(Kherson) In freshly liberated Kherson in southern Ukraine, the echoes of artillery exchanges echo through the empty cathedral where an Orthodox priest marries a modestly dressed couple.
Andriï Krivov, 49, a welder by profession, finally marries Natalia, the nurse with whom he has lived for many years and has had three children.
They bow before the pope, with the detonations of Ukrainian strikes in the background. Russian forces retaliate from the left (eastern) bank of the nearby Dnieper where they retreated in the days before 11 November.
“We could die tomorrow,” frightens Andriï Krivov, almost certain that the Russians will soon strike the city itself. “Kherson is now part of the front. And when they start bombing, we want to appear before God being married.”
Missiles kick up dust over devastated roads and minefields surrounding Kherson, the only regional capital captured by the Russians at the start of their invasion.
The Russian withdrawal from Kherson, which Moscow hoped to make its base in occupied southern Ukraine, has reshuffled the cards in this nearly nine-month war.
The importance of this city for the Kremlin, due to its key location to connect Crimea annexed by Russia since 2014 and the Ukrainian port of Odessa to the west, spared it destruction.
Its resumption by the Ukrainian forces in the third month of a large counter-offensive hinders Moscow’s plans to ensure control of the Ukrainian coast on the Black Sea.
Kherson today finds itself under fire due to a Ukrainian push eastwards in the eponymous region, and perhaps even towards Crimea. The danger is likely to persist.
“Russia has the most to gain from a break and that’s why Ukraine has an incentive to continue its push,” said Rob Lee of the US Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Freedom
In Kherson, Abdriï Krivov fears reprisals from the Russian forces.
“There’s a very good chance they’ll start bombing us now,” he says, hand in hand with Natalia.
Lydia Belova, she says she is ready to endure new suffering: “Freedom is always the most important”.
At 81, this former poultry farmer is waiting for her turn to fill plastic jugs with a hose connected to a local source.
Russian forces cut off electricity to Kherson and destroyed most of its infrastructure as they retreated.
“Water is not a big problem. We can queue. But Ukraine – we have to defend it,” says Lydia Belova, who spent eight and a half months watching Russian soldiers loot shops and hunt down those who refused their authority.
His determination illustrates the main difference between the southern front in Ukraine and the battles fought in the East.
Neither Kherson nor the neighboring region of Zaporizhia was under Russian control before the war while after the pro-Russian uprising of 2014 Moscow imposed indirect control over part of the eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, two of the four recently annexed regions end of September by Moscow.
“Army of Thieves”
The largely Ukrainian-speaking south faces Russian forces for the first time.
The director of the Kherson hospital, Dr. Irina Starodumova, watched the divisions among her staff grow during the invasion. Half left before the Russian annexation of the Kherson region.
Among those who remained, some seemed ready to accept Russian authority, she explains, exhausted, during one of her rare breaks.
“I never suspected in my 42 years here that I was working with people whose ideas were different from those we all shared,” she observes. “The (pro-Russians) came, did their job and kept their ideas for themselves”.
“We tried to be tolerant,” she insists.
At Saint Catherine’s Cathedral, which housed the remains of Prince Grigori Potemkin, Protodeacon Andriï is less forgiving.
The name of Potemkin, minister of Catherine II, Russian empress of the 18th century, is associated with the artificial pasteboard villages that he would have implanted all along a tour of the tsarina in her new provinces on the banks of the Dnieper. Since then, the term “Potemkin village” has been used to refer to propaganda operations aimed at deceiving the leaders of a country and its public opinion.
But Kherson honors Potemkin as its founder. The protodeacon was proud to keep his remains in the crypt. They are no longer there.
“The Russians came with their guns and took it away about two weeks ago,” the cleric explains. “We had two world wars, the Nazis and the Communists without God, and no one had touched him”.
The Russians also left with the monumental statue of Potemkin and other works from Kherson. “I guess they wanted to take their heritage home,” the protodeacon quips. “It just shows that they are nothing but an army of thieves.”