent in recent months, Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, a spokesman for the military administration of the Kherson region, said last week. Six weeks ago there were one or two of these bombs a day across the region, he added, and now there are about 30 to 40.
Although his statistics could not be independently verified, Kherson residents have described a marked change in the type and frequency of Russian munitions lobbed, dropped and fired on their city and surrounding towns. Iskander ballistic missiles have also landed in Kherson in recent days, a violent breach of the normal artillery rhythm.
Ms Korifadze described the shockwave caused by a rocket that struck late last month, pushing her car forward like an invisible hand as she drove to drop off food for her son, a police officer.
Mykhailo Chornomorets, standing next to the crater left by a glide bomb, recounted the shredding sound of the whizzing explosive as it traveled through the air before detonating near his home.
Anna Hordiienko, who runs a small hardware store near one of Kherson’s more shelled neighborhoods, described the different acoustics of booms and bangs she has heard. She now feels like she is an expert at analyzing it.
Kherson is “a military training ground for them,” Ms. Hordiienko said. “They’re just shooting everything they can at us.”
Behind the seemingly endless supply of Russian ammunition lies the stream of civilian casualties, the byproduct of the port city’s clinging to some form of normality just miles from Russian artillery positions. Ukrainian troops, as often happens in frontline cities, live among the population, meaning non-combatants are also at risk. The Russian shelling is indiscriminate and inaccurate, although Russia also routinely targets civilians.
About 20 percent of Kherson’s population remains in the city, spread across various neighborhoods.
Weeks ago, Ukrainian forces said Russian shelling of Kherson had eased since last winter, when the bombardment was at its heaviest and electricity and heat were scarce. During the summer, Ukrainian and Russian armies fought further east as part of Kiev’s counteroffensive.
These operations gave the residents of Kherson some respite, as did the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam in June, which flooded both banks of the Dnipro and pushed Russian artillery positions further inland, away from the city.
But with Ukraine’s main offensive stalled and Russian forces attacking in the east, Moscow has turned its attention back to Kherson and the Dnipro. Ukrainian forces have slowly gained a foothold on the Russian-occupied riverbank through a series of amphibious landings that remain shrouded in secrecy. The increase in airstrikes and shelling has almost certainly been aimed at disrupting those attacks, Ukrainian officials and soldiers said.
“Some say they are there, others say they are not,” Ms. Hordiienko said of the river landings. “Only God knows.”
In previous months, cross-river operations were more limited, with Ukrainian forces attacking for only a day or two before withdrawing. They were often supported by troops on the Ukrainian-occupied West Bank: snipers and grenade launchers firing at Russian positions.
Now Ukrainian soldiers involved in the operations describe a frantic and bloody battle that saw small vessels crossing the Dnipro River at night to avoid Russian drones before dropping off 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 armored vehicles.
Wounded soldiers sometimes have to wait days on the small strip of land Ukraine controls before they can be picked up and transported across the river to the emergency room.
But what was once seen as a Ukrainian diversion to keep Russian forces occupied along the river appears to have irritated Russian forces so much that Moscow has replaced one of its top commanders in the area. Russian state media.
“The sooner Ukrainian forces push the Russians away from the river, the sooner we will be without artillery attacks,” said Vasyl Pererva, a Ukrainian veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan who was in Kherson when Russian soldiers last occupied the city. 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 recalls. “I was an intruder.”
Once home to about 280,000 people, Kherson now has a population of about 60,000, and that number is expected to decline as winter arrives, especially if Russia starts bombing Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as it did last winter. Last Tuesday, a city resident named Mykola, 62, boarded one of the regular evacuation trains from Kherson after a Russian shell riddled his house with shrapnel days earlier.
“Most of the neighbors have moved,” he says. He declined to give his last name.
Crime has declined among the population, said Andrii Kovannyi, a police spokesman in Kherson, but petty thefts and domestic disturbances remain a nuisance to officers, who combine Russian attacks with everyday police work.
The increase in Russian attacks has also led to the mandatory evacuation of children from the towns and villages outside Kherson where Ukrainian forces are launching their attacks. Mr. Tolokonnikov, the military government official, said more than 260 children and their families have left since the end of October. He expects some will stay.
In Kherson city, some playgrounds are surrounded by defensive barricades in case a rocket, grenade or bomb lands nearby. Most children in the city learn online. There is a lack of in-person classrooms the educational level of Ukrainian youth deteriorated since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Two nights after artillery shells missed Ms. Korifadze’s bomb shelter, her 9-year-old granddaughter Anya and Anya’s mother prepared for another night of air raid sirens and Russian shelling. Older men from the neighborhood sat outside and longed for the days when they could fish on the Dnipro.
Anya’s mother asked her daughter if she thought the night would be peaceful, without the varying levels of violence and destruction that slowly but surely came to define her childhood.
Anya quickly responded: “It’s never quiet.”
Emile Ducke contributed reporting from Kherson, and Marc Santora from Kiev, Ukraine.