Transitions
May 28, 2025
Ondrej Kundra
Kherson was turned into a giant hunting ground. How do people live there under the constant attacks from Russia?
The journey on a night train from Kyiv to Kherson takes 11 hours, spanning 700 kilometers (435 miles). The train slows down for the last 50 kilometers before the final destination, its wheels rolling heavily over the tracks and screeching noisily. Police officers and soldiers enter the train, checking everyone’s documents. They go through the travelers’ mobile phones and ask for a special, pre-approved authorization to enter the city. They’re trying to make sure the train holds no Russian spies that could enter the city and help the enemy guide rockets at potential targets. At 8:18 a.m., the train arrives at Kherson’s main station. At other stations in Ukraine, I’m used to getting a coffee after the long journey. Here I want to do the same, but I can’t. Nobody is selling anything – the place is empty, deserted.
“The Russians have targeted the station a number of times. Let’s get out of here,” says my local guide, a Kherson native named Denys Sukhanov, as he welcomes me in front of the station building, which is riddled with bullets, and swiftly walks me to his car. I’m in the most dangerous city of Russia’s war in Ukraine. Here, the fight continues over whether the Russians can break through to the right bank of the Dnieper and open up a path further inland. Kherson has been resisting daily shelling and drone swarms in the sky, and even though its population has been drastically reduced from 300,000 to 60,000, some people have stayed here, keeping their city alive.
Before the war, Kherson was a pleasant riverside city of leisure. Today, life here has very different rules, and you’d better stick to them. “Do not buckle up under any circumstances,” Denys tells me as I instinctively reach for the seat belt. “If you saw an incoming rocket, the belt would slow you down dramatically. When you’re trying to get away, every second decides whether you live or die.”
Parking your car the right way is also important. Kherson is built so that all its streets lead sharply down from the mountain to the river. Before the war, people would park their cars in either direction – toward the Dnieper or facing away from it. This has changed. Today, you always park your car facing away from the river, as the Russians regularly shell the city from the river’s other bank. If you need to escape the incoming fire, you don’t want to lose precious time by having to turn your car around. Also, cars aren’t parked in front of big houses, but rather in the streets behind them. If rockets are launched from around the river, there’s a chance they will be intercepted by the front of the building, whereas life behind the building will weather the hit.
Thick trees can also protect you from a drone attack, even if only a little. You can stop in the shadow of their treetops, hide and hope that the drone operators won’t notice you from so high
- Some know-how, however, is more complex than this. Before Denys heads anywhere in the city, he first takes a look at a number of Telegram channels on his mobile. The channels show reports by locals on where they’ve recently spotted lethal drones. “Based on where they were spotted first and where a little later, I try to estimate their next route,” said Sukhanov, adding he tries to avoid those places.
“Wherever you walk or drive, you need to be in a hurry – each minute spent outdoors is risky,” he explained. That’s why you can’t see a lot of cars in the streets, and if you do see one, it’s probably approaching its destination at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. Additionally, some people have installed metal plates on their car roofs, protecting them against kamikaze drones.
Kherson, in southern Ukraine, was the only major city the Russians conquered after the start of their invasion in 2022, occupying it for nine months. But the Ukrainians pushed them out of the city the very same year, driving them to the left bank of the Dnieper, where the Russian army took up new positions within shooting distance. For a short while, the arms went quiet, but once the shaken-up occupation force recovered from the shock of unexpected loss, it launched the never-ending artillery shelling.
Last summer, the cannons were joined by swarms of drones. As military experts are saying, this has turned Kherson into a laboratory of what the wars of the future could look like. The Russians are gradually improving the drones – both their own and those from China – by making them faster, able to last longer in the air, and capable of longer flights. They have turned the streets of Kherson into a giant hunting ground.
The Sound of War
From the Russian-controlled bank of the Dnieper, drones can reach anywhere in Kherson within five minutes, moving at a speed of 70 kilometers per hour and maneuvering easily. If they don’t find any exposed Ukrainian soldiers or their positions on the right bank of the river within a few minutes, they shift their focus onto anything that’s alive and within range, mostly civilians. Nobody is safe – drones launch small rockets at them, with kamikaze drones following them as they try to escape. Anything that moves can be a target: people sitting in cars, shoppers, people traveling on buses, smokers on balconies, people sitting by an open window in their apartment, even people attending funerals, saying their last goodbyes to killed relatives.
