On a cool morning, the silence of Kherson’s old city centre is broken by a huge rubbish bin being overturned on the pavement. Two men in bulletproof vests calmly scoop the contents onto the road. Dima, a local volunteer coordinator, observes the fetid heap from his porch. “Don't worry, they’re from the council,” he says, cutting short my rising indignation.
A tractor turns the corner, followed by a dozen men and women with shovels, also wearing bulletproof vests. A few minutes later, the rubbish is in the tractor’s trailer. The group moves on as the first Russian shelling of the day starts up.
There’s a simple explanation for this strange sight: the owners of Kherson’s main garbage collection company have been arrested and their trucks seized. Alena and Dmitry Dubrovsky, who ran the company for 20 years, are facing charges of wartime collaboration for continuing to work between March and November 2022, when Kherson was under Russian occupation.
