The bitch, an old mastiff, is called larchi in honor of its former owner. Larchi, who does not stop barking at visitors, is still in the house of his former master, Oleksander Larchenko, former mayor of Snigurivka. But the Larchenko family no longer lives in the residence; there is only a watchman and soldiers who appear from time to time. They renamed the mascot. The councilor fled in November when an advance party of Ukrainian special forces seized control of the municipality. He was the visible head of an administration that collaborated with the Russian invader.
Snigurivka is a municipality in southern Ukraine, on the banks of the Ingulets River. It is a border region between three provinces, Mykolaiv, Dnipropetrovsk and Kherson. Crossing this tributary of the Dnieper was for months a strategic objective of the Ukrainian Armed Forces to expel Russian troops from the western side of the river. In November the Russian withdrawal from that bank of the Dnieper was precipitated, and a new phase began, that of cleaning the region of Russian collaborators and infiltrators. Because Snigurivka, like the city of Kherson itself, were taken by the Russians with virtually no resistance, with the support of part of the political class and even the local military establishments.
An elderly woman from Snigurivka caught the attention of the Ukrainian authorities because, despite theoretically living alone, every day she collected humanitarian aid to feed a large family. When the intelligence services began to follow her, they discovered that she also bought men’s clothing. The special forces battalion commanded by Vladíslav (false name) entered the basement of the woman’s house in the second week of May and discovered several Russian soldiers hiding there. That day, 30 Russians were detained at various locations. Vladíslav does not want to specify if they were all soldiers who were left behind in the retreat or if some were spetznatzRussian special forces infiltrated from the other side of the front to gather information or carry out sabotage.
Vladíslav attends EL PAÍS at the foot of the road, in front of the Ingulets restaurant. Few people remain in the municipality and the cars that cross in front of the battalion leader honk their horns as a sign of respect. He is the authority on Snigurivka. The restaurant was bombed, but on the front door, locked tight, there is a graffiti of a local dealer offering amphetamines, cocaine and marijuana. During the eight months of occupation, Ingulets was used by the invading army as a torture center. “The neighbors heard the screams coming from the restaurant,” explains Luba Zhigalko. This primary school teacher left town on April 1 of last year to go live with her son in Zaragoza. She returned to her in March of this year, when she was told that her husband had died of natural causes. “The city is empty, it’s very sad,” adds Zhigalko.
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Employees continue to be a problem, confirms Vladíslav. He remembers that on one occasion they were hiding on the outskirts of a village that they had infiltrated on a secret mission, in the Russian rear. A local came up to greet them, confirmed that they were Ukrainians. They could see how he was throwing away his mobile phone a few meters from where they were. They immediately understood that the device was signaling the location and they got out of there. Within minutes, the position was shelled. Vladíslav even assures that Snigurivka military commanders gave armored vehicles to the invading troops.
“Everyone in Snigurivka knows where we are based,” says one of his men. “Someone could pass the coordinates to the Russians, yes, but they don’t because we have the town controlled and we would catch it in a matter of hours.”
Collaboration with the invader is a problem that senior military and political officials in eastern Ukraine, the half of the country historically closest to Russian culture, have admitted to this newspaper. In July 2022, Pavlo Kirilenko, governor of the Donetsk province, confirmed in a meeting with journalists that the informants Russia has are a major problem. Kirilenko did the math: if 20% of the population still remained in the province, half of these were pro-Russians.
Only a tip-off could be behind the attack on May 5 with an Iskander missile against a nondescript building in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the city of Zaporizhia, according to an Army officer consulted by this newspaper. The EL PAÍS envoys witnessed the attack and went to the place: soldiers were residing there.
Volodimir Kredovskii tells that many people left Snigurivka following the Russian troops. He can’t say exactly how much, but he’s proud to have been one of those who took the gamble by relaying information to the Ukrainian army about enemy positions inside the town. He owned a garage that was destroyed in the fighting and the council has compensated him by hiring him to guard the remains of a pedestrian bridge destroyed in the Russian retreat. The iron deformed by the explosion, in times of economic crisis, are a treasure for scrap dealers.
Kredovskii is 63 years old and kills time fishing in the Ingulets. He fills a bucket with the little carp he catches while he smokes one cigarette after another. For him, he reflects aloud, Ukraine’s great military mistake was not having blown up the Antonovski Bridge, the main road that crosses the Dnieper as it passes through Kherson. The invader’s takeover of the province in a matter of days was partly because the Ukrainian defenses were weaker in the south than in the north and east, but also because they had the support of local administrations and the attitude passive of commanders in the region.
EL PAÍS agreed to the city of Kherson in November, a few days after the liberation. It was a city closed to the exit of civilians, because the security services tracked the inhabitants who had worked for the enemy. The arrests have continued. A three-day curfew was imposed in the city in early May. Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the province’s military administration, announced that the move was necessary to identify collaborators who were providing information to Russia about the movement of Ukrainian troops.
“Tell me, who lies more, the Ukrainians or the Russians?” Elena asks reporters during a walk along Ushakovka avenue, Kherson’s main artery. The woman is convinced that there are shells that fall in her city that are not Russian, that they are fired by Ukrainian artillery, perhaps by mistake. Or not, she doubts. Elena, 47, regrets that the police stop her on the street to check her mobile phone, in case she has any connection to the Russians. Oleksandr Lutsenko is 29 years old and a greengrocer at a local market in Kherson. He completes Elena’s version: during the Russian occupation, the controls were many more, constant. Most of the residents chose not to go out into the street, explained the testimonies collected by this newspaper in November. There were multiple raids to arrest and make disappear hundreds of men suspected of being loyal to Ukraine.
Elena explains that people are still locked up at home. The explosions are daily and when a missile falls near her building, she hides the cat in the washing machine, to save its life, she says. Elena suspects that the Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses are not working in Kherson.
VIDEO | A Kherson gas station attendant narrates the attack on the train station.
As evening falls, Ushakovka avenue becomes even more empty of passers-by. The few vehicles that circulate are mostly military and move quickly. The front is right there, in a straight line: the avenue ends at the river promenade that runs along the Dnieper. 500 meters away, on the other side of the river, is the Russian army. Signs warning of danger are not necessary: there is not a soul on the promenade, just the remains of a bus destroyed by fire. From that point on, every step into the water is a step toward death.
About this project
A multimedia team of four journalists from EL PAÍS has traveled eastern Ukraine, 1,200 kilometers between Kharkiv and Kherson, in the weeks prior to the counteroffensive that will determine how far the country can go in liberating the territory conquered by Russia.
Dozens of testimonies from civilians and soldiers collected along the front line portray the impact that a long-term war has on the daily life of the population: drinking beers in a bar while receiving a notice on Telegram that a missile will drop in a matter of minutes; what happens when a line of towns becomes a battle front; what it is like to celebrate the golden anniversary in the middle of a devastated city; the daily life of the soldiers, which also consists of many moments of waiting; the fear of living in front of the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, occupied by Russia, in the middle of a conflict; being a teenager and living 12 kilometers from the dangerous Bakhmut front confined at home and receiving online classes; kyiv’s search for Russian collaborators.
A series of seven reports about how life goes on, despite everything, in the midst of the violence and destruction of war, at a decisive moment for Ukraine: a counteroffensive in which its fate is at stake.
credits
Coordination and format: Guiomar del Ser and Brenda Valverde
Art direction and design: Fernando Hernandez
Layout and programming: Alexander Gallardo
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