“It happened 10 kilometers from the city, in a village where I have a store, as my brother and I were driving there to get food and other things for the residents there. Nobody else drives there with food anymore because of the great danger, but we didn’t want the people to lose their access to this service,” a Kherson business owner, Tanya Zaikina, tells me. “During our last drive there, we were hit by a drone, which struck the front passenger seat. I got a direct hit, and I lost consciousness.”
When Zaikina later woke up in the hospital, she found out doctors could no longer save her severely injured leg and had to amputate it. We speak in the Vodnikov Hospital, located in the city center. The hospital, just like the train station, has been the target of repeated strikes, meaning patients such as Zaikina can die here at any moment during their convalescence. Most
windows here are covered with plywood, so that the patients are at least not hit with flying shrapnel from the shelling. This means the hospital rooms are dark even during the day.
Zaikina says she doesn’t want to give in to the gloom, opting to focus on the future instead. “When they let me out of here, I want to go to a specialized clinic in Lviv, where they make prosthetics. The better ones cost many thousands of euros. I need to put the money together somehow because I just don’t have it. So now I’m thinking about all of that,” she said. I ask her what she wants to do after she gets her prosthetic. “Well, I’ll go back to Kherson and continue taking food to people. I’m not letting the Russians chase me out of there,” she replied.
Alongside city locals, another frequent target of the drone attacks are the rescue services: healthcare professionals coming to help the injured, rescue staff, and utility workers dealing with the consequences of drone attacks, and police forces evacuating people from dangerous areas. “The occupiers call it safari – they’re killing civilians and hurting them, recording these attacks and proudly showing their horrific war crimes,” I’m told by Oleksandr Prokudin, head of Kherson’s military administration. Locals agree that the aim is to scare people through frequent attacks into leaving Kherson, effectively emptying the city of life. This would help the Russians in their objective of reconquering it.
This effort is succeeding only partially. Tens of thousands of people still live here. Most of them are older people, who either don’t want to say goodbye to their previous lives or have nowhere else to go. Apart from them, however, there are also families with children. Around 5,500 minors live in Kherson, studying online since the schools are closed. All of them have had to adapt to the new conditions in an effort to survive.
“I used to walk to get to work, but that’s no longer possible. Just before the bus arrives, I hurry up to the bus stop, get on the bus, get off it, and hurry to work. Same thing after work. Other than the store, I don’t go anywhere else. No walks around the city like I used to take, no sitting outside and drinking coffee. Just a quick walk along the same short route, eyes permanently raised to the sky because of the drones, and ears pricked up so that I can hear their hum,” said Dr. Olena Oleinyk in her office in the regional hospital.
She said that leaving Kherson is out of the question for her. She’s not considering it, not even after what happened last fall, when a drone exploded a meter from her, leaving her with injuries. “I noticed it at the last moment, and that’s what saved me. It launched a bomb and I managed to press myself against a wall before it hit me. My leg was injured, but fortunately, the bones weren’t hit. Now, everything is already fine. The doctor who treated me was killed by a drone a month later,” added Oleinyk, whose daughter and grandkids have moved to Kyiv.
“That’s better for them,” the doctor acknowledged. “But I will stay here. This war has divided things into black and white, and I have decided to stand on the white side. I’m the only doctor working with ultrasound who’s remained in Kherson. There are a lot of sick and injured people here, and they need me.”
Life on the Frontline
In mid-November 2022, shortly after the liberation, Kherson was visited by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Masses of joyous locals welcomed him in the main square, celebrating the end of the occupation. It was a moment of euphoria. At that time, a colleague of mine and I happened to be not that far away, but back then, it was not yet possible to obtain a journalist permit to enter the recently liberated Kherson, so we only managed to visit the nearby villages of Posad-Pokrovske and Blahodatne.
As I walk across the same square where Zelenskiy once stood, I think back to the photos of the crowds in the streets. Today, I see a completely different city. Only the ever-present birds and stray dogs represent life here – there are no people to be seen anywhere. The common sounds of the city have also disappeared. I can only hear the rustle of the trees, the wind from the Dnieper frolicking in the treetops, and the thunderous bangs of Russian and Ukrainian artillery.
I see the same picture as I walk Kherson’s streets to get down to the water. I walk by a former coffeeshop, an ad agency, and an electronics store. Their storefronts are damaged from detonations and pressure waves from the shelling. Some stores have been destroyed completely – others partially. Those have their blinds rolled down, just like the store with women’s fashion carrying the biblical name Esther. Glass crunches underneath my footsteps anywhere I go. “Some people still live even down here, closer to the river,” said my guide, Sukhanov, when I asked him whether the locals have moved away from the river to the more distant parts of the city due to the shelling. “Even down at the riverfront, there are still some people here and there.”
