A sense of relief outweighs joy on Sunday in Kherson, southern Ukraine, where residents are trying to adjust to a new life after months of Russian occupation.
Many residents of the city complain that the Russian forces, which finished evacuating the city on Friday after eight months of presence, have sown desolation there.
You could see destroyed military vehicles, mutilated buildings, and smell the smell of burning wood in this strategic Black Sea port, where war was still raging a few days ago.
According to an AFP correspondent who was able to enter the city, the time was not for scenes of jubilation on Sunday, the population rather expressing great relief to see the occupier gone.
As queues stretch outside food and emergency aid distribution posts, many adults and children move through the streets wrapped in blue and yellow Ukrainian flags.
Some are gathered in the main square of the city, in order to communicate with their relatives via the Starlink satellite Internet service, owned by Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla and Twitter.
“I need to reconnect with my family,” says Klavdia Mych, a 69-year-old retired teacher. “We haven’t had water for a week,” she adds. And they say that everything is mined: it’s scary.
The Russians “took everything with them. They robbed the stores,” said 30-year-old shop assistant Viktoria Dybovska.
“They cut [l’électricité] three or four days ago, just when they were starting to leave. They simply vanished overnight,” adds Antonina Vyssotchenko, 29. “God will punish them all for everything they have done,” says Svitlana Vilna, 47.
On Facebook, Oleksandr Todorchuk, founder of UAnimals, an animal rights movement, claims that the occupants left, taking with them “most of the animals from the zoo to Crimea. [territoire ukrainien annexé par Moscou en 2014], from llamas to wolves to squirrels. »
After the successive military setbacks of the Russian army since the summer, the Russian withdrawal from Kherson is an even greater humiliation for the Kremlin since the region of this great city is one of the four annexed by Russia in violation of international law following its invasion of Ukraine on 24 February.
” Overjoyed “
This is the third major Russian withdrawal since the beginning of the war, Russia having given up in the spring to take kyiv in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance, before being driven out of almost the entire Kharkiv region. (northeast) in September.
“We are all overjoyed,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Saturday evening, who also reported significant destruction in the region.
“Before fleeing Kherson, the occupants destroyed all the essential infrastructure – communication, water supply, heating, electricity”, he added, specifying that 2000 explosive devices had been neutralized.
According to him, the Ukrainian armed forces regained control of nearly 60 localities in the Kherson region, which had been the first major city to fall after the Russian invasion.
On Saturday, in Pravdyné, one of these liberated villages, returning residents hugged their neighbors, some unable to hold back their tears.
“We understood that the Russians had left because our soldiers were driving by. I had tears of happiness, that Ukraine was finally liberated,” Svitlana Galak, a 43-year-old woman who lost her 15-year-old daughter in a bombardment on the village, told AFP.
Her husband, Viktor (44), no longer wants to hear about the Russians: “We don’t want them to come back and shoot everyone. Let us live as before”.
Evacuation order
After eight months of occupation by Russian forces, national television programs are once again visible in Kherson.
Some 200 police have been deployed to Kherson to erect roadblocks and document “the crimes of the Russian occupiers”, National Police Chief Igor Klymenko announced on Saturday.
He alerted residents of the town to the presence of explosive devices left behind by Russian forces, urging them to “move with caution”.
After the evacuation of Kherson, on the western bank of the Dnieper, an evacuation order to Russia’s Krasnodar region near Crimea was issued by pro-Russian local authorities on Saturday evening to their district employees. from Kakhovka, on the eastern bank of the river.
On Sunday, the Russian army continued to build defenses on the left bank of the Dnieper where it entrenched itself, according to the Ukrainian army.
During the night, Russian forces fired S-300 missiles at the right bank without causing damage, according to the same source.