KHERSON, Ukraine – The green pickup truck sped down the road, Russian forces right across the river. Inside, Halyna Luhova, the mayor of Kherson, clutched her helmet to her lap and looked out a bulletproof window.
When the first bullet exploded, just in the van’s path, perhaps 200 yards ahead, her driver locked his elbows and clenched the steering wheel and drove straight through the new plume of black smoke.
“Oh my god,” Luhova said as we raced her across the city. “They’re hunting me.”
The second bullet landed closer to the ground.
She was nearly killed six times. She slept on a cot in the hallway. She made $375 a month, and her city in southern Ukraine became one of the hardest hit during the war, being fired upon by Russian artillery almost every hour.
But Ms. Luhova, the only female mayor of a major city in Ukraine, is determined to create a sense of normalcy even though Kherson is nothing out of the ordinary. She holds regular meetings – in the bunker. She criticized department heads – for taking so long to set up bomb shelters. She walks around neighborhoods and chats with residents whose lives have been torn apart by the explosions.
She makes any complaints about corruption or mismanagement – and many more – about the gossiping of Russian-backed collaborators who are paid to frustrate the government. her rights.
Kherson, a port city on the Dnipro River, was captured by Russian forces in March; liberated by Ukrainian forces in November; and now, three months later, almost deserted. Bands of uneducated children roam the empty boulevards lined with bare trees and centuries-old buildings cracked in half.
Ms. Luhova sees her job defined by basic verbs: bury, clean, repair and feed. Of the roughly 10 percent of Kherson’s original population of 330,000 that remained, many were too old, too poor, too stubborn, or too stressed to run away.
Recently, she has become so overwhelmed with their needs – for food, water, generators, internet access, buses, pensions, medicine, firewood – that she says that It took her 40 minutes to sleep each night and became so exhausted she had to lie down in bed. intravenous drugs. She feels better, she said, though not really calm.
“We need those bomb shelters now,” she interrupted at a meeting in early February, when the temperature outside dropped a few degrees below freezing.
Before her, in an underground office, were the heads of the main city departments, many in winter coats and hats. The office has no heat.
She’s trying to get dozens of stand-alone concrete bomb shelters. When an administrator replied that the contract process needed to be followed or they could be charged with corruption, she exploded.
“You did nothing, and I am really angry at your stupidity,” Ms. Luhova said.
“I feel like I don’t have enough air standing next to you! You will answer with your own blood, your own blood!
The manager rolled his eyes and went outside to smoke a cigarette.
In a political culture dominated by macho men – the mayor of the capital Kyiv, for example, is a towering former heavyweight boxing champion – Luhova, 46, in leather boots gray suede and black puffer jacket with faux fur collar, another cut. Raised by a single mother during the last days of the Soviet Union, she laughs when she thinks about the hardships of that time.
“All those awful lines to beets – imagine, beets!” she speaks.
When she was 21, Ukraine was newly independent and she was teaching English at a neighboring school, married and a mother. She climbed to the position of school superintendent, which she used as a springboard to being elected to the Kherson city council eight years ago. Before the invasion of Russia last February, she was the secretary of the council, considered the number 2 official.
Russian forces burned down her house in March, and she left the city shortly after. The Russians tried to make Kherson part of Russia, forcing children to learn Russian in school and people use Russian rubles in the market. In June, they kidnapped her boss, the former mayor of Kherson, and he has not been seen since. Ms. Luhova replaced him and became the head of Kherson’s military junta.
When she returned in November, she found a city ecstatic because the Russians had been driven out but in terrible condition. The The Russians looted everything from centuries-old art and water treatment equipment to Kherson’s fleet of fire trucks and buses. But the Russians did not go far.
Ukraine had no motivation or backup to pursue them across the river. So now the Russians sit on the opposite bank of Kherson and open fire at will.
No city in Ukraine, outside of the Donbas region to the east where the Russians were advancing, has come under such intense shelling as Kherson. Over the past two and a half months, it has been attacked more than 1,800 times, Ukrainian officials say.
The pods come with no warnings. No air raid sirens. These are shells fired from tanks, cannons, mortars and rocket launchers that explode a few seconds later — the Russians are very close, in some places 700 meters away. Residents hardly have time to shelter.
Yesterday afternoon, a rocket attack killed two men walking on the sidewalk. There are no military facilities nearby.
“The exact reason for Russia to use up its dwindling ammunition stock here is unclear,” a recent report said. UK defense intelligence update on Kherson.
Since mid-November, Ukrainian officials say Russian troops have wounded hundreds of residents and killed more than 75.
“It was just revenge,” Ms. Luhova said. “There’s an old saying: ‘If I don’t take it, no one can,’ she said, trying to explain why the Russians were shelling the city after retreating. “It’s stupid but it’s the truth.”
Kherson could be a war-torn city on the front lines of Europe’s bloodiest conflict in generations, and Ms. Luhova could represent Ukraine’s never-ending spirit to keep it going. the Russian flag does not fly over this country.
But as in any other city, residents love to complain about their mayor.
“I called more than a hundred times to fix the electricity, but no one came,” said Olena Yermolenko, a retiree who helped run it. a cell of citizen spies during the Russian occupation. She also repeated accusations on social media that the mayor was stealing humanitarian aid, which Ms. Luhova strongly denied.
Oleksandr Slobozhan, executive director of the Association of Ukrainian Cities, says that from all he knows, the allegations are a smear campaign by pro-Russian spies.
Despite the challenges, Ms. Luhova is determined to keep the city running, in the most fundamental ways. She recently went to Kyiv to ask Mr. Slobozhan for 20 buses.
“We were paralyzed,” she said. “Our trolleys didn’t work and we couldn’t fix them because when our workers went to fix the lines, snipers killed them.”
She left with the promise of 20 bus rides.
“I liked the way she worked,” Slobozhan later said. “She moves forward no matter what.”
Ms. Luhova plans to attend a donor conference in Poland later this month; she’s been out of the country only a few times in her life. The place she really wants to go is Bali.
“I heard you go there and you come back looking younger,” she joked.
Her husband is a taxi driver in another city, and her two eldest sons live far away so she is alone in Kherson. Most days, one can see her moving around in her green pickup truck.
When we were with her, and the bullet exploded on the road, her driver turned around as fast as he could.
But the Russians tracked her down. From across the river, they fired a second salvo. It crashed into a roadside house, and the blast wave rocked the truck. The car kept going, but the ammunition felt deadly close.
That evening, at a house where she was staying with friends, in a small pull-out bed in the hallway near the kitchen, Ms. Luhova declined a close call.
Atop a layer of delicious homemade pickles and small squares of Brie, she holds a cognac between her fingers and toasts her victory.
“If I can disappear into the air and end this war, I will,” she said. “I am willing to sacrifice myself to end this hell.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn contribution report.
