Lines in Kherson, August 2023
Khoda.gov.ua
There’s no hard line between war and peace in Ukraine but that doesn’t mean the human soul stops yearning for one. Take Kherson. Located in the southeast of the country along the Black Sea, the port city was liberated from occupation in November 2022 and still gets routinely shelled from Russian positions across the Dnieper River. This past June, Kherson returned to global consciousness for a brief moment when the Kakhovka Dam was destroyed, flooding the city. When my little reporting squad (writer, photographer, interpreter) visits two months later, we find Kherson grim and dark, a city of half-life and sporadic electricity. Before the war, 300,000 people called it home. Now the population is down to 60,000 or so.
It’s not just a matter of the tangible. There’s a strange gloom to the area that stays with me long after we depart, a kind of ethereal black pall that conjures up heavy violence and death. It trails our heels through crosswalks, hums over the river in the munition drones coming and going, coming and going, probes the dreams of locals and visitors alike. I’ve only been two other places in this world that were similar: Belfast, along Falls Road, when I was a dopey college kid armed with ignorance, and Sadr City in Baghdad, when I was a soldier packed down with agency. There’s nothing to do with those comparisons, I suppose, except to recognize them. Still, life endures in Kherson.
Daniel Jihad Salem, thirty-nine years-old, was among the first soldiers to enter the city last November. His special-operations team, nicknamed “Ocean’s Twelve,” encountered minimal opposition as they pushed toward the city, part of a rapid blitz that was arguably the pinnacle of the 2022 counteroffensive.
“There was a blocking position with some orcs,” he remembers, referring to Russians by a slang term. “We kicked their asses, and kept on going … We felt like we were going to be fucked up because they had some RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), but we didn't give them time to [fire] them. They had one vehicle, but after the fight, there was nothing left of it because of [our] machine gun.
“That post was the only resistance that we had.”
A jubilant crowd poured into Kherson’s main square that day, waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags, hugging and kissing soldiers like Salem, something he recalls as “one of the most unbelievable moments in my life.”
The same square looms empty when we walk through it, minus a small rocket crater near its center. We stop to peer into it like it’s a wishing well. It’s a new artifact of the war in a place of old tranquility. Maybe here’s that line, I think. Maybe. It’s a beautiful summer day. Sun tumbles down at us from above. The air is clean and light. I don’t hear any birds even though we’re in a park. Yet cognizance tugs. I know where we are and where we are not.
Our photographer circles the crater, snapping his camera, hunting for the exact right angle. Ben fought as a U.S. Marine in Ramadi. He knows armed violence, he senses the pall, too, here in Kherson, but since he’s a Marine, he smiles wide and says we need to embrace it. I manage something near a smirk. Our interpreter Nazar, a young man from the west of Ukraine, just shakes his head.
We spot a pair of elderly babushkas along the periphery of the square on a bench under a tree. I try to interview them with the aid of Nazar. One of the old women seems not to understand either of us. The other plays along.
“You must’ve experienced so much,” I say, meaning World War II, and the Soviet Union, and independence, and the recent military occupation, and also so much else. “What is your favorite memory from here?”
“America is very good,” says the one who understands us.
I try another approach.
“What makes Kherson home? What makes it special to you?”
“Thank you, America,” the babushka says. “Thank you, Mister Joe Biden.”
I thank them for their time. It’s not Nazar, he’s good at what he does, is as fluent in Russian as he is in Ukrainian and English. One doesn’t survive eight-plus decades in Kherson, or most anywhere for that matter, answering loaded questions from smiley foreign reporters.
What the preceding nine months of occupation were like varied, depending. Most people stayed in their homes and neighborhoods at first, according to Kherson resident Tetiana Mykhailova. But after about a month, people started going out more. “We were scared,” she says, “but we felt like life must go on and we decided to return to the streets.”
