Kherson residents forced to flee as triumph quickly turns to torment

‘It’s impossible to live like that. We worked all our lives to build our house and pay for it and now we have got to leave’

The joy of liberation had all too soon been replaced by the strain of daily shelling. It was time for the family to go. As Andriy lifted his father Oleksandr from the platform at Kherson station on to a train bound for Kyiv, both were in tears at leaving their home. The final straw had come overnight when a shell hit a neighbour’s house on their street near the city’s Antonivka bridge.

“It’s impossible to live like that,” said Andriy. “We worked all our lives to build our house and pay for it and now we have got to leave.”

Russian troops may have withdrawn from the city, but they remain only a few hundreds yards away over the Dnipro river. The city is well within range of their artillery and they have fired hundreds of shells at the city, while Ukrainian guns fire back.

Daily shelling is killing residents, wearing on nerves and hampering efforts to get the power grid back up.

Yaroslav Yanushevych, governor of the region, said the city had again lost its power supply after heavy shelling yesterday.

“There is no voltage in power lines in Kherson,” he wrote on social media. “This happened because of large-scale attacks on the city.” More than 30 people have been killed in the barrages since a counter-offensive evicted Russian troops from the city on Nov 11. Ukraine’s government has encouraged residents to leave and has laid on free train transport and minibuses. The services are hardly overwhelmed, but there is a steady stream of people leaving.

Pavlo Shevchenko, who was departing on an overnight train with his girlfriend, Anastasia Ukrainets, likened Kherson to Mariupol, which was shattered by a Russian siege in the earlier stages of the invasion.

“There’s shelling everywhere and we have no electricity or water,” he said. “The city feels really, really empty. On the first days, people were celebrating, but now it’s empty.”

Another woman was travelling with her five-year-old son, Misha, who clambered over the train bunks in his red pyjamas. Anxiety had also pushed her out of Kherson: “When I meet all the soldiers, I just want to hug them. But we are going because of the shelling. It’s to save our nerves.”

Ukraine’s military said Russia had pulled some troops from towns on the opposite bank of the Dnipro, but gave few details and did not say if Ukrainian forces had crossed the river.

Russia has already told civilians to leave towns within 10 miles of the river and withdrawn its civilian administration from the city of Nova Kakhovka. “A decrease in the number of Russian soldiers and military equipment is observed in Oleshky,” the military said, referring to the town opposite Kherson. It said a force of mainly newly mobilised reservists had dispersed in the forest along a 15-mile stretch of road through riverside towns. Ukraine’s power grid has been so badly battered by waves of Russian attacks that it will take time to fix, even with extensive European aid.

Both America and the EU have begun to deliver transformers and heavy generators and pledged tens of millions of pounds of equipment.

But Andriy Herus, head of Ukraine’s committee on energy and housing, said some parts would have to be made from scratch, which would take six months.

He said: “During this winter, it is impossible to restore all the damaged facilities of the energy infrastructure.”

Yevhen Yenin, Ukraine’s deputy minister of internal affairs, has said that 700 infrastructure targets, ranging from sub-stations to fuel depots and bridges, had been hit and that 520 cities, towns and villages faced power supply problems.

As the blackouts stretched on and temperatures fell, nine people were killed in accidents in the country as they resorted to emergency generators, candles and gas cylinders to try to heat and light their homes after power outages.

Ukrainians have been warned to brace for another wave of attacks similar to last week’s onslaught, which left millions without power.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military said yesterday they were seeing signs of Russian troops preparing to pull out from several villages in the south of the Zaporizhzhia region, north-east of Kherson.

In Mykhaylivka, soldiers reportedly abandoned a warehouse and a police station where they had been staying for the past few months, the Ukrainian general staff said.