Before the war, the problems faced by the residents of Kherson were similar to those in many European cities: salaries, corruption, addiction, the need to improve public services. Now they centre on obtaining the means of survival: water, heat, food, electricity and connection to the outside world.
Many villages in the Kherson region have been without electricity, gas and running water for months. Kherson city’s electricity and water supply was cut off about two weeks ago as the Russians fled, and not everyone had a gas supply.
Almost a week after Ukrainian forces retook the city, residents were wandering around carrying 5-litre plastic water bottles on trolleys, full or empty. They could be overheard asking each other where to find bread and discussing how many days it had been since they had seen milk in the shops. In some residential courtyards, people were gathered around campfires, cooking food and boiling water.
In Kherson’s central square, where some were still taking pictures next to the Ukrainian flags, a large crowd had gathered. They were standing packed close together but often facing opposite directions and were glued to their phones. They were there for the new 4G mast, one of several the returning Ukrainian authorities have set up in the city centre to compensate for the destruction of telecoms infrastructure by the fleeing Russian forces.
Remnants of the Russian occupation, and of life in Ukraine before it, persist in the form of ripped-up Russian propaganda billboards and abandoned western and Ukrainian chain stores.
The recently appointed new head of the Kherson region, Yaroslav Yanushevych, described how he was working to rebuild the administration from scratch, with a humanitarian crisis looming and Ukrainian military intelligence reports saying Russia could level the city as an act of revenge. “This is the biggest challenge of my life,” said Yanushevych, sporting black military fatigues.
Yanushevych is new to the region. He is a career civil servant who has mostly been based in Kyiv. Before being appointed head of Kherson in August, he ran Ukraine’s state radio frequency centre.
“All of our partners – the ICRC, the UN – say that no regional administration has faced a challenge like ours,” he said.
Only 140 of 600 regional state employees left Kherson for Ukrainian-controlled territory. When he established an administration-in-exile under orders from the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, only a handful of members of staff were there to meet him. Most had rebuilt their lives elsewhere, he said.
Yanushevych would not say how many Kherson administration employees became collaborators, or comment on their current whereabouts. Ukraine’s security services regularly publishes lists of Ukrainian officials who have collaborated with Russian occupation, including numerous former Kherson officials.
In September, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, unilaterally announced the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, even though his troops did not hold any of them entirely. The international community rejected the move.
The occupation of Kherson region was particularly prized by Russia’s leadership as it created a land corridor and water supply for Crimea, the peninsula Russia annexed in 2014. Kherson, Putin declared at the time, was now Russian.
But the state of Kherson’s regional administration building, which sits on the central square of the city, indicated there was little governance happening and it appeared to have been a low priority.
Inside, the Ukrainian branding and signs for Kherson regional administration were still there, including in the governor’s own office. As were the Ukrainian national and patriotic artwork that lined the corridors.
The floors were littered with small ash piles of burnt documents. Every room out of more than three dozen viewed by the Guardian was trashed and looted. There was women’s clothing in one room. On some desks there was uneaten food, including a half-eaten cabbage.
A security service officer for Yanushevych, declared one room with a powerful stench a “Russian toilet”. Since the occupation, Russian soldiers have become infamous in Ukraine for using rooms as toilets in schools, factories and offices instead of the available toilets.
But for Yanushevych, the mess inside his future office is fixable – his biggest challenge now is to reconnect the electricity supply. “Without electricity, the scale of the problems, like water, remains unresolvable,” he said.
He said the Russians had purposefully destroyed all the substations and transformers surrounding the city when they left. The second power station that supplied the region is across the river in Russian-controlled territory and not functioning.
Yanushevych hopes his administration will not have to deal with what will have to happen if it cannot provide the region with enough electricity. “[Evacuating residents] depends on whether there will be electricity. The president has said very clearly that we should throw all our resources into restoring the electricity supply,” he said. Mine clearers had to inspect each site before work could begin, which would take time, he said.
Though noting there was no plan to evacuate residents, Mykhailo Lynetskiy, the head of Kherson district under the Kherson regional administration, had a more pessimistic take. Lynetskiy said that there would probably only be enough electricity to power the water system and for a limited number of residents. “As a Kherson city native, I categorically advise people to leave the city for safer places for the duration of the winter period,” he said.
To add another layer to the surreal and difficult process of reintegrating Kherson’s residents into Ukraine after eight months of occupation – many of whom are living at rock bottom beneath the booming artillery being fired above their heads – prosecutors and police are gathering evidence of Russian war crimes and tracking down collaborators.
Evidence of the systematic torture, disappearance and killing of civilians is already being documented.
The majority of residents who welcomed the Russians have had plenty of time to escape but, according to the authorities, dozens of those who collaborated could still be hiding in Kherson. The Guardian saw one man being led down the street bound and blindfolded with tape. The escorting police officer said the man had been cleared of suspicion after someone reported him, but was being released away from the interrogation centre so he would not know its location.
The real sense of euphoria about being back with Kyiv could still be felt one week after Ukrainian troops rolled into town. But it was mixed up with the extraordinary reality residents were forced to navigate under occupation, where no one knew what the future held. One middle-aged shopkeeper could be heard telling off her younger subordinate, “Just you wait, your parents are going get it. A week ago they were shouting ‘glory to Russia’, and now ‘glory to Ukraine’!”
Yanushevych definitively ruled out working with collaborators. But, he said, he understood that most people stayed because they did not have the means to leave or were obliged to stay, for example, because of elderly or disabled relatives.
“They were not police officers or soldiers. No one gave them the order to leave. I’m not going to judge them.”
