World looks away as Russia bombs Kherson daily

Destruction of Kherson

Inna, a young film director, and an expectant mother, came to a Kherson humanitarian aid hub looking for help. With no makeup, and wearing a T-shirt with a cartoon scaly dragon, she looked like a student heading for a bookstore. Instead, Inna found piles of rubble all around the street. A Soviet-made 1962 GRAD rocket stuck from the hole in the asphalt, next to a lost toy dinosaur. The hub got hit by a Russian MLRS rocket the previous night. Another rocket destroyed the building next to Inna’s home. Inna had previously left Kherson but came back after several weeks. The family could not afford to rent an apartment in Odesa.

“Living in a refugee communal living space in Mykolaiv isn’t good for a newborn,” said Inna. “Yet, living here, at home, is scary. We don’t know what to do. My husband’s home in Oleksandrivka, a village near Kherson, was destroyed by Russians. We lost our homes and jobs.”

Inna’s family story is typical for Kherson. Serhiy and Yana, volunteers at the recently destroyed humanitarian hub, spent most of their time volunteering and intended to continue. Warm clothes and blankets got damaged during the night attack but, luckily, the fund’s food warehouse, located blocks away, survived the night’s attack.

“I come here and I feel better. My workplace burned,” said Yana. “I used to work at a café downtown. Now I live in a basement.”

“My workplace of work drowned,” added Serhiy, a former seaport technician.

Like Inna’s family, the majority of the remaining residents of Kherson rely on volunteers and charities for food deliveries. Humanitarian aid hubs are at risk: as a part of their war on civilians, Russians deliberately target places for aid distribution and attack the adjacent areas with parked transportation.

At another humanitarian aid hub also located at a regular residential building, a group of twenty citizens, mostly in their 50s and 60s, form a human chain to unload diapers, blankets, and canned food as fast as possible. Speed is critical for staying alive: Russian intelligence drones circle in the sky, searching for gatherings of people.

Scorched-earth policy

“The Russians continue to inflict damage specifically on civilian infrastructure,” said Dmytro Pletenchuk, the speaker of the Naval Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “Whenever they hit civilians in Aleppo, they always said that this was the headquarters of ISIS. And they do the same in Ukraine. Wherever the rocket falls, they call it ‘the location of the headquarters.’ This is their information policy.”

Russia’s “scorched-earth tactics” have been a hallmark of its military strategy, from historical conflicts to the current war in Ukraine. This policy aims to destroy virtually all valuable resources to an enemy, including vital resources like water, food, human lives, animals, vegetation, tools, and infrastructure.

Volodymyr, another volunteer, lost several minivans to the fire after such an attack. Yet, Volodymyr continues to deliver food and hygiene goods in his old Volvo, also damaged after a missile hit his house, to the districts located close to the Dnipro River. These areas are under constant fire and are monitored by the Russian military drones from the other bank. Most volunteers do not risk driving to the river as Russians aim at civilian cars.

Residents of the houses on the river are not just under round-the-clock fire: vulnerable population groups are stranded without food and first necessities, often without power after attacks.

As Volodymyr delivers canned food and diapers to a family of four, with one child bed-ridden, he finds them hiding in a storage room for hours as the air raid continues. Moving is out of the question: the family has no means to move.

Volodymyr visits another family with a young child with special needs. The mother spent nine months of the occupation without ever leaving the house and stepping outside for fear of her son being kidnapped by the Russians. Russians practiced taking children to the Russian-controlled territories “for recreation and health improvement.”

Returning the children was extremely challenging. Dmytro, a water taxi driver now in a forced retirement as the Dnipro River became a front line, brought back from the Russian-controlled territories about 100 children, transporting them across the river while risking being shot by a Russian sniper.

Rescue efforts by boats continue as the Russian air raids intensify. The regional and the city administration, helped by the police and volunteer organizations, are hard at work evacuating Kherson and Kherson Oblast residents, especially families with children and older people. However, the lack of funds and resources led to many evacuees returning to their residences from safer places.

Volunteers use motorboats to evacuate elderly people with limited mobility to a secret location in a village by the side of one of many rivulets in Kherson Oblast.

Russians do not shy away from launching attacks on evacuees. Black smoke from the aerial bomb and drones are a usual sight. The village population, mostly elderly people with farm animals, only agree to leave their homes after nothing was left of them. Many bring their pets and farm animals, such as chickens and goats, with them.

Svitlana, a pensioner, fleeing with her cat, said that it was her second attempt to leave. On the second attempt, her neighbor’s house was destroyed, and neighbors were killed the day before the evacuation. Svitlana and her cat were heading to Kherson. She sounded optimistic.

“Compared to my village, it is a safe place,” she said.

#Kherson: Russians use 1962 Soviet-made Grads (MLRS) and cluster munitions to destroy residential areas and kill civilians.

Why? You tell me. pic.twitter.com/9eN0o6zhnX— Zarina Zabrisky

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