Listening to the unanswered Ukrainian guns it became clear that Russia is on the run

The boom of artillery was close by and almost constant, deep thuds echoing across the endless, fertile fields of southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, where President Putin’s occupying army is once more on the run.

Ukrainian tanks and troops swept unopposed across land that just days ago was held by Russia’s army. The outgoing artillery fire was all Ukrainian and unanswered by the Russian guns. The soldiers were tight-lipped, wary of spilling military secrets, but exuded a quiet confidence that this seven-month long war has now turned decisively in their favour as Putin’s forces collapse on front lines all across Ukraine.

Russian armoured vehicles were abandoned in dusty roadsides, or lay destroyed in ditches. Across fields where Ukraine’s farmers once harvested sunflowers and wheat, the metallic remains of Grad rockets were burrowed deep into the earth. The vast Dnipro river glistened in the autumn sun. One man sat on a bench outside his home with a battered guitar singing a song about Jesus and “a free Ukraine”.

The Russian army fled from north Kherson on Monday, just over a week after the Kremlin announced it was annexing the territory after a sham referendum. The grim legacy of Russia’s invasion, which the Kremlin claims is aimed at “liberating” Ukraine, is bombed out homes and shattered lives.

In the picturesque village of Khreshchenivka, Viktor Kopitok, the top official, said that Russian troops had seized him in March because they suspected him of working with the Ukrainian army. They tortured him with a red hot poker, leaving deep burn marks on his flesh and also doused his legs in petrol and threated to burn him alive.

Every night for three weeks, he was locked in a cold, damp cellar in the yard of his own home. The entrance to the cellar, the soldiers told him, was booby trapped with a tripwire that would detonate explosives if he or anyone else opened it. “I considered suicide,” Kopitok, 37, said, wiping away tears. “Some of the soldiers were just sadists. I might look OK on the outside, but inside, I’m broken.” He eventually escaped in April, when the Russian soldiers were replaced by Kremlin-backed separatist troops from the Donbas region.

Others spoke of being intimidated into taking part in the Kremlin’s referendum, which Putin cited as justification for annexing the Kherson region.

“Two officials and two soldiers with automatic weapons came to our home and asked us if we were going to vote,” sobbed Nina, 55. “I was trembling but I said no. They then asked my husband and he felt like he had no choice, so he put a tick in the box for joining Russia. But what else was he supposed to do when armed men came to our home?”

Before they were finally forced out after seven long months of occupation, the Russians had felt so confident in their role as the region’s new masters that they had begun printing a newspaper full of crude Kremlin propaganda. One article in the paper, called Lighthouse, repeated Putin’s false claim that Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state. An accompanying photograph that purported to show Ukrainian “fascists” was in fact taken at a rally of far-right groups in Moscow ten years ago.

In the yard of a nearby house, Natasha, 53, was throwing out a pile of the papers. “What do I need them for now?” she laughed. “The Russians told us ‘you are with us now and we are here forever’. But I am Ukrainian. Why should I have to live in Russia?”

Many residents had fled as the Russian army approached in February. Those who remained said they were too old, too stubborn, or simply unwilling to leave their homes.

Just 55 miles south is Ukraine’s next major target, the regional capital, also called Kherson, which was seized by Russia early in the war. The recapture of the city by Ukraine would scupper Putin’s plans to secure a land bridge to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that was annexed by the Kremlin in 2014.

It would also allow Ukraine to target Russian forces in Crimea with western-supplied long range missiles. “Our soldiers do not stop. And it’s only a matter of time before we expel the occupier from all of our land,” President Zelensky said last week. Linking Crimea to the Russian mainland is the 12-mile road and rail bridge across the Kerch Strait, which was partially destroyed yesterday by an enormous explosion.

Before the war, Putin is said to have boasted that his army would be take Kyiv in days. Instead, his demoralised and exhausted troops have been driven out of the north and are now retreating in the east and south of Ukraine, inspiring hope in Kyiv and a growing fury among pro-Kremlin hardliners.

Last week, Kirill Stremousov, the Russian-installed deputy head of the occupied Kherson region, lashed out at “incompetent military leaders” in Moscow. He also said that Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minister, should “shoot himself” to atone for the military’s failures in Ukraine.

In the Donbas, a coal mining region in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv’s forces are pushing towards their ultimate aim of Donetsk and Luhansk after retaking Lyman, a strategic transport hub. On the outskirts of the town, a deserted Russian army block-post was daubed with pro-war Z and V symbols. Anti-tank mines and burnt-out Russian armoured vehicles still littered the shell-scarred road. A Ukrainian military convoy moved slowly across a pontoon bridge before heading further east. A shot rang out in the nearby forest.

“You have been tricked and betrayed,” Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, said in a Russian-language message to Putin’s forces. “You were promised a walk in the park. But you were sent into a trap. You are paying with your blood for someone’s fantasies and false aims.”

Yet the fighting is also taking a terrible toll on Ukraine’s army. “We are suffering up to 20 casualties a day in my battalion,” said a Ukrainian officer in the Donbas region. “Previously it was 60 a day.”

He said that experienced troops from the Moscow-backed Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR] were more willing to fight than Russian soldiers. “The DPR soldiers don’t surrender and they are dying in large numbers. The Russians are much more willing to run,” he said.

A wounded Putin is still able to strike out. On Thursday morning, seven Russian missiles hit residential buildings in the centre of Zaporizhzhia, a city in southern Ukraine, killing 17 people as they slept. A block of flats on the city’s main street was reduced to rubble. Hours later, Alyona, a shop owner living nearby, stood staring at the scene of destruction.

 “The blast woke us up at around 5:30am. It was like our building had been turned to rubber and was swaying from side to side,” she said, as smoke rose into the sky and rescue workers searched for bodies. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

The attack came a day after the Kremlin had said it would “consult” with the people of Zaporizhzhia about whether their city should be incorporated into Russia. The majority of the region, which goes by the same name, was annexed by Moscow last month and remains under Russian control.

Russian state television aired images of the devastated building, but said it was located more than 150 miles away in the Donbas region and had been hit by Ukrainian missiles.

Back in the Kherson region, soldiers posed for photos next to a massive sculpture of a watermelon, the symbol of an agricultural district that was liberated last week. In nearby homes, villagers struggled to understand what Putin, who turned 70 on Friday, had hoped to achieve. “He’s inhuman, he doesn’t live in the real world,” said Viktor, the village head. When asked if he had a birthday message for Putin, another man shook his head. “I just want him to drop down dead as soon as possible.”