At 5am on Wednesday Serhii Melnikov heard a noise outside. The Russian soldiers who were living in the house opposite – number six, Shevchenko street – were packing up to leave. They had occupied the village of Mylove in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region for eight long months. Now they were off, as part of a humiliating pull-out from the right-bank of the Dnipro river and the city of Kherson.
“Vladimir Putin said Russia would be here for ever. In the end they left in five minutes and ran away like goats,” Melnikov told the Observer, the first newspaper to reach Mylove since its liberation late on Thursday. He added: “Putin wanted to kill us. He’s ended up destroying his own country. Russia’s retreat from Kherson is an enormous failure.”
Melnikov opened the neighbouring gate and showed off the open shed where the Russians had cooked their meals and hung out in the evenings. They left behind china coffee cups, cigarette butts and a glass jar of tomatoes. Rubbish and green army ration packs were strewn around. “They had a radio transmission set with antennae and used a storeroom to keep their mortars,” he said.
The last moments of occupation were tinged with vindictiveness. On their way out Russian troops blew up the village’s school and nursery buildings, where they had lived, and brought down the radio tower. On Saturday the nursery resembled a concrete heap; a sign placed outside read: “Mines”. They detonated Mylove’s crossing over a tributary of the Dnipro river, and other key pieces of infrastructure.
Ukrainian special forces swept in on Thursday night. By Friday morning residents had put out blue-and-yellow flags and were celebrating their first hours of freedom. They hugged Ukrainian soldiers sporting yellow armbands and offered them homemade pastries. “Our guys are heroes. God looked after us,” Melnikov’s mother in law Liudmyla said. “It’s been hard. I didn’t get my pension or tablets for my blood pressure.”
There were similar scenes of jubilation in Kherson, the province’s capital, which Moscow seized during the first days of March. Locals danced around a bonfire outside the regional administration building, sang patriotic songs, and chanted “Z-S-U”, the initials of Ukraine’s triumphant armed forces. Cars tooted their horns; citizens waved banners adorned with watermelons, the Kherson region’s much-loved fruit.
The last few days have been a disaster for Moscow. They suggest Putin’s audacious military plan to conquer Ukraine has failed, shot through as it was with hubris and magical thinking. His army was unable to conquer Kyiv and Kharkiv. It has now lost control of its only functional major city. Demonstrators protested in spring against Russian rule and on Friday were back on the streets, rejoicing at its demise.
The Russian retreat last week was a shambolic affair, announced by Putin’s hapless defence minister Sergei Shoigu. The last soldiers disabled the Antonivskiy Bridge, which Ukraine had targeted with US-supplied Himars missiles, and ran in panic across a pontoon crossing. Another bridge was severed at the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, which leads to the occupied city of Nova Kakhovka.
These were historic scenes. The war, however, is far from over. On Friday, loud booms could be heard across the Dnipro river. Russian soldiers – many of them newly mobilised – have been digging defensive positions on the left bank. The two armies now face off over an expanse of water stretching for hundreds of kilometres. Russia still controls the southern chunk of Kherson province and a land corridor stretching to Mariupol and the eastern Donbas.
In Mylove, Serhii Demchuk pointed across the Dnipro to Russian-controlled territory, a mere eight kilometres away. Visible in the haze was the village of Hornostaivka, on the other side of the Kakhovka reservoir.
From somewhere nearby, came a whoosh from a Ukrainian grad missile, fired at departing Russian troops. “You get used to the explosions,” Demchuk said. His wife, Alesia, said: “No you don’t. It’s terrible”.
A large column of Ukrainian vehicles including several T-72 tanks trundled across a late autumnal landscape of black sunflower fields. The dirt track went past abandoned Russian trenches and piles of artillery shells. The Russians had left behind broken infantry fighting vehicles. Trashed civilian cars marked with a “Z” – the letter representing Putin’s faltering invasion – lay in a grassy ditch.
Ukrainian soldiers were euphoric. “Our morale is sky-high. We know why we are fighting. This is our land,” 28-year-old Serhii said. He said his home town of Oleshky – across the river from Kherson – was still under Russian occupation. “We will take back Oleshky and everything else,” he predicted. Next to his checkpoint were two burned-out Russian tanks and the village’s council building, a Ukrainian flag on its pole.
Melnikov said the village was originally home to 1,000 people. Between 300 and 400 stayed after the Russian takeover. He said: “We asked them why they had come. They replied: ‘To make your lives better.’ By the time they exited we had gone back in time 30 years. We now have no electricity, gas or water. Everyone is broke and there are no jobs. Instead of waging war, Putin could have fixed the roads and hospitals in his own country.”
The first enemy troops stationed in Mylove were Russian proxies from the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, the DNR. Their Armenian-born commander was sacked for illicitly selling petrol allocated for his vehicles. “The next lot were worse. They broke into shops and homes, looking for alcohol. They said they wanted booze and girls. They were dirty, unkempt, and frequently drunk,” Melnikov said. “Like tramps. They stole everything they could.”
In Kherson city and in other settlements the Russians tortured and executed civilians, including policemen, former fighters, and government employees. Melnikov said they arrested two teenage boys in March after they tore down three new Russian, communist and DNR flags from the Soviet war memorial. “An officer put them up against a wall and shot over their heads. They were made to dig trenches as punishment,” he said.
He said about 10 villagers actively collaborated with the Russians. One, Tetiana Surzhik, became the new pro-Moscow “mayor”. She advised the soldiers where they could live, and gave them the addresses of properties that were empty. The collaborators left last week, he said, with the soldiers. They included a local woman who fell in love with a Russian officer and married him over the summer, he added.
A few people were members of the resistance. Melnikov said he would sit on his roof – overlooking a yard of geese – and watch Russian military hardware as it rolled past. He sent the coordinates by mobile phone to his son who lives in the city of Dnipro. He then forwarded them to the Ukrainian army. “On one occasion I spotted a Russian rocket-launcher system. I sent a message. It all happened very quickly. Ten minutes later it was destroyed,” he said.
Putin’s attempt to bring Russkiy Mir or the Russian world to Mylove lasted for 245 days, he pointed out. “I was here from the beginning until the end. What amazed me is how many of Putin’s warriors seemed unfamiliar with toilets and asphalt roads. They arrived saying we were Nazis. By the time they left it was clear to everyone they were the Nazis. They destroyed everything.”