She’d encounter Russian soldiers at the grocery store, gas stations, the bank. For her, “things didn’t change much,” she says, though communication with the outside world came and went with limited cell connectivity and internet. When those did work, the thirty-two-year-old took to scrubbing her browser history, in case. Meanwhile, her firefighter husband barely left their home. He has a tattoo on his chest with an AK-47 and his blood type from his army days. They were certain the Russians would take him for an active Ukrainian soldier and disappear him on sight.
“They would have killed him,” she says.
The line, I think again. Maybe it’s here, too, carved in the permanence of ink on the husband’s chest, erased and invisible in the wife’s browser history.
In the days before Ukraine reclaimed Kherson, Russian soldiers began looting the same groceries, hotels and banks they’d been protecting for nine months. “They took TVs and electronics, in particular,” Mykhailova says.
Their focus on spoils may have been part of why Salem and his colleagues entered the city largely unchallenged. Before the war, Salem was a famous Ukrainian television presenter and restauranteur. Half-Ukrainian and half-Lebanese by descent, he served previously in the Lebanese army about two decades ago. That was more military experience than most recruits had, so a spot in the newly-expanded Special Operations Forces (abbreviated SSO) was secured. Tall and muscular, he carries himself with confidence and swagger, and is candid about how often Ocean’s Twelve goes across the river to Russian-occupied territory to “Fuck with them, tear shit up, then come back … the only things we need are bullets and a couple of kamikaze drones. We do a lot of good things for other brigades so they can move on. We do the dirty job. And I love it.”
He sounds like many a Western commando I’ve known, brash and proud, loud and certain. But there’s another side to Salem, too, the well-traveled restauranteur with an international background who recognizes his team’s role in the grand strategy: “Hard times are still ahead. And what we can do [now] is destroy their vision and hearing before the winter freeze hits again.”
Further, perhaps more than most, he can see how this war is being received elsewhere.
“People who are not inside the war, who are donating and supporting, they can be tired, too. That’s okay. I can understand that. For them, every time we go forward, the war is farther away.”
But this empathy has its limits. “What I see sometimes is that Europe and America are getting tired from the Ukrainian war,” Salem continues, “I would like to correct them. They’re not getting tired from the Ukrainian war; they’re tired of the Russian war. They came here, remember? We’re just defending ourselves.”
Our interview gets interrupted twice: first when the electricity cuts out, forcing us to rely on a candle and the glow of our iPhones; the second, after the lights return, when a couple of his spec-ops teammates in the adjacent room grow bored with the evening.
“Ласкаво просимо в Україну!”
A grenade bounces from one corner of the room to another like a pinball. Its source moves away from the doorway in a shadow. Those of us at the table in the kitchen do not have time to escape. It’s a matter of seconds. I bow my head and shield my eyes and tell myself to not flinch.
There’s a loud pop and a puff of sour, black smoke. Floor tile sprays over those of us at the table. Braying laughter fills the room.
It is—was—a training grenade.
“Those fuckers do that to everyone,” Salem says from across the table. Weird thing to do in one’s own house, I think. Though it’s not quite their house. They’re temporarily occupying it as they prep for missions across the zero line —which is not the exact line we’ve been seeking, as one would have to trudge many kilometers in either direction to find even the guise of peace. But still, it’s there, it’s near, and it beckons.
As for the house, it once belonged to a Russian-friendly police chief who fled when the Ukrainian military seized back this area. The chief’s wife called recently from Crimea. She demanded the soldiers vacate it.
“Slava Ukraini,” she was told.
Minus a hole in the wall here or there (and now a chipped kitchen cabinet), the place remains in fine shape. There is a bit of a Lord-of-the-Flies vibe going on, though it’s important to note that these burly, bearded men have been at war eighteen months now with no end in sight. Fucking around with weapons in the home of a rich and corrupt enemy seems a minor indulgence. One they earn again and again, I think, with every treacherous raid across the river.
Salem makes his apologies about the training grenade while the others come into the kitchen still laughing. It was a test, of sorts, and it appears my little reporting squad passed. We get shown a video from the previous month when they put one under the bunk of a new team member. His freakout upon waking proves worthy of a replay.
