Mock executions in the street. Families kidnapped never to return. Escape routes peppered with mines... life in courageous city under the control of Putin’s goons
THE protesters passing below his third-floor office window cry out ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ and the Mayor of Kherson feels a tingling of pride. How Igor Kolykhaev wishes he could publicly address them, his people, and acknowledge their bravery as they dodge tear gas canisters in nearby Freedom Square.
And he would dearly love to emulate President Volodymyr Zelensky by issuing a defiant rallying cry. Yet his is the only major Ukrainian city to fall to the Russians and it has rendered Mr Kolykhaev, if not powerless, then severely weakened. ‘It hurts,’ he admits.
The military and police left soon after Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into town a month ago. In their absence, Mr Kolykhaev has become the peg upon which Kherson’s 250,000 remaining residents hang their dwindling hopes of salvation.
Acknowledging his burden, the 50-year-old father-of-two tells The Mail on Sunday: ‘I am on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week trying to fix things.’
With nightly shelling in the suburbs, kidnap gangs roaming the streets and chronic food and medicine shortages, Mr Kolykhaev concedes that Kherson’s future is, to put it mildly, uncertain.
‘There is a 50/50 chance that it will go the way of Mariupol,’ he says, referring to the near-obliterated port city further east along the Black Sea coast in southern Ukraine. ‘The prospect is horrifying.’
In addition to Mr Kolykhaev, The Mail on Sunday has talked to a lawyer, doctor, teacher and business leader who describe the realities of life under Russian rule, portraying Kherson as a city teetering on a cliff edge, facing a humanitarian disaster and presided over by dread-inducing occupiers who grow ever more brutal as Putin fails to achieve expected victories elsewhere.
MR KOLYKHAEV reveals that with each passing day this is becoming an increasingly dirty war. He says more than 100 activists in Kherson, and in some cases their families, have been ‘disappeared’ – snatched from their homes in the middle of the night, their fate unknown. ‘We are doing all we can to try to find them, so far without much success,’ he admits.
Daria, a lawyer, says she knows of two families who were taken away after Russians wearing civilian clothes burst into their homes. She says: ‘If they do not open the doors, they smash them down. In the cases I know of they were looking for documents, I suppose incriminating evidence of some kind.
‘They put a bag on the head of the man they were looking for and then did the same to his family, including the two children. We have heard nothing since. They are lost.
‘We tried to get some information but the Russians wouldn’t reveal anything.’
We learn of another disturbing case: five sports coaches abducted on the same day.
‘I heard that those taken, from one club in the city, had some possible connection to the military,’ says businessman Alexey. ‘Four of the men were eventually returned two weeks ago, having been severely tortured.’
But he said a fifth man, in his 60s, who teaches the Japanese martial art akido, never returned, and his friends and family fear the worst.
Russian troops and tanks moved into Kherson, strategically located on the Dnieper River, after days of intense fighting that left more than 300 Ukrainian civilians and fighters dead.
Bodies were left strewn about the city streets as the battles raged. Utility workers tried to fix damaged pipes and downed lines but came under fire from snipers.
Fabrika, a shopping, cinema and bowling complex at the entrance to the city, was once a symbol of its growing prosperity. Maxym, a doctor living nearby, shares pictures of what it looks like now: a disfigured, burnt-out husk. ‘There was a series of explosions and a huge fire and then the Russians began shelling the firemen to stop them putting it out,’ he says.
Around this time, a group of armed Russian officers, including the commander of forces attacking the city, entered the mayor’s office and announced plans to set up a military administration.
A proud man, Mr Kolykhaev is reluctant to discuss his dealings with the occupiers, beyond saying they follow rules laid down by the Geneva Convention. Which is more than can be said for the occupiers’ dealings with residents.
The Kremlin hoped Kherson could clear the way for its forces to push westward toward Odessa – a much bigger prize. But the advance has been slow, the resistance fierce, and, say Kherson residents, this has made the occupiers aggressive.
In the past fortnight there have been reports of a new tactic used by Russians to intimidate the population. Daria shares some footage taken from a friend’s apartment balcony. It shows Russian gunmen standing over a group of people face down on the ground. One of the soldiers fires his weapon inches from a man’s head.
‘Terrifying,’ says Daria. ‘And horrible. This is their new thing.’
She recalls the early days of the occupation when a Chechen army unit struck terror while passing through on its way to Kyiv.
‘I witnessed one of their Tigr armoured vehicles turn its guns on an apartment block near my home on the edge of the city,’ she says.
‘Some people were shouting “Glory Ukraine” from their balcony and that is why they were hit. Four people died.’
Escape from the city is a perilous undertaking. The mayor warns: ‘There is no humanitarian corridor
and residents are risking their lives by trying to leave the city. There are no safe roads; the Russians have mined the roads on the routes out of the city.’
Thus far, 50,000 have left. In the city itself, there are four checkpoints, a mile or so apart, and each progressively more dangerous than the previous. Residents must drive with their windows wound down – so the occupants are visible – or expect gunfire.
Sometimes they are hit anyway. Anastasia, 34, a university lecturer, said a friend was trying to take her 15-year-old son and 65-year-old disabled father out of the city when – ‘for no reason whatsoever’ – soldiers riddled their car with bullets.
‘Her son died, so did her father and my friend was injured,’ says Anastasia. ‘Why would they do that? It was clear there weren’t military people inside the car.’
Even if the fourth checkpoint is successfully cleared, residents are immediately plunged into the middle of near-constant battles in the countryside. ‘There is nothing left of the village of Oleksandrivka, for instance,’ says Mr Kolykhaev. ‘It doesn’t exist.’
Those we interviewed all recounted incidents in which soldiers searched the occupants of cars, systematically checking clothes and bags – then helped themselves to jewellery and money.
‘A woman, a relative of mine, was travelling with her twin seven-year-old girls, heading for western Ukraine,’ says Anastasia. ‘But soldiers at a checkpoint took all their money – €5,000. When my relative complained and said she had nothing left, one of them laughed and threw a €100 note on the ground.’
Days are characterised by the search for food, with hours spent queuing outside shops. Soldiers, though, simply help themselves.
‘They just take what they want and don’t pay for anything. At first they took mobile phones and now it’s food,’ adds Anastasia.
‘The city is running out of the Ukrainian currency, hryvnia, and the Russians are trying to get us to use roubles only but there is much resistance. They are also trying to force us to speak only Russian. They are everywhere, checking papers, boarding buses to search for people and at night their armoured vehicles prowl the streets and the soldiers shine lights in people’s faces.’ Another woman we spoke to, a teacher, said many of her students were ‘obviously very emotionally damaged by war’.
‘There has not been a single day without shelling or bombing or shooting. We have online learning and I see the children crying on screen, though they mostly try very hard to be strong. The everyday stress is enormous.’
Now the protests are becoming less frequent, the people more fearful. There are still pockets of defiance, though. And little victories.
One of the few Ukrainian flags still flying in the city hangs from the mayor’s HQ. And someone – a brave soul – has recently taken pot shots at the Russian flags draped over the main police station and other buildings requisitioned by the invaders, leaving them peppered with holes.
‘The city is still Ukrainian,’ insists the mayor. And what would he say to his people if he was given the chance to address them?
‘We will win,’ he snaps back.
There has not been a single day without shelling or bombing