Kherson is being bombarded by Russian artillery daily as residents struggle to survive in stark contrast to scenes of jubilation just two weeks ago as the city was liberated from Putin’s forces.
Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking overnight, said Kherson was struck by Russian artillery 258 times last week – with 21 more attacks reported yesterday.
Civilian infrastructure is the main target of the strikes, with Zelensky saying a water plant that supplies Kherson and nearby Mykolaiv was hit and destroyed – having just been repaired from earlier bombing. Apartment buildings were also hit.
The attacks deepen the misery that people still living in Kherson are being forced to endure, as Russian troops destroyed both water and power supplies before they fled across the Dnipro River on November 11.
Anatoly Sikoza stands in the ruins of a destroyed house where the bodies of eight Ukrainians were discovered after Russian forces fled Kherson
Oleksandr Antonenko, 53, sits in a front of his apartment building damaged by a recent Russian military strike in Kherson
Residents are now forced to walk to the river – the new frontline between Russian and Ukrainian forces – to gather water in buckets, as artillery fires overhead.
Wood-fired stoves provide heat for cooking, washing and keeping warm as winter advances and the air temperature regularly drops below freezing.
In the main square – which was the scene of an all-night party when Ukrainian troops arrived in the city – there are now aid relief tents.
One provides heat so that people don’t freeze to death, while a second provides power which people use to charge their phones – the main means for receiving information about how the war in going.
The third is for evacuees – those whose lives in Kherson have become too hard to endure and want to flee elsewhere.
Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address Monday that Russian forces had fired 258 times on 30 settlements of in the Kherson region over the past week.
Ukraine’s presidential office said Monday that at least four civilians were killed and 11 others wounded in the latest Russian attacks.
Meanwhile Yaroslav Yanushevych, the regional governor, said 21 further attacks took place Monday – including on ‘residential quarters of Kherson’. Fortunately, nobody was killed in those strikes.
British military intelligence said Sunday marked a record number of strikes on Kherson, at 54.
Hanna, a Ukrainian mother living in the city with her nine-year-old daughter Nastya, told CNN that life is ‘very hard’ right now.
But, she added defiantly, ‘I can say we live much better now. No water, no power, but also no Russians. It’s nothing. We can get through it.’
Supplies are being slowly restored, with Mr Yanushevych saying on Monday that around a quarter of the city now has power – up from around 17 per cent last week.
But there is little sign that the Russia plans to let up its bombardments and Ukraine’s ability to stop them is limited.
Putin’s forces retreated to well-established defensive lines when they left Kherson, across the wide and relatively fast-flowing river.
Battling across the river would be a hugely complicated and costly operation for Ukraine, before the challenge of clearing Russian defences on the other side.
Western officials, briefing journalists earlier this month, said Kyiv does not possess the capacity for such an attack and they do not expect it to happen any time soon – if at all during the rest of the war.
A house in downtown Kherson destroyed by a Russian shell on 25 November
A view shows an apartment building damaged by a recent Russian military strike in Kherson, Ukraine, on November 27
That means they lack the ability to silence the Russian guns currently firing on Kherson, and the city is likely to remain under attack for the foreseeable future.
As civilians struggle to hold on in the ruins of their city, Ukrainian war crimes investigators continue to uncover evidence of what they suffered under occupation.
Officers say five torture rooms have been found in the southern city and at least four more in the wider Kherson region.
Ukrainians allege that they were confined, beaten, given electric shocks, interrogated and threatened with death.
Human rights experts warn that the allegations made so far are only the beginning.
The Ukrainian national police say more than 460 war crimes have been committed by Russian soldiers in recently occupied areas of Kherson.
When a dozen Russian soldiers stormed into Dmytro Bilyi’s house in August, the 24-year-old police officer said they gave him a chilling choice: hand in his pistol or his mother and brother would disappear.
He turned his gun over to the soldiers, who carried machine guns and had their faces concealed.
But they nevertheless dragged him from his home in the southern village of Chornobaivka to a prison in the nearby regional capital of Kherson, where he said he was locked in a cell and tortured for days, his genitals and ears shocked with electricity.
‘It was like hell all over my body,’ he recalled. ‘It burns so bad it’s like the blood is boiling … I just wanted it to stop.’
