San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Ukraine rushes aide to retaken city of Kherson
MYKOLAIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian police officers returned Saturday, along with TV and radio services, to the southern city of Kherson after the withdrawal of Russian troops, part of fast but cautious efforts to make the only regional capital captured by Russia livable after months of occupation. Yet one official still described the city as “a humanitarian catastrophe.”
People across Ukraine awoke from a night of jubilant celebrating after the Kremlin announced its troops had withdrawn to the other side of the Dnieper River from Kherson. The Ukrainian military said it was overseeing “stabilization measures” around the city to make sure it was safe.
The Russian retreat represented a significant setback for the Kremlin some six weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed the Kherson region and three other provinces in southern and eastern Ukraine in breach of international law and declared them Russian territory.
The national police chief of Ukraine, Ihor Klymenko, said Saturday on Facebook that about 200 officers were at work in the city, setting up checkpoints and documenting evidence of possible war crimes. Police teams also were working to identify and neutralize unexploded ordnance and one sapper was wounded Saturday while demining an administrative building, Klymenko said.
Ukraine’s communications watchdog said national TV and radio broadcasts had resumed in the city, and an adviser to Kherson’s mayor said humanitarian aid and supplies had begun to arrive from the neighboring Mykolaiv region. But the adviser, Roman Holovnya, said the remaining residents still lacked water, medicine and food, which he called “a humanitarian catastrophe.”
“The occupiers and collaborators did everything possible so that those people who remained in the city suffered as much as possible over those days, weeks, months of waiting” for Ukraine’s forces to arrive, Holovnya said. “Water supplies are practically nonexistent.”
The chairman of Khersonoblenergo, the region’s power provider, said electricity was being returned “to every settlement in the Kherson region immediately after the liberation.”
Despite the efforts to restore normal civilian life, Russian forces remain close by. The General Staff of Ukraine’s armed forces said Saturday the Russians were fortifying their battle lines on the Dnieper River’s eastern bank after abandoning the capital. About 70% of the Kherson region remains under Russian control.
Moscow’s announcement that Russian forces were withdrawing across the Dnieper followed a stepped-up Ukrainian counteroffensive in the country’s south. In the last two months, Ukraine’s military claimed to have reclaimed dozens of towns and villages north of the city of Kherson.
Across much of Ukraine, jubilation marked the exit of Russian forces, since a retreat from Kherson and other areas on the Dnieper’s west bank would appear to shatter Russian hopes to press an offensive west to Mykolaiv and Odessa to cut off Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea. In Odessa, the Black Sea port, residents draped themselves in Ukraine’s blue-and-yellow flags and shared Champagne.