Consider This from NPR - The Course Of The War In Ukraine Hinges On The Fight For Kherson

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

All eyes are on Kherson. In Ukraine's first major offensive of the war, soldiers are pushing towards the city, trying to retake it from Russian troops. It's a transport hub and key river crossing, and reclaiming it would be a huge victory for Ukraine.NPR's Kat Lonsdorf brings us the story of Vitaly, a 22-year-old college student in Kherson. Since the city first fell, he has sent NPR voice memos detailing life under the Russian occupation. Now, he's decided he has to get out.And NPR's Brian Mann travels near the front lines with Ukrainian forces pushing towards Kherson. It's a vast stretch of half-abandoned villages and farms fields, old industrial sites and dense forests, where the exact point of contact between Russian and Ukrainian troops is often unclear day by day.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Sergiy Shatilov is 29 years old. Underneath his closely trimmed beard, he still looks baby-faced. And at this moment, the fate of his country depends, in part, on him. Shatilov leads Ukraine's 98th Infantry Battalion. I can't be killed also. I have no insurance and nobody has. Shatilov leads Ukraine's 98th Infantry Battalion. 600 men, many of whom were civilians before the Russian invasion. When NPR caught up with the battalion, they were within earshot of Russian tanks on the front line. From here, like around 11 kilometers. Inch by inch, they're fighting their way towards the city of Kherson, trying to retake it from Russian forces.

It's the first major Ukrainian offensive of the war. Reclaiming Kherson would be a huge victory for Ukraine and a huge blow to Russia. It's a transport hub, a river crossing, and it was the first major city to fall to Russian troops in the early days after the invasion. I hear outside right now there's like a rocket launcher and lots of shootings going on. Russian troops are walking the streets. Vitaly was there to see it. He is a 22-year-old Ukrainian college student. NPR reporters met him in Kherson two weeks before Russia launched its campaign.

And since then, he's kept us updated on what's happened in the city. Today we had a protest. I went there and there were like a lot of people there. There were like nearly maybe 5,000 people, I think. Talking to Western media is a big risk. That is why we are only using his first name. Vitaly has talked with us about early challenges like scrounging up enough food. Then came Russia cutting off Ukrainian cell networks and internet. As the war has dragged on, Vitaly has sounded more desperate. Honestly, I'm doing not that great, I'd say.

By early May, Vitaly wants to leave Kherson. He and his mom will go west, where they have relatives. I definitely got to get out of here before June, because when June comes, I think it'll be hell in here. But getting out of a city that Russia and Ukraine both desperately want to control? That's not so simple. Consider this. The course of the war in Ukraine hinges on what happens next in Kherson.

We'll visit the Ukrainian troops trying to retake it, and a college student desperate to escape. From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Monday, August 8th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the Wise app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. Over the course of months, Vitaly plots his escape. His thinking changes day by day as he hears rumors of interrogations at checkpoints and cars shot up by Russian troops. And throughout it all, almost every day, he sends voice memos to one of our producers, Kat Lonsdorf. She picks up the story from here with a message Vitaly left a couple months ago. Hey, yeah, I'm here. I'm sorry. Actually, I didn't check Telegram for like a couple of days.

Anyway, I have a horrible experience that I went through. It was a Sunday. He tells me he and his mom went outside the city to a village to visit his grandma. Well, that was a really stupid idea, and I knew that was a stupid idea. The way there was smooth, no problems, he says. But on the way back, they were stopped by Russian soldiers. This is the first time Vitaly's been so close to them. He wanted me to give him my phone. And yeah, so I gave him, but I had my like, kind of like a decoy phone. And I did not have anything there, like no social media, no photos. And, you know, he thought it was pretty

suspicious. He was like asking, what the hell is this? He was like looking for a reason to detain me. And I remember I thought that this is it. Like, I thought that I might die today or something or tortured. I don't know. It's just a crazy feeling. I don't know. I've never felt that before. The soldiers finally let him go, but Vitaly is shaken. You can hear it in his voice. Yeah, but anyway, but there's no way that I'm going anywhere right now. He tells me he and his mom, they've decided they're just going to wait it out until the fighting is over, until Kherson is hopefully liberated by Ukraine. He sounds depressed. I just sit at home all the time, so. But then a little over a week ago. There's a classmate of mine. He went through Crimea to Georgia. Vitaly tells me that they've changed their minds and have decided to go the

other way out, south, through Crimea and into Russia and across the border into Georgia, a place friendly to Ukrainians. He says that you guys got nothing to worry about. I thought it was pretty dangerous, but he kind of like convinced me to. Vitale is acutely aware that he is a 22-year-old man, just the right age to be fighting in the army. But the battle is moving closer and closer. So he and his mom pack up. They find a friend who is also leaving, who can drive. He clears his phone, deletes our chats, removes me from his contacts.

Because I know the Russians are, you know, looking for people with a pro-Ukrainian side. But if they're going to find out that I interact with Americans, I mean, they're going to kill me. They make one more trip to the village to say goodbye to his grandma. She's going to stay. And they go for it. Pretty sure this whole experience is going to look like the movie Argo, if you ever watched it, like starring Ben Affleck. It's probably going to be like the scariest, the hardest experience that I would go through. It's worth noting here that Vitaly speaks English the way he does because he learned by watching American movies and YouTube channels. Vitaly tells me not to text him.

He'll reach out when it's safe. And yet again, days go by. And then a message pops up on my Instagram. Hey, kid, I got through the Russia and I'm in Georgia now. They made it. Vitaly's exhausted. They drove mostly at night, were interrogated at checkpoints and waited for hours and hours at border crossings. No. And he was like typing things in the computer. I think they're finally out of Kherson right as it becomes the center of the next phase of the war.

