Families urged to flee southern Ukraine before counter-attack

After three months of occupation, with supplies running dangerously low, a new edict came down to the people of Kherson from their Russian overlords: teachers were to report for duty and sent for retraining in a new Russian curriculum to be introduced in schools from the start of the September term.

Tanya knew the ways out of occupied Kherson were few, with the occupiers eager to keep residents in place to accept the Russian passports being pressed on them as plans were readied for a referendum on joining the Russian federation. Her family set off anyway — she and her husband and two teenage children, along with her parents — waving white flags with “children” written in Russian on the car bonnets, in the direction of Ukrainian-controlled Mykolaiv, some 30 miles distant. Russian guards pointed them along a dirt track through a field, and they cleared the outskirts of Kherson without incident — but as they drew within reach of Ukrainian territory the Russian shells began to rain down all around them.

“Everything went black,” Tanya remembers, before coming to and seeing her son, badly wounded, beside her in the car and her daughter lying by her mother in the field. Only she and the two children survived. It was a month before her parents’ remains could be retrieved. She located them in a mortuary in Mykolaiv, recognisable only from the fragments of their clothes. She had them cremated. “I will take them back to be buried on their own land, where their own parents are buried, when the Russians are gone,” she said.

This week the government in Kyiv signalled that a massive offensive to retake the lost southern territories around Kherson is imminent, four months after Russian troops walked into the city with scarcely any resistance. Iryna Vereshchuk, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, urged civilians “to evacuate urgently”, adding: “I know for sure that there should not be women and children there, and that they should not become human shields.”

Vereshchuk admitted that evacuation was extremely risky after Russians formally forbade Ukrainian civilians to leave the territory under their control. In a sign of near desperation, the Ukrainian government has suggested civilians take the previously illegal route into Russian-controlled Crimea and through Russia to escape.

How serious and imminent the plans for a counter offensive are remains unclear. Ukrainian forces have been nibbling back the edges of Russian-held territory around Kherson over the past few weeks, claiming a couple of miles of penetration here and there. Russian artillery has kept up a constant barrage on Mykolaiv, where Moscow’s bid to blast a “Novorossiya” corridor all the way to Moldova failed. That left Ukraine still in possession of Odesa and a critical pathway to the sea. Vitaliy Kim, Mykolaiv’s regional governor, said today that the two biggest universities in the city had been hit by Russian missiles.

Compared with the fight for the eastern Donbas, where country lanes bristle with artillery on the move, the front line outside Kherson feels almost sleepy. Many of the Ukrainian operations here are “hit and run” exercises, Volodimir, a tank battalion commander admitted, to keep the enemy busy and on the run. The real action, increasingly, is happening deep inside the Russian-controlled areas where civilians are chafing under de facto Russian annexation, with high-priced supplies brought in from Crimea and savings wiped out with the introduction of the Russian rouble.

This week US-supplied Himars, which reached the battlefield only this month, were used to strike a Russian ammunition store in Nova Kakhovka, deep inside the Russian zone, killing scores of troops and lighting up the night sky with the detonated ammunition. Oleh Pylypenko, a district administration chief who was held in Nova Kakhovka for three months before his release in a prisoner exchange last month, said the strike would have unnerved the occupiers. “They never worried about Nova Kakhova, it was a rearguard base,” he said. “This is a huge psychological blow to them, it changes the whole picture. They are not safe there anymore.”

Sasha, a native of Nova Kakhova now living in Odesa, received a call from his mother there as the strike was happening, marvelling at the size of the explosion. “She climbed up to the gazebo and said: ‘It’s still burning, my son, it’s still burning, it’s banging and exploding!’” She reported that Russians troops “have begun to move about often during the night-time curfew finding new place because they believe their locations are now known”. Sasha added: “It seems some kind of movement has started because before they felt very free.”

Ukraine’s military is putting enormous hope in the precision targeting capabilities of the Himars systems and other western weapons to change the dynamics of the battlefield. Hopelessly outgunned by Russian artillery, as devastating troop losses on the Donbas front line attest, the military now hopes to destroy the enemy’s ammunition stocks before they can be used.

In an interview this week Oleksii Reznikov, the defence minister, said President Zelensky had ordered Ukraine’s military to retake occupied coastal areas which are vital to the country’s economy while he wrote begging letters to his western counterparts explaining that such an operation could only be successful with the gift of their precision-guided rockets.

Some 300,000 people lived in Kherson before it was overrun by Russian troops crossing the Syvash, or Rotten Sea, the marshland that divides Crimea from mainland Ukraine. Some 5,000 square miles were lost in a couple of days and, with the inevitable fall of besieged Mariupol, a Russian corridor opened up all the way to the gates of Mykolaiv. How many are left is unclear, though Kherson is one of the occupied areas where an anti-Moscow resistance is most active. Pylypenko, incarcerated for his role informing for the Ukrainian military, said there were “thousands” of partisans still undercover, ready to assist an offensive and dodging the entreaties to accept Russian passports and citizenship.

Tanya’s own husband is one and she keeps in touch with him through an encrypted messaging service on the Russian-installed internet that has replaced Ukrainian mobile systems. Other friends and family are trying to plot their way out too. A traffic queue, days long, is forming along one road towards Zaporizhzhya that the Russians have yet to cut off.

Her uncle, who lives outside Nova Kakhova, told her breathlessly of the strike that lit up the night sky. “He says the house is shaking from all the explosions,” she said. “But it gives him hope that maybe the Ukrainians will come soon. Otherwise he does not know how he will be able to get out of there.They are trying to turn it into another Russia and time is running out.”