KYIV: Ukrainian officials Sunday began moving food, water and medicine into the southern city of Kherson, two days after Kyiv’s forces entered the strategic regional capital that Russia had captured at the start of the war and now has fled.
More than three-quarters of Kherson’s 300,000 residents had escaped the city, leaving 75,000 people to endure the Russian occupation before Moscow’s forces retreated last week and Ukrainian troops began to move in.
“Russian occupying forces and collaborators did everything possible to make those people who remained in the city suffer as hard as possible during these days of waiting, weeks of waiting, months,” an adviser to the mayor of Kherson, Roman Golovnya, said on national television.
Ukrainian forces feared that buildings in much of Kherson might have been significantly damaged, much like other cities, such as Mariupol, but found it largely intact, although with a limited water supply.
Liberated, many Kherson residents gathered on the city streets in the last couple of days, waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags in celebration.
Residents shared stories of the Russian shelling of the city but at the same time said the Ukrainian use of advanced missile systems supplied by Western allies, including the United States, seemed to disrupt Moscow’s supply lines and troop positions.
They said Ukraine hit Russian positions with the aid of a network of informants.
Still, Kherson residents told of friends and family who were detained and went missing over nine months of Russian occupation.
And life is not back to normal in the most elemental ways.
(VOA)
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