Oleksandr Antonenko, 53, and his mother Liudmyla, 82, eek out a living inside their apartment which was damaged by a recent Russian military strike in Kherson, Ukraine
More than two weeks after Russians retreated from the city, accounts such as his are helping to uncover sites where torture allegedly took place in Kherson, which Kremlin forces occupied for eight months.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, a local rights group, said: ‘For months we’ve received information about torture and other kind of persecution of civilians. I am afraid that horrible findings in Kherson still lie ahead.’
The Associated Press spoke with five people who allege they were tortured or arbitrarily detained by Russians in Kherson or knew of others who disappeared and endured abuse.
Sometimes, they said, the Russians rounded up whoever they saw – priests, soldiers, teachers or doctors – for no specific reason. In other cases, Russians were allegedly tipped off by sympathisers who provided names of people believed to be helping the Ukrainian military.
Once detained, the people said they were locked in crowded cells, fed meagre portions of watery soup and bread, and made to learn the Russian anthem while listening to screams from prisoners being tortured across the corridor.
Detainees were allegedly forced to give information about relatives or acquaintances with ties to the Ukrainian army, including names and locations disclosed in handwritten notes.
As a police officer with a father in the military, Mr Bilyi remained under the radar for several months of Russia’s occupation, until he said someone probably tipped them off. He spent four days in a cell with others, being pulled out for questioning and electric shocks.
Investigators accused him of having a Kalashnikov rifle – not just a pistol – and pressured him to reveal his father’s whereabouts. They then shocked him for half an hour a day for two days before releasing him, he said.
Ukrainian national police allege that more than 460 war crimes have been committed by Russian soldiers in recently occupied areas of Kherson.
The torture in the city occurred in two police stations, one police-run detention centre, a prison and a private medical facility, where rubber batons, baseball bats and a machine used for applying electrical shocks were found, said Andrii Kovanyi, a press officer for the police in Kherson.
Civilians queue at an evacuation station in Kherson city centre as they seek refuge from Russian attacks in other parts of Ukraine
rthur, who’s hand was injured by shrapnel after a Russian strike near his home in Stepanivka a week ago, rests in a hospital bed in Kherson
When Igor was detained in September from the call centre where he worked, he was taken into a room, ordered to remove his shirt and to place his palms on the metal door to increase the flow of electricity and the pain of being shocked with a stun gun, he said.
The Russian soldier said: ‘Are you ready? Now you’re going to scream like a bitch … You will not get out of here, and we will kill you,’ said Igor, who gave only his first name to protect his identity.
The 22-year-old, accused of providing Ukrainians with Russian military positions, said he was shocked by the gun along his back for two-and-a-half hours and then forced to stay awake in a chair all night.
Pictures on his phone, seen by the AP, show clusters of red circular marks lining the length of his back. He was freed after two days but not before writing a letter providing details about a relative of his uncle about whom the Russians wanted information.
Documenting the crimes in Kherson will be challenging because no other city this large has been occupied by Russia for so long, said Brian Castner, senior crisis adviser at Amnesty International.
‘Evidence must be collected and preserved to maintain that chain of custody, so that when there is international justice, the evidence is lock-tight and perpetrators can be held to account,’ he said.
Police in Kherson are investigating and collecting evidence. But more and more people are arriving daily, and the justice system is overwhelmed, local rights experts said.
In March, Dmytro Plotnikov’s friend was seized by Russians when he went to Kherson’s central square to run errands shortly after the occupation began.
Mr Plotknikov knows of three other people who were captured and released by Russians, one of whom still had visible bruises on his body more than a month after being freed, he said.
But since the Russians left Kherson, what concerns him most are the Ukrainians who collaborated with them and remained.
In May, Mr Plotnikov’s neighbour posted a photo of his sister and her address on a Russian chat group, he said.
His sister is outspokenly pro-Ukrainian, and the neighbour accused her of spreading hate about Russian people, he said. Had the Russians seen it, they might have come to her house and arrested the family, he added.
Ukrainian police have spoken to the woman, but she remains in the community, Mr Plotnikov said.
‘They should be punished,’ he said. ‘I am ashamed that such people are around … why in the 21st century (can) you can be tortured for your pro-Ukrainian position, for your love of the Ukrainian language and culture? I do not understand it.’