Talking to Ukrainians under the rain of Russian bombs

Far away from the futile Trump-Putin noise (will he? won’t he? why didn't he?), Ukrainians are being targeted and killed every day. I talked to friends and acquaintances in Kherson, a frontline city.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

This following is based on messages from a handful of my friends and acquaintances in Kherson. The following is what they told me after their city on Friday once again had been brutally and cynically targeted by Russia.

When I opened my social media on Friday morning, many people from Kherson were sharing this horrific video. It gives you an idea of what it is like to live in a frontline city in Ukraine, in October 2025, three years and 8 months after the Russian invasion started.

The city of Kherson, in the south-west corner of Ukraine, and its 300,000 inhabitants was occupied by Russia in the first week of the invasion, in March 2022.

Nine months later, in November 2022, the strategically important city was liberated by Ukrainian forces. But most of the region of Kherson - located on the south/east bank of the river Dnipro - is, as you can see on the map, still occupied by Russian forces. And from there, across the river Dnipro, the Russians pummel Kherson. Every day and every night.

Map: BBC

For the past three years, the Russian army has basically used Kherson as a training and testing ground for its warfare. Hundreds have been killed and injured by Russian drones, missiles and shelling from the east/southern banks of the Dnipro river.

Today, four out of five inhabitants of Kherson have fled.

Here is the same situation, the bombing of Kherson on Friday morning, but filmed by Russian cameras from ‘their’ side of the river that divides the city, published on Russian social media to boast of their impact. Chilling.

The following are the messages I received from friends and acquaintances in Kherson, unedited, their own words. I have only added explanatory information.

(And just to be clear, they write to me in Russian as a courtesy, because my Russian is – so far! – much better than my Ukrainian).

“To say that we are doing well would be an exaggeration,” my friend Elena writes to me Friday morning, from inside Kherson, she lives in the very center of the city, “but we are alive. And that is already something.”

For security reasons, I am not using her real name. There have been many examples of Russian spies and collaborators inside Kherson, both during and after the city was occupied by Russia.

Living in constant terror

Another long-term friend, Natalia (not her real name) tells me: “I was in Kherson yesterday to see my father, it would have been better if I hadn’t gone. As I was leaving, the nightmare started.”

“They terrorize us more and more, day by day."

“Four shaheds [drones] landed close to us, in the village on the outskirts of Kherson where my father is staying, they landed directly on a nine-storey block of flats.”

“The Russian can see us just from the other side of the river, and a minute later they hit you - and they are specifically targeting residential areas, kindergartens, hospitals.”

But Friday was a particularly vicious attack, Elena tells me.

“The whistle of a bomb, the buzz of a drone. We have gotten used to those sounds. But today they hit us hard. Even the birds were darting low in fear. I have never seen anything like it.”

Two people were killed and dozens injured in the attacks on Friday.

A long-time acquaintance of mine, Oleksandr (not his name), works in the emergency services in Kherson. I actually manage to reach him on the phone.

“For three years I have kept myself like a zombie, because I have a job to do,” he tells me.

“If I think about what I do when I come to pick up pieces of people from the pavement or in their own kitchens, my mind would collapse. So I turn off my brain and just let my hands do the work.”

A long time ago, in a previous life, I worked with Oleksandr’s wife at a university in Ukraine. They were both teachers. Oleksandr was teaching Ukrainian literature, history and art. He was a lively and sweet teacher, very funny an quirky, his students adored him. More than three years ago, as soon as Kherson was invaded by the Russians, he sent his wife and daughter out of the country, and he has not seen them since.

He himself was imprisoned and tortured by the Russians for months. He thinks it was because he was a teacher of Ukrainian language and culture. Then, one day, with no explanation, he was suddenly let go.

“I hope that I will meet my wife and daughter again one day, but I have changed to a different person, so I don’t know whether it is a good idea,” he tells me. He speaks slowly, as if he is writing or spelling out each word.

“To be honest, I am no longer a normal person, but somebody has to do these jobs, so the country will survive.”

“They say that there now exist rehabilitation centres for people like me, where they can tear me apart mentally and put me together again. I hope so. A friend of mine went for some months, then he came back and said that he had been helped. Then he killed himself after another bomb attack.”

