In Ukraine’s South, Russian Occupiers Tighten the Screws

Russia is tightening its hold over occupied areas of southern Ukraine, installing pro-Moscow leaders, hunting for dissenters and dismantling Ukrainian state institutions.

In the city of Melitopol, like many others in the area, red, blue and white Russian flags now fly atop public buildings. Russian security forces patrol the streets and soldiers man checkpoints, inspecting people’s identification documents and looking through the contents of their mobile phones, residents say.

In March, Russian forces burst into the office of Melitopol’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov, put a bag over his head and detained him. Moscow named a local pro-Russian politician to replace him. Mr. Fedorov was later released in a prisoner swap and is now in Ukrainian-held territory.

Russian occupation authorities have said they would seek to make the Russian ruble legal tender and say they will reopen schools teaching a Russian curriculum. Mr. Fedorov said Melitopol is now connected to Russia’s internet via a fiber-optic cable from Crimea. There also are new Russian cellphone-service towers.

On Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned Russian conduct in the occupied areas, saying: “Torture chambers are being built there, local authorities and anyone deemed notable to local communities are being abducted.”

Mr. Zelensky called on the West to impose sanctions on Russia’s entire financial system for its attempts to replace the Ukrainian currency in areas under its control.

Russian forces that pushed north from Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, seized a significant swath of territory in southern Ukraine during the opening weeks of the war. Generally, there has been less fighting than in the north, where Russian forces retreated in early April after weeks of fierce resistance. Russia’s supply lines in the south, in particular, have rarely been targeted by insurgent-style ambushes.

After failing to capture Kyiv, Moscow has said it is refocusing its offensive on eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region. Before the invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized the independence of two Russian-controlled statelets there. Moscow, however, hasn’t said what it intends to do with the large territory it holds in the southern regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Propaganda leaflets distributed by Russian forces in the Kherson region say Moscow had no choice but to “launch an operation to liquidate the anti-people Kyiv regime” in order to thwart a Western plot to destroy the Russian and Ukrainian peoples alike.

“Don’t think it will be quick, easy and painless,” the leaflets say, urging locals not to leave their homes and communities, and not to approach Russian troops and armored vehicles on patrol.

In some places, Russian forces have also hoisted the flag of the Soviet Union on government buildings and moved to replace statues of Lenin dismantled after 2014.

Sergey Aksenov, the Russian governor of Crimea, said over the weekend that Ukrainian teachers from across the occupied areas of southern Ukraine will be taken to “requalification camps” in the peninsula so that they would follow “Russian standards” in the classroom.

In Melitopol, the mayor, Mr. Fedorov, said Russian forces were stripping factories of their machinery and shipping it back to Russia.

 “To me it’s a signal that they don’t intend to stay long, because otherwise they would have tried to develop the area or at least tried to seize the entire factories instead of just looting them,” he said.

After Mr. Fedorov’s arrest by the Russians, he said he was held in a detention center and interrogated. He said he could hear people crying in pain from nearby cells. He was freed in the prisoner exchange six days later.

After Mr. Fedorov’s prison ordeal, many other officials in southern Ukraine abandoned their posts and made their way to Ukrainian government-held territory.

 “A dead mayor or a mayor detained somewhere in a cellar is not of much use,” said Vitaliy Nemerets, mayor of the city of Kakhovka in the Kherson region. He said on social media that he left the city in April, fearing that his family’s lives were in danger.

Because Russia’s policy is unclear, the occupation forces’ approach varies from city to city.

In Kherson, the only regional capital and the biggest Ukrainian city that Russia has captured since launching the war on Feb. 24, the elected mayor, Ihor Kolykhaev, has been allowed to keep running the municipality in accordance with Ukrainian law and in cooperation with Kyiv.

The municipality still flies the Ukrainian flag and pro-Ukrainian rallies take place regularly. Protesters are sometimes dispersed by Russian security forces firing warning shots and tear gas.

 “When the armed soldiers of the Russian Federation came here, I told them that as long as the flag above is Ukrainian, we will work according to Ukrainian law. And if the flag changes, we will all resign,” Mr. Kolykhaev said. “Kherson is Ukraine. People here are waiting for the armed forces of Ukraine to come and free them.”

In Kherson, Russian forces have set up their headquarters in the regional government’s administrative building and recently removed a monument to 100 Ukrainians killed in 2014 protests. Mr. Kolykhaev said Russians gained access to a database of war veterans who have fought in Donbas since Russia fomented conflict there in 2014, territorial defense volunteers and other potential foes. Using these lists, Russian security forces are conducting selective raids throughout the city.

Kherson’s regional council voted over Zoom shortly after the Russian takeover of the city to reject any attempt to sever the region from Ukraine. Now, Ukrainian officials warn that Russia plans to conduct a referendum in May on establishing a “Kherson People’s Republic” along the lines of the Donetsk and Luhansk statelets created by Moscow in Donbas in 2014.

After the planned referendum, local men could be mobilized to fight alongside the Russian army, as it already happened in Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine’s military said this week.

Even though there are no agreed evacuation corridors from Kherson to the rest of Ukraine, thousands have fled using country back roads, Mr. Kolykhaev said. Others escaped via Crimea, trying to then get to government-controlled Ukraine or Europe via Turkey.

In many towns across southern Ukraine, Russian occupation authorities have managed to find local collaborators among politicians affiliated with Opposition Platform For Life, a political party that pushed for closer ties with Moscow before the war and was recently disbanded by Mr. Zelensky.

The party’s leader, Viktor Medvedchuk, who was under house arrest pending a treason investigation when the war began, initially managed to escape but was recently captured by Ukrainian security forces.

While the party’s other leaders in Kyiv have condemned the Russian invasion, many of its lower-level politicians in the south have chosen to collaborate with Moscow. In Melitopol, for example, an Opposition Platform city council member, Galina Danilchenko, was named by occupation forces as the new acting mayor.

In the city of Enerhodar, home to Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant, Russian authorities appointed as acting mayor Andriy Shevchyk, a councilman from Opposition Platform.

Opposition Platform candidates won 12 of Enerhodar’s 34 city council seats in the latest elections. But Yana Dabizha, executive officer of the municipality, who says she doesn’t recognize Mr. Shevchyk’s authority, says few residents are cooperating with the occupation forces.

 “Those 40% of the population could have become pro-Russian. But it didn’t turn out this way,” said Ms. Dabizha. “I expected that there would be many more collaborators than what we are seeing now.”

To provide security and establish an auxiliary police force in Enerhodar, Russian authorities brought in a pro-Russian militia leader from the Donbas region. Another militia commander from the Donbas was recently put in charge of security in the port city of Berdyansk.

Enerhodar’s teachers, so far, are resisting pressure to reopen schools under the new authorities, Ms. Dabizha said.

In Kherson, where mobile-phone and internet connections are stable, teachers conduct classes online, following the established Ukrainian program in cooperation with the Ukrainian ministry of education, said Iryna, a math teacher in the city. The Wall Street Journal agreed to use only her first name. “Everyone wants to be Ukraine. It is considered shameful now to be for Russia,” she said.

Kherson city, home to some 300,000 people before the war, fell with little combat after the governor, the local security-service chief and military commander all left on the first day of the war. Mr. Zelensky has since stripped Kherson’s security-service chief of his general’s rank and called him a traitor.

While defense plans called for minefields to be laid on the narrow isthmus linking the region to Crimea, and for a strategic bridge over the Dnipro river to be destroyed, none of that happened.

When Russian armored columns rolled into Kherson, they were met by a ragtag force of local territorial defense volunteers who had just been issued light weapons. Some 60 of them died in Kherson’s central park as they tried to put up a hopeless fight, armed just with assault rifles and Molotov cocktails, residents say.

Since then, Ukrainian forces have pushed back with counteroffensives from the neighboring Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions. The front line now runs about 10 miles north of the city of Kherson, with Ukrainian forces regularly shelling Russian positions in its Chornobayivka airport.

“There is no insurgency in the city now,” said Mr. Kolykhaev, the Kherson mayor. “Maybe that is because they are all waiting for the armed forces of Ukraine to enter. They probably have orders to start acting only then, so that they aren’t detained too early.”