One night last June, Liliya Aleksandrova slipped out of her home in occupied Kherson with some bright paints and a dangerous idea. She went to a grocery shop in her neighbourhood, a business that she knew was frequented by Russian soldiers who had invaded the city months before. “Kherson is Ukraine,” she wrote on a metal fence near the shop. Then she added a golden swirl of paint – a yellow ribbon, the symbol of Ukraine’s resistance movement in the Russian-occupied territories.
“For sure it was scary, but she asked God to help her,” recounts an interpreter, who was summarising Aleksandrova’s account to the Guardian.