And now the next phase of Vitaly's life as a refugee can begin. NPR's Kat Lonsdorff. While Vitaly has been trying to get out of Kherson, Ukrainian troops have been battling their way towards it. We're going to hear how that battle is going from NPR's Brian Mann, who has been traveling close to the front lines talking to those soldiers. And a word of caution, his story contains moments of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Midmorning, we drive past bunkers and sandbag walls on the outskirts of Apostolov, a half-empty industrial town northeast of Kherson. We're out on what's really the military frontier now. There are villages still around.

You see civilians, but there are also checkpoints everywhere and fortified positions. Our goal here is to see and hear what it's like day to day for thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, many of them civilians just a few months ago, who live and fight on this southern front. The first stop is a place hidden on the edge of an abandoned factory where Ukrainian soldiers are brought when they're injured. A burly guy with a black beard who calls himself Doc waits in the back of a big army ambulance. One, two, three waits in the back of a big army ambulance. He grins and says there are no patients here now,

but he thumps the medical equipment strapped to his body armor and says he's ready. He says when wounded soldiers arrive, they're often in a very bad state, often hit by Russian artillery. He has to work fast to stabilize the men before transporting them onto a military hospital. As the offensive continues toward Kherson, Doc says things will only get worse with more casualties. The day after our trip, the Ukrainian military told NPR 26 wounded soldiers were brought here for care. The soldiers tell us that is the sound of Russian tanks firing in the distance. For weeks, elements of Ukraine's army have been pushing forward along

a vast arc of territory toward Kherson. U.S. and British intelligence reports say it's working. Russia is back on its heels here under enormous pressure. But progress has been grudging and costly, and both sides have scored hits. That's a Ukrainian army major named Oleksandr Litvinov. He's a guy with a kind face, in his 50s, who worked as a chauffeur before the war. He's taken us forward a few kilometers closer to the active fighting, to an observation post and bunker next to a small orchard where he was stationed. Litvinov says he's volunteered to show us this place because

it's important people know what he and his fellow soldiers are facing. Litvinov says he was here when Russians hit them repeatedly with bunker buster artillery shells and then a missile. It was deafening, he says. He shows us a crater a dozen yards across, then shrugs and says they were lucky. The Russian aim was just a little off. Next location. We climb next into a pair of battered SUVs driven by Ukrainian soldiers. Ukraine's army has stipulated NPR can only go forward from this point to talk to soldiers if we ride in their convoy.

So Major Litvinov drives. He points to farm fields where the bronze yellow wheat will go unharvested. He says it's too dangerous. All the farmers have fled. We're moving quickly now because we are in the open here. And a lot of the Russian artillery does have the capacity and the range to hit here. So what he did say is that they have not seen spotter drones today. The landscape looks eerily empty, scarred by craters and shell-damaged buildings.

Litvinov tells us it's easy to get lost out here on winding farm roads among scattered villages and industrial sites. The exact point of contact between Russian and Ukrainian troops is often unclear day by day. So as we're climbing out of the vehicles here, I can hear the tank fire again in the distance. Hello, Brian. Two Ukrainian soldiers appear from the other car and identify themselves as Viktor and Sergei. They carry assault rifles with extra magazines strapped to their armor. One wears a camouflage bandana over his shaved head. They lead us into a strip of thick forest, to the trench they occupied for months. They say they were down in this hole, getting hammered by Russian tanks and mortars,

sometimes for a month at a time, often with no way to fight back. They tell me it was frightening to be under fire. But they say the experience differs soldier to soldier. Sometimes they say the fear just disappears. Other soldiers are always scared. It never goes away. I climb down through the narrow hole. The trench doesn't feel safe. It smells of raw dirt. The cut logs used to build a sheltering roof are low, claustrophobic. This trench isn't being used right now, but there are still bottles of water, ammunition caches,

and other supplies. Victor and Serhii tell me the front line has moved forward from here. They offer to take us closer to active fighting, but we decline for safety reasons. I ask if they'll use this trench again if the Russians push back. We took these positions and now we're planning to go even further. Maybe, they say. But they're convinced that won't happen. They think they have the Russians on the run as Ukraine's army pushes toward Kherson. But then something happens that shows how uncertain, how dangerous things are here.

Victor and Serhii say they've detected a Russian reconnaissance drone operating overhead. I don't see it or hear it, but they say it's hovering above the tree canopy. If it spotted us, we could be threatened by artillery or snipers. After a few minutes' wait, we leave the forest quickly, scrambling back to the vehicles. The soldiers are clearly concerned. Major Litvinov, our guide and driver, grips the steering wheel, going much faster over the rutted tractor road, trying to get us out of there. Then, suddenly, he loses control. My audio recorder catches the moment, the sound of the car hitting a tree.

My leg is broken, my security advisor is also injured, and our driver, Major Oleksandr Litvinov, is killed in the crash. We're evacuated swiftly by Ukrainian medics and soldiers, including Doc, the field medic we met earlier in the day. They care for us and take us to a military hospital a safe distance from the line. Later, the Ukrainian military will tell us they believe their two vehicles were actually under fire by the Russians. We didn't hear or see that. What we did see is how dangerous that world is, how quickly a stretch of forest or a farm field or a village street can turn

deadly. We also see the terrible price Ukrainian soldiers, volunteers like Oleksandr Litvinov, are paying day after day as they struggle to push the Russian army back from their country. NPR's Brian Mann, reporting from near Herschelund. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.