As she was driven by her son out of Dudchany, a small village in the north-east of the Kherson region a few days ago, Rosaliya Kovalchuk, 72, glimpsed something from the backseat that will haunt her forever.
“Hanging from the branches of a tree were guts from a man’s belly,” Kovalchuk said, pausing as she sought to collect her emotions. “A military car had been blown up. I think he was Russian from the boots and the uniform.”
Dudchany, one of the stepping stones down the Dnieper river to Kherson city, the regional capital 77 miles to the south-west, is at the centre of fierce fighting that the west says could be pivotal in the outcome of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
Russian-installed authorities yesterday ordered all residents of the city of Kherson to leave “immediately” ahead of an expected advance by Ukrainian troops.
Kherson city was taken in the very early days of the war and remains the only regional capital to fall to Russia since 24 February. But a counter-offensive launched in the summer by Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s forces in the wider south Ukrainian region has enjoyed dazzling results, with village after village retaken in the last few weeks. They are bearing down on the region’s beating heart.
If there was any doubting the symbolic and strategic importance of Ukraine’s assault, it was underlined by Putin’s announcement a fortnight ago that the region, along with Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, had been “annexed” into the Russian federation, a proclamation that provoked as much mockery as it did diplomatic outrage given the continuing battle.
Putin’s decision did nevertheless raise the stakes for Russia’s president. The battle for Kherson, then, is of global importance – but at its centre are 1 million civilians, of which around a thousand live in Dudchany, where the two sides are now in close-quarters battle.
It was in March that Russian soldiers swept into the farming village, setting up bases in abandoned homes and municipal buildings. There was constant heavy shelling, and the sound of low-flying planes would fill villagers, cowering, hiding in bunkers, with fear.
Photograph: Ed Ram/The Observer
The soldiers would search homes every 10 days, and felt free to take what valuables they fancied. But while the remains of a shepherd, Mykola Potyshyak, 61, would be found in his shack and a tractor driver, Sergiy Lesyko, 50, went missing some months ago, the village mostly avoided the atrocities reported elsewhere.
The story of Dudchany is instead that of the brutal reality of a community that has found itself with a war on its doorstep.
Kovalchuk and her friend, Anna Koval, 72, who lives two doors down on the village’s Pushkina Street, recounted their stories from the gym of a school in the city of Kryvyi Rih, north of Kherson, where 70 beds have been laid out for refugees. They arrived on 11 October. “We sit and we pray,” said Koval, weeping as she gripped an icon of the virgin Mary. By the start of this month, the sounds and sights of war in Dudchany had become all too familiar to both women. But on the evening of 1 October, they watched perplexed as the Russian occupiers in armoured vehicles raced past while soldiers with backpacks marched at pace past their front doors. The Russians were in retreat.
Dudchany is divided by a small tributary of the Dnieper river, and the Russians were abandoning their positions to get south of the water as fast as possible. “It happened so quickly,” said Kovalchuk. “They left behind lots of weapons – machine guns, ammunition, grenades.”
Ukrainian soldiers arrived the next day, gathering all the abandoned Russian hardware. “We baked,” said Koval. “Cookies, pancakes, borscht. We took it to the abandoned homes the Ukrainian soldiers had set up in. It was such a relief to see them.”
But then the heaviest of the shelling began. Among the buildings hit were the social club and the kindergarten, while homes on the edges of the village were turned to rubble. From 3 October, the village lost its electricity. The lights went out and there was no hot water. When some of the Ukrainian soldiers moved into properties at the end of Pushkina Street, the Russians responded with a barrage of fire. It became unbearable; a struggle to see how they might survive. “They spotted them and started to bomb this area,” said Kovalchuk. “About 100 metres away there were explosions and fires and we decided we had to evacuate.”
At 11.30am on 11 October, Kovalchuk and Koval joined her son, Mykhaylo, 46, and daughter-in-law in their car, leaving the homes that the women had lived in since 1968 and 1969, respectively. “It was very painful,” said Koval. “My husband and I built that house. We moved into it when I was 17. Only God knows whether I will be lucky enough to return.”
Many, however, are yet to leave and the fighting in the next few weeks is likely to become more intense. Last week, an abandoned school said by Ukrainian forces to be a base for around 100 Russian soldiers on their side of the village was hit by multiple rockets. And the main goal of Ukrainian artillery units is to get within 20km of Kherson city in order to hit Russian positions.
Koval worries for those left behind. She lost contact with her granddaughter, Alyona Dmytrenko, 31, who works in a shop in Kherson city, on 3 October. “Before that she said there were Russians but everything was normal, she didn’t want to worry me,” said Koval.
Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the Ukrainian military administration of Kryvyi Rih, where 75,000 refugees, mainly from Kherson, have settled, said evacuation to Ukrainian territory from lands occupied by Russia had become almost impossible. “The Russians closed the ways for people to escape five months ago but then the frontline was 100km long so people managed to find ways through the back roads, the river, forests,” he said. “There is a spot where there are 1,000 bicycles which people abandoned when they got to safe territory. But the frontline has moved 25km. It’s no longer possible to escape like this.”
Anatoly Plyska, 70, who is also staying in the school in Kryvyi Rih after fleeing from the village of Mykhailivka after it was liberated by Ukrainian forces on 6 October, said that under occupation they had been trapped in by checkpoints on every road. Three young men tried to escape by wading in the shallows of the Dnieper river but one stepped on a mine and was killed. Andriy Gordy, 36, a teacher from Kherson city, who escaped in the summer to the school where is now staying, said there was no way out now.
Instead, the Russian-installed authorities say they are turning Kherson city into a “fortress”. Vladimir Saldo, the Moscow-appointed governor of the Kherson oblast, said last Wednesday that 50,000 to 60,000 people from the region, including the city, would be relocated to Russia over the next 10 days as Ukrainian forces continue to advance.
The grim reality is that while Ukraine may be advancing, the bloody scenes witnessed by Kovalchuk and Koval a fortnight ago as they fled their homes appear doomed to be replicated. “My heart is bleeding,” whispered Koval. “We were living in peace – how has this happened?”
