Handed down off the back of a truck emblazoned with a blue Magen David, brown cardboard boxes of provisions were being snapped up by young and old who had gathered in Kherson’s Freedom Square, desperate for support.

The handouts, driven from Ukraine’s capital Kyiv seven hours away, were from Frida, an Israeli-based relief and medical organisation. Each box contained oil, milk, flour, canned foods and biscuits — intended, said Frida’s Mark Neviatjsky, to keep a family going for one week.

Administering the operation was Dmytry Brusylovsky, a 44-year-old IT company owner.
Suddenly catapulted into action as liberated Kherson’s deputy governor for humanitarian affairs, Brusylovksy is in charge of the mammoth task of coordinating incoming aid supplies from around the country and from world donors.

He told the JC it was his moral duty, as a Jew and a Ukrainian, to drop everything in his relatively comfortable existence in another Ukrainian town hundreds of miles away and come to the aid of the city’s battered population. He had answered a plea for help from his friend, the new military governor Yirashlav Yanushevitch.

“I’m paying all my own expenses, with zero salary,” Brusylovksy said. He was also ensuring that other patiently queuing locals could fill up their jerry cans with “Freedom Water” from a large blue container nearby, set up by another relief operator.

The blue-and-yellow Ukrainian flag flew over the governor’s office at the edge of the square, and posters were being put up with patriotic pro-Ukrainian signs. The new messages covered over the propaganda that the Russians had plastered around the city during their nine months of occupation.

Still, two weeks after the reconquest, some Russian signs temporarily remained. One proclaimed: “The people of Kherson are proud to be Russian.”

Intermittent shuddering explosions made almost no impact on the locals, who were accustomed to the sounds of war. “It’s mainly outgoing,” said Brusylovksy. “At least, I hope so.”

When the governor walked with Brusylovksy across Freedom Square, the two men were accosted by locals, who were, understandably, concerned about the lack of electricity and water.

The governor patiently explained that his team were putting in superhuman efforts to restore some of these vital services. The Russians had sabotaged utilities, he told them, as their forces pulled out of the city to the other side of the Dnieper River, blowing up the main bridge to stall any further Ukrainian advance, and digging in for a continued battle.

Aware of foreign and local cameramen, the governor seized the chance to hug a little girl in a pink anorak. Two nine-year-old boys pleaded with two heavily armed fighters to hand over their military unit’s epaulettes off their shoulders — which they did.

A lone pavement barbecue, heated by charcoal, was cooking some meat on a grill, but the plethora of restaurants, some looking very modern, were shut. I walked for about two miles to a golden-domed cathedral and then to a synagogue, both empty.

Nearby, people were plugging in their smartphones for a charge, and using the internet by a link to an Elon Musk-supplied Starlink device with a satellite dish, driven by that rarest of commodities, a generator. A cafe, bolstered by another generator, was supplying much-appreciated coffee and cakes.

Olga Furman, 65, a psychologist, was sipping coffee alongside her 15-year-old daughter. “We’re liberated, yes, but what sort of life is this?” she asked. Dr Furman had continued working at the local hospital throughout the occupation.

Two of her patients had been arrested inside the hospital by Russian security men, she told the JC, and they had returned two weeks later. “Their eyes told me what must have happened,” she said. “They were just staring vacantly, and they hardly spoke any more.”
The chief doctor at the hospital, Leonid Remiga, had refused to sign a commitment to work under Russian rule. At first the Russians ignored this sign of defiance, then tried to arrest him, but he feigned heart palpitations and his staff pretended he needed immediate surgery.

In September, the Russians came again, and Dr Remiga was driven away. “In a cell of eight people with room only for four, they subjected me to intense psychological pressure. But they allowed me to treat some of the locals they had locked in adjacent cells and tortured,” he later told the JC. “I was released after eight days and dismissed from my job. Now I’m back and very, very glad to be rid of them.”

Another doctor at the hospital, paediatrician Ludmila Bogatchuk, 65, who has Jewish heritage, said she too had avoided signing any pledge to work under Russian rules, but did not confront the Russians, whose security officers used a mixture of persuasion and coercion.

Stories are emerging of successful acts of defiance — and even of Ukrainian espionage against the Russian occupiers.

Alexei Sandakov, a 44-year-old businessman with Ukrainian and Israeli nationality, says he spent most days under the occupation cycling around Kherson while filming via a carefully camouflaged GoPro camera on his handlebars.

He smuggled his videos to media in London and Berlin, giving the world pictures of defiant citizens protesting at Russia’s incoming troops. Information was also smuggled to Ukraine’s military.

Sandakov, who was born in Kherson, says he stayed partly because of patriotism and partly due to the “adrenalin-rush” that his anti-Russian spy missions provided.

Back at the governor’s office, I watched Brusylovksy stepping on a Russian flag that had been torn down by Ukrainian forces, and was now being used as a doormat. “It’s rubbish,” he remarked as he wiped his feet.

Just then he took a mobile phone call: a set of apartments near the river port had been struck by Russian rockets, killing a boy.

He offered to send the inhabitants a generator. I drove with him at breakneck speed to deliver the item to a front line that, for the ten minutes we were there, had mercifully fallen silent.

In our armour-plated vehicle, we then took an unexpected detour along recently de-mined roads, veering to avoid a destroyed bridge. Brusylovksy and his military colleagues had decided to give the JC exclusive access to Kherson airport — the location for the greatest Ukrainian achievement in the battle for the south.

The Russians had planned to use the captured airport and its surrounds as their main base for flights, and for their southern troops and equipment. Instead, they had become sitting ducks for Ukrainian artillery and rockets.

As they kept resupplying, they were repeatedly bombed, and at least 30 Russian planes and helicopters were destroyed on the ground, as were numerous tanks and armoured vehicles. Two top generals were killed there too.

Brusylovksy and I posed alongside two Russian-made but Ukrainian-owned military helicopters. They appeared in remarkably good condition, but the Russians had failed to get this valuable equipment refurbished during their nine months of occupation and had left them behind as they departed from Kherson.

Still, the military success of Kherson’s liberation may only be a precursor to worse times.
Many locals are quitting the city, encouraged to do so by the governor, who feels the burden of trying to care for them during a cold winter and more bombardment.

I met a 29-year-old sitting at his laptop on the Kherson-to-Kyiv overnight train. He was travelling north to try and link up, eventually, with his wife and two young daughters, who are in Russian-held territory across the river from Kherson.

She had been warned by a Russian soldier to leave just before the Russians themselves withdrew. “They told her they would pull out, then reduce the whole town to rubble, like in Mariupol,” he said.

“Actually, most of our town is intact. But how can my family be reunited?”

Like so many stories in Ukraine, there is no guaranteed happy ending.