Ukraine Secret Plan to Liberate a City in Russian Made Hell
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The New York Times
Kherson Ukraine was a metropolis with all the things we know about a modern city. Subway, Yellow City bus transportation, streets immaculate clean, and a civilian population from 2014-2022 have been under the Russian gun. Their powerful neighbor decided they wanted all the goodies Mother Earth had given to the residents as economic power. Gas, Coal, and oil are to be extracted. But when I say living under the gun, since 2022, I really mean under the big guns. Every day bombardment. Every time the Russian forces could not nail Ukrainian positions they went for the residents of the city. The young men are gone now, some out of Ukraine and many others to fight for their country. The residents could have left but people born there and raising families there won't leave their homes no matter how many holes the Russians have made. This city is been difficult to take over for Ukrainians but comfortable to defend because it sits on a high area that makes it easy to see downward. It has cost many lives but now because of new equipment which allowed Ukraine to go behind the lines, the government of President Zelenskyy believes there is hope.
It was just after 1 p.m. when the first of three artillery shells shrieked past Maryna Korifadze’s bomb shelter in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, landing nearby with a bone-rattling crump.
Her regular crowd of neighbors, some with children in tow, shuffled down the basement stairs and into the bunker. They sat on benches and chairs, passing around chocolate, coffee and tea. The younger crowd started playing table tennis in the next room.
“Sometimes it’s between 20 and 30 people a night here,” Ms. 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 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 Dnipro 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.
Ms. 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.”
ImageA group of people sit in chairs against the wall in a train station waiting to board a train to Western Ukraine.
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Passengers waiting to board a train to western Ukraine at a station in Kherson. Roughly 20 percent of the city’s population remains, scattered across various neighborhoods.
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A woman walks along a sidewalk in with a bus station in the background surrounded by sandbags.
Protective sandbags in the center of the city. With Ukraine’s main offensive stalled and Russian forces attacking in the east, Moscow has shifted its attention back to Kherson.
That may or may not come true. For now, the Russian strikes in and around Kherson continue unabated.
The State of the War
Drone Barrage: Russian forces targeted Ukraine with their biggest drone attack in weeks, part of what Ukrainian officials and military analysts say appears to be a campaign to wear down and probe Ukrainian air defenses ahead of winter.
Joining the War Effort: Hundreds of experienced fighters from Colombia have joined Kyiv’s ranks to improve their financial fortunes, reflecting the recruitment struggles faced by Ukraine as the conflict turns from a struggle for national survival into a war of attrition.
Growing Frustration: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has complained over what he has labeled unrealistic expectations for rapid success on the battlefield amid concerns that slow progress against Russian forces will discourage Kyiv’s allies from sustaining military aid.
Russian Soldiers Detained: The arrest in an occupied area of Ukraine of two Russian soldiers was a rare admission by Moscow that its forces may have committed a crime against Ukrainian civilians. But experts warned that it might just be political posturing.
Russia’s use of glide bombs — guided airdropped munitions capable of flying long distances — has increased by more than 2,000 percent in recent months, Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, a spokesman for the Kherson region’s military administration, 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 somewhere around 30 to 40.
Though 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.
Ms. Korifadze described the shock wave delivered by a missile that impacted late last month, pushing her car forward like an invisible hand as she drove to drop off food for her son, a police officer.
Standing next to the crater left by a glide bomb, Mykhailo Chornomorets narrated the shredding sound of the hurtling explosive as it traveled through the air before it exploded near his home.
Anna Hordiienko, who runs a small hardware store near one of Kherson’s more shelled neighborhoods, mouthed the different acoustics of booms and bangs that she has heard. She now feels as if she is an expert in analyzing them.
Kherson is “a military training ground for them,” Ms. Hordiienko said. “They’re just shooting everything they can at us.”
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A group of women, some pushing bicycles, head down a path after collecting bread.
Residents of the village of Blahodatne, near Kherson, heading home after receiving bread from a humanitarian aid delivery.
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Auditorium seats in ruin sit among the rubble of a destroyed building in Ukraine.
The community center in the village of Posad-Pokrovske, just west of Kherson, has been heavily damaged by fighting.
Behind the seemingly unending supply of Russian ordnance is the stream of civilian casualties, the byproduct of the port city clinging to some form of normalcy only miles from Russian artillery positions. Ukrainian troops, as often occurs in frontline cities, live among the population, meaning noncombatants are also at risk. Russian shelling is haphazard and inaccurate, although Russia also has routinely targeted civilians.
Roughly 20 percent of Kherson’s population remains in the city, scattered across various neighborhoods.
Weeks ago, Ukrainian troops posited that Russia’s shelling of Kherson had declined since last winter, when the bombardment was at its worst and electricity and heat was scarce. Over the summer, Ukrainian and Russian armies battled farther east as part of Kyiv’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 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 shifted its attention back to Kherson and the Dnipro. 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,” Ms. 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.
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Two children play on a playground that is ringed with defensive barricades to protect them from shelling.
In Kherson city, playgrounds are ringed with defensive barricades in case a rocket, shell or bomb lands nearby.
Now, Ukrainian soldiers involved in the operations describe a frantic and bloody battle where small craft move across the Dnipro 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 armored 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 where 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. Last Tuesday, a city resident named Mykola, 62, was boarding one of the regular evacuation trains from Kherson after a Russian shell riddled his home with shrapnel days before.
“Most of the neighbors have moved out,” he said. He declined to provide his surname.
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A red car turns onto a mostly deserted street with buildings in the background.
As evening sets in, Kherson’s streets empty out. Crime has dropped as the population has dwindled, but petty theft and domestic disturbances remain a nuisance for officers.
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A woman looks out the window of a yellow bus as it rides down the center of Kherson city.
Kherson’s population has dropped to about 60,000, from 280,000, and is expected to decline further as winter sets in, especially if Russia begins to bomb Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Crime has dropped with the population, said Andrii Kovannyi, a police spokesman in Kherson, but petty theft and domestic disturbances remain a nuisance for officers, who juggle Russian attacks with mundane police work.
The increase in Russian strikes has also spurred the mandatory evacuation of children from the towns and villages outside of Kherson where Ukrainian forces are launching their assaults. Mr. Tolokonnikov, the official from the military administration, said more than 260 children and their families had left since late October. He expects some to stay.
In Kherson city, some playgrounds are ringed with defensive barricades in case a rocket, shell or bomb lands nearby. Most children in the city learn online. The lack of in-person classrooms has degraded Ukrainian youth’s education level since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Two nights after the artillery shells missed Ms. Korifadze’s bomb shelter, her 9-year-old granddaughter Anya and Anya’s mother were settling in for another night of air-raid alarms and Russian shelling. Older men from the neighborhood sat outside, pining for the days they could fish on the Dnipro.
Anya’s mother asked her daughter if she thought the night would pass quietly, without the varying levels of violence and destruction that was slowly defining her childhood.
Anya responded quickly: “It’s never quiet.”
Emile Ducke contributed reporting from Kherson, and Marc Santora from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a Ukraine correspondent and a former Marine infantryman. More about Thomas Gibbons-Neff
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