I excuse myself to go the bathroom. I need to pull from my back a couple pieces of plastic shrapnel and kitchen tile. “Embrace it!” Ben calls after me. Nazar remains at the table with a strained, pensive look on his face. Our interpreter knows the language of these Ukrainian soldiers. But it’s our photographer who best understands them. On my way I pass through the living room where still other team members are constructing homemade drone bombs for their next mission, while watching a Transformers movie.
The following morning, we eat breakfast at an outdoor café to the drums of artillery in the near distance. Neither the waiter nor the other patrons seem disturbed by it so we decide we won’t be, either. Nazar speaks Russian to the waiter. The waiter speaks Ukrainian to Nazar. Then we walk to the river. A Territorial Defense guard says to be careful, snipers from across the Dnieper take occasional shots at easy stationary targets. I keep my head below the razor wire and fence, best I can, and watch a pair of low-flying drones buzz over the nearby Eternal Flame monument. It’s dedicated to the fallen soldiers of Afghanistan.
Their war in Afghanistan, which preceded the one I lost some friends to. During theirs, the mujahedeen enemy were aided by our supplying of Stinger missiles, the same mujahedeen who’d later become our enemy, but then were sort of our clandestine ally. The geopolitics can confound, from both then and now.
We withdraw from sniper range and enter a domed sandstone church. It’s St. Catherine’s Cathedral, one of the most famous and oldest churches in Ukraine. The bones of Potemkin had been kept in a crypt here for centuries until Russian soldiers fled with them across the Dnieper in the fall of 2022. The air in it is church air, dry and stale and warm, and I write in my notebook: “Strange place for an American to be.”
Ben’s camera is small but causes consternation with other visitors. Nazar explains who we are and why we’re there. Then we are welcomed, and educated. The cathedral’s roof caught fire during a Russian shelling the week prior, from ablaze fragments, and workers are still repairing the damage outside while volunteers clean up debris inside. The archpriest of St. Catherine’s agrees to a short interview, expressing his desire for lasting peace and less wild dogs in the neighborhood.
I ask if he misses Potemkin’s bones. He shrugs.
I ask how the Russians treated him and his people. “Mostly left us alone,” he says. They came to worship here, too, he explains, same as Ukrainian military. Especially a colonel he got to know a bit, who came in every afternoon, no matter what.
The archpriest’s eyes crinkle. He wonders, he says, if that man is still alive.
I look up again at the burned roof. We’re in a church, a holy place where both Ukrainians and Russians have sought refuge and grace and solitude and forgiveness and all the rest. Yet there’s no line here, not one I can sense. If there ever was, it seems to have been absconded with, same as Potemkin’s bones.
Meanwhile, Mykhailova, the Kherson resident, says she’s upbeat for her hometown’s future despite what it’s been through. Like many we observe in Kherson, she wears a patriotic shirt with the Ukrainian flag on it, an item she took great care to hide during the occupation. She believes her optimism might be connected to a generational divide within Ukraine. She was born in 1991, the same year as the free democratic Ukraine. She knows her experience isn’t everyone’s.
For example, “My grandpa really went kind of into this thing with Russian news,” she says. “It was really hard to convince him back … sometimes even in conversation, I can hear this idea, like, this is all America's fault.”
There is frustration in her voice when she talks about her grandfather. But there is also love, understanding. “Let them live,” she says, regarding how she reconciles his beliefs with her own. “Because their childhood memories, their youth, was in [the] Soviet Union. And you cannot just convince them that Ukraine is that good and Russia is bad. That's fair.”
Fair is an odd word to hear in Kherson. It’s a rare one to hear during any war. It’s not lost on me that it comes from a civilian, and proud Ukrainian, who wants nothing more than a return to normalcy. She’s drawn her own line—not between war and peace, but in the midst of it.
Matt Gallagher is the author of four books, including Daybreak, a new novel about the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict.