Dozens of Russian vehicles, stay-at-home orders, and no light, gas, water nor heat to collect the dead. We report on the fall of Kherson
ANDRII YATSKEVICH went to bed on March 1st in a Ukrainian city and woke up in a Russian-controlled one. A sailor born and raised in Kherson, a town in southern Ukraine just north of Crimea, Mr Yatskevich, contacted by phone, says that he checked social media to see security-camera footage of several dozen Russian vehicles parked outside the city administration building.
Meanwhile in the south, Russia is seizing smaller towns along Ukraine’s southern coast. Berdyansk and Melitopol are in Russian hands. These two towns were particularly vulnerable to Russian takeovers, and not just because Crimea is nearby. Kremlin-friendly officials have held important jobs in local government since independence in 1991, and unlike in the Ukrainian-held half of the Donbas region, these places never sidelined them after 2014, says Denis Bihunov, a political scientist.
To achieve its aims, Russia will need to hold its new turf. Can it do that? Russian troops will grow more vulnerable if they thin out over ever more occupied territory, leaving those holding the fort vulnerable to counter-insurgency efforts, says Rob Lee of King’s College London. Hostility toward the invaders is pervasive. One video in now-occupied Kherson shows a brave citizen running with a Ukrainian flag in each hand across the town square, metres from tanks’ turrets.
These scenes in the south are an illustration of how brutal Russian tactics have become. Less than 100km to the south-east is Crimea, which Russia managed to seize in 2014 without spilling blood. Many Ukrainians with pro-Russian sympathies used to think that a rapprochement between the two countries was possible. After just one week of this war, “for all of my friends that hope is already dead”, says Mr Yatskevich.
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