Liberated city rejoices despite desperate conditions

KHERSON, Ukraine — During the long, long months when Russian forces were in charge, the national flag was contraband. Only rarely and in the privacy of his own home did Yevhen Teliezhenko dare bring out his prized possession, the banned yellow-and-blue of Ukraine.

Now the Russians are gone, forced out of his southern city of Kherson, and the 73-year-old is making up for all the lost time. He and his wife are driving around the city, flying their flag and — with the enthusiasm of teenagers — asking Ukrainian soldiers who liberated them to autograph it. “They were fighting for us. We knew we were not alone,” he said.

Where just last week there was deep fear in Kherson, now there is an abundance of joy. And that emotion is bursting out despite the fact there is no power, no water and barely any cell phone coverage.

Food and medicines are in short supply. Life promises to be tough for weeks to come, as winter bites down on barely heated residences. Russia’s poisoned parting gifts were the destruction of key infrastructure and the deadly seeding of booby traps around the city.

Still, at least hope and happiness are back, which will more than do for now.

“Finally freedom!” said Tetiana Hitina, 61, Teliezhenko’s wife. “The city was dead.”

Kherson was the only provincial capital captured by Russia, seized in the invasion’s first weeks. It was a significant — but as it turned out only temporary — prize for Moscow, because of the city’s port and its strategic position on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine.

The Dnieper’s wide waters now separate Ukraine’s troops, who fought their way for weeks toward Kherson, and its former Russian occupiers, who abandoned the city last week in the face of the Ukrainian advance, escaping to the river’s eastern bank.

Yet the fighting is far from over. Russian troops are now digging in there, bracing for the next Ukrainian move. Over the sounds of Ukrainians rejoicing for a third day running Sunday in Kherson’s main square, the thump of artillery fire could be heard in the distance. About 70% of the wider Kherson region is still in Russian hands.

Roads leading into Kherson bear witness to the ferocity of the fighting — much of it largely unreported at the time because Ukraine had blacked out frontline news from the region to avoid giving useful intelligence to the Russians. For miles along the approach to the city, the war and its ravages have left not a building untouched.

Amid the abandoned trenches and the charred remains of military hardware, a surprising sight: children popped out of mutilated homes to wave at cars rolling through their village, which until only recently was a war zone.

For the moment, billboards that the city’s former Russianbacked administrators put up are still there. But surely, not for long. Their now-outdated message: “Russia is here forever.”