Three weeks after Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson from Russian occupation, residents are getting used to life under constant rocket fire from their former occupiers, a country that once promised them it would “be here forever”.
Yet that promise, made time and again in Kherson during the staged ‘referendum’ on joining Russia in the autumn, ended in chaos, dismay and uncertainty.
On 10 November, when the Russian army finally retreated from Kherson – the only major Ukrainian city it managed to seize earlier this year – it destroyed the water supply system, electrical substations and the main television tower. People were left without power or communications.
