On November 11, the Armed Forces of Ukraine liberated Kherson. The city had been under Russian occupation for over 8 months. The Ukrainian army entered the city of Kherson after Russia announced in the morning that all its troops had left the oblast center and moved to the eastern bank of the Dnipro River.
Hundreds of citizens gathered on the city’s main square to meet the Ukrainian soldiers with applause.
Oleksandra, a schoolgirl, was forced to attend a Russian school in Kherson. The girl says she dreams of burning the Russian textbooks she was forced to use in her studies and is very happy that the city is liberated.
“Two days ago, my friends and I stood with flags near the road, and all the drivers honked at us. We were so delighted. My grandmother burst into tears, and we could hardly calm her down. We are very happy that Kherson is now the part of Ukraine. Well, indeed it has been the part of Ukraine all the time.”
Anna moved to Kherson from Donetsk in 2014, so this is the second time she had survived the Russian occupation.
“When we saw what Mariupol looked like… Well, at least our houses are not so destroyed by shelling and fires. We don’t have a basement. I don’t even know where we would hide.”
After the liberation, 4 torture centers were discovered in Kherson. The Russian occupiers organized one of the centers in the Kherson pre-trial detention center.
Andrii’s son was detained after they found photos in his phone. He was held in the detention center for more than three months, and then taken to the left bank of Kherson oblast.
“Those who stayed in the detention center told us about what was happening there. In the first days, Russians tortured them, and then they took everyone away. A man called me and said that he had stayed in a cell with my son and that the son was taken to Kalanchak. My wife went there, but they told her they would not release our son.”
Maksym Niehrov was kept in the detention center from March 15 to early April.
“From month to month, the conditions in the detention center were becoming worse and stricter. I was lucky, as they beat and tortured me not very hard. But after the members of the Resistance Movement intensified their activities and killed some enemies, they began to take revenge. You could be easily detained even if after an attempt to assassinate a Russian collaborator somebody would point at you and say you did it.”
During the retreat, the Russian army destroyed or damaged as many utilities as possibleto leave Kherson without electricity, light, water and communication.
Also, the Russian military mined roads and settlements in Kherson oblast, when fleeing from the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Since the de-occupation, bomb squads have already cleared 200 kilometers of roads and 189 houses, and defused about 2,500 explosives.