I can only glance at the Dnieper on the horizon, but even from a distance, its dark-blue mass feels majestic. I’m imagining the beauty of what it must have been like at the riverfront before the war. Around Kherson, the river has islands with meanders covered in thick, tall reeds. Some locals compare it to nature’s Venice. A popular leisure activity was to rent a boat on the weekend and go on a picnic on one of the islands. Or, if you wanted an even bigger adventure, you could get on a ship and head out all the way to the sea.
Now, only memories remain. The Russians have repeatedly tried to get to the islands and create a more advantageous starting point for a new attack on the city. For now, Ukraine’s army has managed to push back these forays, but the future is wide open and uncertain. The Russians could even manage to get their breakthrough. If the occupiers re-conquered Kherson, that would make it easier for them to move onto the next major city, Mykolaiv, an hour’s drive from Kherson, and then onto Odessa, at the Black Sea.
Love and Its Shades
The drones that threaten the people of Kherson are not big and cannot fly as far as the well-known Shahed drones that circle all over Ukraine, causing major damage even in cities that are hundreds of kilometers from the frontline, such as Kyiv. In Kherson, the Russians are using what are known as FPV drones, which are tiny and cheap to produce. Typically, they send smaller swarms of them toward the city. They last several dozen minutes in the air before their batteries run out. If they don’t find a target, their remote operators sit them on the rooftop of a house, where they wait for hours until life appears. Then they strike again.
Ukrainian soldiers in groups of four go out day and night to the river and try to shoot the drones down. “Resisting Russian drone terror is a never-ending technological battle,” said Prokudin, head of the military administration. “Together with our armed forces, we are working on improving the region’s defense system. Only last week, the enemy attempted 2,100 drone attacks in the region. Thanks to the professionalism and skills of our defense forces, 82 percent of the flying drones were hit, amounting to over 1,700 enemy unmanned aerial vehicles.” He explained that Kherson’s civilian administration is collaborating closely with the army to improve the defenses.
“Over the last two years, we have obtained and provided to the defense forces over 510 different anti-drone systems. Naturally, this process is continuing,” he adds.
In Kherson, drones are everywhere. Still, as you travel away from the river, you can come across something resembling the hum of a city. One such place is the fruit and vegetable market, where stall vendor Pasha sells his produce. “Today, people are buying everything – radishes, kohlrabis, peppers, tomatoes. It’s a good day,” he said, smiling ear to ear. “Talking to people energizes him. But when he’s at home, he doesn’t smile – there he only frowns,” said the vendor’s wife, entering the conversation. To explain why, Pasha takes out a mobile phone and shows me how his house was demolished in 2023 by a Russian rocket. “It was 30 minutes to midnight. The house shook. We ran out of the bedroom into the hallway. That’s when the second rocket hit us. It went straight into the bedroom,” he added. He and his wife survived. They have repaired their house and still live there. But he said the dark visions from that horrible night keep coming back.
Not far from the market is the Yesents coffee house, run by Yulia Kyselova. A petite, cheerful woman, she not only enjoys serving locals but also helps out the soldiers. She collects food for them from donors, as well as bulletproof vests, candles, and clothes, which she then drives to give to them. “Yesterday we sent them 90 sweet loaves to the frontline. We then got a photo from them, showing how much they had enjoyed them,” said Yulia, offering me paska, a traditional Ukrainian Easter bread. Tulips are blooming in front of the coffee house, as well as in its vicinity. As long as it is possible at all, people here still take care of their surroundings.
Yulia’s car, too, has been the target of a drone strike. The reason why she hasn’t left Kherson yet is love and its many shades. “My husband works in the army here. We met when I was helping out the soldiers as a volunteer. I also like my coffee house a lot. I want to bring joy to people. Our coffee and sweets bring them joy amid all this horror that we all need to survive,” she said. As I found out later, the building with the coffee house was hit by a Russian drone two hours after our meeting. It destroyed an apartment on the upper floor, leaving both Yulia and her business mostly untouched. For now.
The Drone Symphony of War
In Kherson, I stay at Denys Sukhanov’s place. His small house is located in one of the suburbs, with the Ukrainian army holding artillery positions only a few hundred meters away. And they’re keeping busy. After some time, I stopped counting the rounds. As I leave the street and enter Denys’ garden through a gate in a tall wall, I feel like I have arrived in paradise. Within a relatively small area, there are peach trees, apricot trees, cherry trees, and walnut trees, with
vines climbing around a pergola. Denys starts up a grill, places the meat that we previously bought on it, and offers me homemade red wine. We’re talking.