I will not lie. As Oleksandr talks, as I hear the hopelessness in his tone, a good man who used to be so lively, so engaging, I am sitting with tears in my eyes, thinking about the nightmare that Ukrainians will be living through even long, long after this fcuking war is over.

Full of shame and confusion, I don’t know what to say to him, don’t know how to end such a conversation. There is, of course, nothing that I can say that will do anything for him.

It is as if he feels my bewilderment.

“Sorry, I got to run,” Oleksandr says suddenly, and hangs up.

Elena describes how death around you every day makes you numb. “The people of Kherson,” she says, “have become different people.”

“You can die at any moment. You are forced to live with that thought. Go to bed and wake up with that thought. This morning, we woke up to these massive explosions. But you know that you cannot run and hide from something like that.”

“We all have the same dreaded suitcase packed – with your documents, your personal ‘treasures’ and a few necessities.”

Many of the people Elena lived among and worked with have been killed.

“My neighbors were killed during the Russian occupation of Kherson (March-November 2022).”

“It is terrible when you talked to somebody yesterday and today they (the Russians) just killed them on the street.”

“You are walking down the street, to the market or the store to buy groceries. And yet, somehow you sense that something could fly in at any moment. It happens like this: you drive past a street, and then half an hour later, a shell hits that very street and people are killed or injured.”

Some people insist on staying

Before the war, Kherson had a population of 300,000 – today around 60,000 are left here, according to the city’s mayor. So, one in five are left after almost four years of war.

“It is mainly older people that are still here,” Elena tells me, “I know many old people who insist on staying on in their homes along the river, even though it is in a ‘red zone’ where the Russian bombs easily can reach you. It happens every day.”

“Elderly people over there stay to look after their houses or pets. It’s cold over there, because they have for along time already been without gas and electricity. They don’t even receive humanitarian aid, because it is too dangerous to deliver it to them, you risk getting killed.”

“But people don’t want to leave their homes and be forced to live among strangers. They only leave if their house is actually destroyed and they have no other option than to up sticks.”

Natalia tells me that her father, in his eighties, refuses to leave, even if his neighborhood is now getting hit more and more often.

Others tell the same story. Some have even left only to return after months somewhere else in Ukraine, where they felt ignored, alone, forgotten.

“It is expensive and hard to uproot yourself,” Elena explains, so many are simply forced to stay.

I have known Serhii (not his name) for 25 years. He has a PhD from an American university and worked for years in Silicon Valley, but returned home in 2014 after the revolution to help rebuild his country.

“We made quite a bit of progress on modernizing the state apparatus, fighting corruption with digitalization”, he explains. But despite no longer being a young man, he volunteered for the army on the very first day of the Russian invasion, 24 February 2022.

“We fought the Russian tanks with homemade Molotov cocktails in the street just below my flat.”

In late February 2022, only days before Kherson was occupied, he returned to look after his parents. Soon after, his father was killed when a bomb hit the market where he was buying dog and cat food.

Serhii is now working for the army in an administrative role in Kherson and is taking care of his 88-year-old mother who was born in the house she still lives in.

“I can understand that it seems bizarre from where you are, Michael,” he writes, and I can practically see him shrugging his shoulders between the lines.

“I am not poor, so I could even buy our way out of here – but nope, my mother refuses. She just insists that ‘I was born here in this house, I have raised my kids here, I have buried my husband here, no fcuking Putin will make me leave alive’ and all that”, Serhii explains.

“I guess it is her way of holding on to just a little bit of sanity, as she sees it.”

Terror, resilience and gallows humor

“By now, the city is basically blocked off by Russian drones,” Elena tells me.

“To try to leave and enter Kherson – like we could previously – is by now deadly dangerous. It’s like [Russian] Roulette.

“Somehow,” says Elena, “all that terror around you numbs you. Even though you know that it is terrible, you try not to stop and think.”

“The reaction of people on the streets is interesting. They don’t even bat an eyelid when explosions happen nearby. They just go about their business, walking their dogs.”

Natalia says that there is a very dangerous side to this impressive resilience:

“When I was in Kherson these last few days, I noticed that there are in fact more people on the streets than previously, although the attacks are increasing and increasingly deadly. I cannot explain it, cannot understand it.”

“The people who stay there, many of them have ‘lost it’, they have lost all sense of danger, it is terrible.”

“It’s funny,” says Elena, “you start washing your hair, and you wonder whether you will have time to rinse out the shampoo.”