A regional capital in Ukraine falls to Russia for the first time

ANDRII YATSKEVICH went to bed on March 1st in a Ukrainian city and woke up in a Russian-controlled one. A sailor born and raised in Kherson, a town in southern Ukraine just north of Crimea, Mr Yatskevich, contacted by phone, says that he checked social media to see security-camera footage of several dozen Russian vehicles parked outside the city administration building. The mayor of Kherson had posted that residents should stay at home, and that the town would need a miracle to restore light, gas, water and heat and to collect the dead.

After one week of a war that has killed more than 2,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the Ukrainian government, Vladimir Putin now has a territorial trophy to show for it. A city of 285,000 people, Kherson is the first regional capital and by far the largest town that Russian forces have taken and held. Elsewhere his war machine has failed to make quick inroads and is already resorting to barbarism. Fresh videos on March 2nd of attacks on government buildings and in residential areas in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, showed bloodied corpses lying in the streets, suggesting that such horrors are not an aberration but a new reality.

Meanwhile in the south, Russia is seizing smaller towns along Ukraine’s southern coast. Berdyansk and Melitopol are in Russian hands. These two towns were particularly vulnerable to Russian takeovers, and not just because Crimea is nearby. Kremlin-friendly officials have held important jobs in local government since independence in 1991, and unlike in the Ukrainian-held half of the Donbas region, these places never sidelined them after 2014, says Denis Bihunov, a political scientist. In Kherson, the local police phone line rings unanswered. Rumours swirl that officers have relocated to Mykolayiv, the next town along the coast.

One goal of the advance is, almost certainly, to create a “land bridge” connecting the Russian-speaking Donbas, and Russia itself, with Crimea, which it annexed in 2014. Another goal may be to take Odessa, Ukraine’s third-largest city and a major port, which would cut Ukraine off entirely from the sea. Control of the region around Kherson also gives Russia control of a canal which brought fresh water from the Dnieper river to Crimea, but which Ukraine shut off after Russia annexed the peninsula in 2014. It could also act as a waystation for an ongoing northward push along the Dnieper river towards strategically important cities like Zaporizhia and Dnipro. In Enerhodar, a town of 50,000 that is home to Europe’s largest nuclear power station, hundreds of locals assembled to block the streets as incoming Russian forces approached.

To achieve its aims, Russia will need to hold its new turf. Can it do that? Russian troops will grow more vulnerable if they thin out over ever more occupied territory, leaving those holding the fort vulnerable to counter-insurgency efforts, says Rob Lee of King’s College London. Hostility toward the invaders is pervasive. One video in now-occupied Kherson shows a brave citizen running with a Ukrainian flag in each hand across the town square, metres from tanks’ turrets. In Berdyansk, social-media footage shows citizens gathering outside lines of Russian troops to chant “go home”. Others sense danger. Many residents in occupied Kherson are scared to go outside. “We have the armed forces of Ukraine and they protect us, I believe in them. Civilians being killed will not help,” texts one Kherson resident who wishes not to be named.

Russian soldiers appear to have orders not to fire on civilians unless attacked. But not everywhere. In Konotop, a town in Ukraine’s north-east, Russian troops threatened to destroy the city unless it surrendered. There Russian troops shot and wounded the father of one of Mr Yatskevich’s friends, he says, as he went to protect his shop from looting by Russian troops. Worsening food shortages could make residents more desperate. The deputy mayor of Mariupol warns of an impending “humanitarian catastrophe” in his city, which has been surrounded by invading forces.

These scenes in the south are an illustration of how brutal Russian tactics have become. Less than 100km to the south-east is Crimea, which Russia managed to seize in 2014 without spilling blood. Many Ukrainians with pro-Russian sympathies used to think that a rapprochement between the two countries was possible. After just one week of this war, “for all of my friends that hope is already dead”, says Mr Yatskevich.

Many reports suggest that the Russian rank-and-file are not happy, either. Many seem bewildered when they realise how unwelcome they are. Some have abandoned their tanks, undamaged. Western spooks say some have punctured their own fuel tanks to avoid having to advance. But the invading army is still huge, and much better equipped than Ukraine’s defenders. And it seems to have orders to bombard Ukraine into submission, city by civilian-filled city.

Kherson, and several other southern Ukrainian towns around which Russian troops are fighting today, were founded on the orders of Catherine the Great. In 1793, in a tribute to her territorial conquest across Ukraine, the Russian tsarina had a commemorative medallion struck in her honour which said: “I have recovered what was torn away.” For Mr Putin, Kherson is just the first step. He will want more.

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