Lately, Max has asked me to bring him the same things from Kyiv every time I come to Kherson: canned cat food, a special brand of terrible cigarettes and inexpensive fruit beer. You can buy all of this in the southern Ukrainian city but his schedule – he runs transport for the regional energy company – isn’t quite aligned with that of the supermarkets.
I grew up in Kherson, but these days I return as a journalist – to report on evacuations, liberation from Russian occupation, mass shelling and the dam explosion. Together with my colleague Vladimir Senchenko, a cameraman, I manage to buy almost everything Max requested on our journey south.
We enter the city late on 6 June, after the nightly curfew has begun. The next morning, a whole day has passed since the destruction of the Kakhovka dam. The city’s river-facing streets are gradually sinking into the water.