He’s telling me about his family, his ex-wife, and two children. They left for the UK during the war. We talk about his garden and about how active he is in the life of the local community, including his efforts to put together a group of active people who could one day write a plan for Kherson’s post-war development.
Denys is complaining about the stupidity of the authorities and some of his fellow citizens, criticizing, for example, the fact that while the city has built protective concrete anti-rocket barriers close to bus stops, it has not protected the bus stops themselves in this way. Thus, people waiting for the bus are needlessly risking their lives. He’s also bothered by how many locals have lost the motivation to strive for things on their own, like Yulia does, relying instead on humanitarian aid from the NGOs. And they drink. As our conversation is getting really interesting, Denys suddenly notices something and tells me to look at the sky. Right above us, something resembling an average-sized bird is circling around. It is white, easily blending into the sky. If it weren’t for Denys’s warning, I wouldn’t have noticed it at all.
“Spy drone,” said Denys, explaining that before the Russians send their killer drones, they first do terrain reconnaissance with the spy drones, which propose targets for them to hit. We hide under a small roof by the house. When the first drone flies off and no other drone appears, we continue preparing the food. Denys’s father, who lives nearby, brings us beetroot salad to go with the meat, and the talk turns back to the drones. “Spy drones don’t change direction that much – they stay at a certain height and observe things. Kamikaze drones, on the other hand, jump from one position to the next. Also, each drone makes a different noise,” said Denys.
The only one not excited by the drones is Denys’s five-year-old female St. Bernard called Rudi. She first wanted to bite me, but later on, we became friends. I will be sleeping in the living room, underneath a Ukrainian flag signed by the legendary general Valery Zaluzhny, who in 2022 defended Ukraine from total Russian occupation, as well as underneath a map of Ukraine, including occupied Crimea. If the Russians had found the map during the occupation, they could have killed Denys. I’m thinking about whether, in addition to the drones, big Russian rockets also fly into the surroundings of this garden from paradise. But I decided not to ask the question, so that I can sleep well.
Ten Minutes Before 9 p.m.
The following day, I have more meetings scheduled, but it takes several hours before we can head out. Each time Denys takes his car out of the garage and looks at the Telegram channels, he finds out that drones are flying nearby. He then quickly puts the car into a hiding spot. Vladimir Putin announced a one-day ceasefire on Easter Sunday, but it clearly doesn’t apply to Kherson. Russians continue the artillery shelling and send out more drones, a total of 130 of them. At several places, I see thick smoke rising after explosions.
Before noon, the sky is clear for a while, and we can set off. This time we take a different route from the one we took to get here. A few streets down, we pass by three destroyed houses. “It
happened a month before you arrived, 10 minutes before 9 p.m.,” explained Denys. The question I was thinking about asking last night is, therefore, answered. Denys added that the houses were struck by a KAB, a Russian optically guided bomb, designed for the destruction of smaller-sized stationary targets on land, such as bunkers made of reinforced concrete, landing strips, railway and highway bridges, and military-industrial facilities. In Kherson, Russians use it to destroy civilians and their houses.
After I have more meetings with locals, Denys takes me underground, to a room under a high-rise building where he meets up with 10 other Kherson locals in relative safety to play the popular video game Mafia and discuss what to do with Kherson after the war. When we later say goodbye and I take a bus to Odessa, I feel like I have found a new friend.
Our minivan sets off on time. The road to Odessa is virtually empty – a car flashes by every now and then. Twenty minutes after the start of the journey, we’re speeding through the flat country around Posad-Pokrovske. In Kherson, a local man told me before my departure that Russian drones can now reach even here, and that they attacked a vehicle some three weeks ago. I’m trying to look for any traces of the attack by the road, but given our driver’s breakneck speed, I stand no chance.
I lean into the seat and think about what I have just experienced. Over my 13 trips to Ukraine since the beginning of the great war, I have never felt as nervous and threatened as here in Kherson, but I still know I want to come back. If for no other reason, then just so that I can once again drink red wine with Denys in his garden and talk to him about what’s new.
Ondrej Kundra is deputy editor-in-chief of Respekt, the leading Czech newsweekly, where this article originally appeared. Republished by permission. Translated by Matus Nemeth.