This was a postal run like no other. We were following a post office van through the Kherson countryside as the shelling started. The Ukrposhta (Ukrainian Postal Service) van had a precious cargo. It was delivering cash to the elderly residents of a tiny village called Novomykolaivka in Kherson region.
he village was liberated just a few weeks ago and this would be the first time villagers had received their pensions in eight months.
The postal worker in the van in front of us was called Valentyna Smikun, dressed for another day in the office — make-up carefully applied, stylish red wool coat.
Postal workers on their rounds back home in Ireland have the odd angry dog to contend with, Valentyna was driving through a warzone.
‘We all work together here to make our village a better place, to raise our village from its knees’
We passed a farm building which was still on fire, a fresh strike. Saw the odd black plume of smoke from a shell that had just landed a few fields over.
Then, through the thick glass of our armoured vehicle the thud of a shell landing a little closer. The vehicle in front of us, Valentyna’s van, was “soft skinned”. Valentyna was not.
The shelling we could hear in the distance was, most likely, part of the Ukrainian advance in the direction of Kherson city. We were in the east of Kherson Region a very long way from the regional capital.
But news was starting to come through that after an announced withdrawal of Russian troops from the city, Ukrainians were starting to liberate village after village in the direction of the city itself.
The Kherson Oblast was one of the four regions the Russians had illegally annexed. They had quickly taken Kherson at the beginning of the war. The city, now liberated, was the first and only regional capital they had managed to successfully capture.
The idea was that they would use it to launch attacks on important port cities like Odesa and Mykolaiv.
Pensioners in the newly liberated village of Novomykolaivka in the Kherson region wait for their first pension in eight months. Pictures via Paraic O’Brien/Channel4 News.
The ultimate aim: a giant land bridge from the Donbas in the east to the Moldovan border in the west. A sham referendum to join the Russian federation was held in Kherson back in September. A puppet administration had been installed consisting of misfits parachuted into positions of authority by the Russians.
The city was supposed to be one of the jewels in Putin’s imperial crown.
Now, though, Russian troops were being ordered to retreat. They were leaving the city in droves, trying to cross the mighty Dnipro river. It was embarrassing for the Kremlin.
It was a sign of weakness. And nothing hurts a “strongman” quite as much as that.
Back in the village of Novomykolaivka, the postal van turned into the drive of the village hall. About 150 elderly residents were waiting. Valentyna got out of the van and introduced us to Yulia Borukh, the acting mayor of the village. Inside the hall they set up a table and one by one people start filing in to collect their pensions.
There was something incredibly moving about this small administrative procession. Eighty-seven-year-old Clavdia approached the desk slowly with the help of a walking stick. She presented her passport. The picture inside was of a much younger woman. Valentyna from the postal service counted out Clavdia’s pension on the desk.
During occupation the Russian ruble was the imposed currency. Clavdia’s pension worked out at the equivalent of €23 a week. It was not very much but it was now in Ukrainian hryvnia.
I leaned in a little and asked Clavdia how she managed to survive this last eight months without her pension money. She shook her head and explained in Ukrainian to my translator that she had lost her hearing.
Novo Mikolievke was liberated on October 4. Kherson, further west, is now also free. This little village then was a microcosm of the regional capital. So what awaits Ukrainian troops as they enter the city?
‘She was beaten, the Russians beat her and her husband. They beat them very hard’
If you really want to get a sense of the trauma caused by Russian occupation, just join this pension queue — a small group of elderly residents, in a tiny village, just one of hundreds before you get to the city itself.
At the head of the queue, Yulia Borukh was holding the hall door open for people. She was introduced to us as the acting mayor. What happened to the previous mayor, I asked.
Yulia hesitated for a moment then the elderly men and women around us in the queue answered for her, a chorus of pensioners: “He ran away.”
Yulia smiled shyly and said: “Well, he evacuated.”
“Why did you stay?” I asked.
She explained that her parents and her husband’s parents lived in the village. Then she looked around at the people in the queue and said: “These are my people. I help them. They help me. We all work together here to make our village a better place, to raise our village from its knees.”
‘The liberation of Kherson is one of the most significant moments in this war so far’
An old woman in the queue piped up. “Yulia stayed with us. She was honest and conscientious. She lived with us through this war.”
Yulia looked down at her feet, went a little red. This woman did not want the limelight, she was coy when it came to talking about her own war-time heroism. For “her people” though, the pensioners who she was opening the door for her, she was a war hero.
I asked Yulia how it had been for her and her family under Russian occupation.
“Was it scary for you?”
“Of course,” she said. She went quiet. Another woman in the queue interjected
“She was beaten, the Russians beat her and her husband. They beat them very hard.”
Yulia’s eyes welled up with tears. The previous mayor had left at the very beginning of the war and she had stepped into the vacuum just as the Russians were arriving.
Herself and her husband had refused to co-operate with the invading Russian force. One day some soldiers made them pay.
Yulia was severely beaten with the butt of a rifle and her husband was beaten with, according to his wife, “anything they could get their hands on”.
Yulia was just the first person we spoke to in the queue. The next woman was Valentyna. Her son was captured by the Russians and had disappeared. She doesn’t know where he is.
And so it went, along the length of a line of pensioners in just one little village in Kherson. Person after person with a story of Russian brutality. If these were the experiences here, imagine the horrors that will come to light in the city in the coming weeks.
The liberation of Kherson city is one of the most significant moments in this war so far. The resilience and ingenuity of the Ukrainian command will be studied in military school in the years to come.
What struck me standing in that queue though, is the scale of the rearguard action — the repairing, the re-establishment of state services and civic society. There are thousands of tiny steps needed to rebuild — electricity reconnected to a house there, a water pipe mended here, a pension delivered to a small village.
The captains of that campaign are the likes of the Valentyna, the postal worker and Yulia, the village mayor. And I, for one, salute them too.
