The Decibel - What the liberation of Kherson means for the war in Ukraine

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

The Globe’s Mark MacKinnon was in Kherson this weekend while residents celebrated Ukraine regaining control of the city from Russia’s invading forces. They had been under Russian occupation since the beginning of March, just days into the war, and life has been difficult.Mark tells us about what he has been hearing from people and what this latest loss for Russia means for the broader conflict.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Welms, and you're listening to The Decibel. People are celebrating in Kherson because Ukraine has retaken the city from Russia's invading forces. Today, The Globe's Mark McKinnon is back to tell us what he saw this weekend in the liberated city. This is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mark, thank you so much for joining me again. Thank you. You were in Kherson just a couple of days ago this weekend. What was it like to be there?

Honestly, it was one of the more inspiring things that I've been through in this war. A lot of the places that we've gained access to after the Russians have left have been quite depressing. Cities like Bucha is very famous, Borodyanka, Izium, the last time I was on your show, I think. There is some of that in Kherson, but what was notable was this is not a city that was destroyed by the conflict. Because back in March, March the 1st, the Ukrainians withdrew from the city without a fight and the Russians came in and now the opposite has happened. The Russians on November 11th pulled out from the city without a fight, and the Russians came in. And now the opposite has happened. The Russians on November 11th pulled out of the city, and the Ukrainians entered. So there's never been a big battle for Kherson.

And so the residence was much more like one of those scenes that we've seen in, you know, I'm old enough to have covered the fall of Baghdad when people came into the streets and were just sort of so elated that what was happening to them was over. And this was more similar to that. I mean, it wasn't a large number of people. A lot of people left Kherson, obviously. Some fled at the start of the war. Many moved just now with the Russians across the river. But, you know, the people who remained in Kherson were absolutely delighted and elated to see foreigners. I've never had an easier time being a journalist. People were, you know,

lining up to tell me their stories. Really? And so what are some of the stories that they told you? What did you hear from people? I mean, the first thing that I encountered were people who were gathered on the riverbank, the Dnipro River. The Russians have now withdrawn across, and so you can see, right across into Russian-held territory from this sort of park that overlooks the river, which should be a dangerous place to be.

But Ukrainians, the residents of Kherson, were going down there with their mobile phones trying to get a signal from the Russian side of the river so they could tell their families and friends in other parts of Ukraine that they were okay because it had been without mobile connections for some time. And then people were saying to me that they had a hard time believing that the Ukrainians were coming to the city. They were actually quite afraid this was going to be a major battle. They knew that the Ukrainian troops were coming towards Kherson. They were expecting the Russians to defend the city. And so people were just relieved and happy. And they were running into the streets to hug the first Ukrainian soldiers. They saw, I met a kid who

was trying to get everybody who had liberated the city to sign his flag, thinking it would be a great souvenir for the future. Wow. What about what the city was like when it was under Russian occupation? Because as you said, the Russians had control of it from the beginning of March for quite a while, for most of this war. What was life like for people living there under Russian occupation? So what you saw here was sort of an effort by Russia to sort of start to integrate these places. And so residents were telling me that the first thing that changed was the television and how on the first day the television tower was targeted, they believe. And then when it was repaired, the only things they could see were Russian state-controlled television news about how this was an operation to liberate Ukraine and

the propaganda about Ukraine being sort of run by fascists that Vladimir Putin is going to save Ukrainians from. And then a few months later, it was the cell phone networks, the mobile networks, where one day you just couldn't use your Ukrainian mobile phone in the city. So everybody had to go line up and get a Russian SIM card, which involved giving your passport and your home details and basically telling the Russians that you live in this city and you're here and here's your name and your address. After that, they started moving to implement the Russian ruble. So the Ukrainian hryvnia as a currency was being phased out

and in came the ruble. And even clocks were set ahead of the hour. So every facet of life, they were trying to just make these people believe that they were living in Russia, that this was Russia. And one of the women I met on the square was just saying, at first people really resisted this. They didn't want to start using the ruble. They didn't want to get a Russian SIM card, but eventually you had no choice. You needed to make transactions, you needed to get paid, and so people started accepting Russian government pensions and salaries,

and you needed to have a mobile phone. So people were, you know, even if they hated the occupation, were starting to sort of feel themselves falling into this idea that they lived in a, what was now Russia. And she said it took one day after the Russians left for people to start refusing to take the ruble. Wow, that's a fascinating look at actually what it is like in that kind of transition period when Russia is trying to institute all these new things on this population. I want to ask you about, I guess, the infrastructure there, because you said that Kherson was not as destroyed.

There wasn't a battle for Kherson in the ways that there were for other areas. But you also mentioned that people were standing in an area trying to get a mobile connection. So I'm just wondering, in terms of the services there, what's actually available? Right now, there's almost no infrastructure at all. As the Russians were leaving after they denounced their withdrawal, they seemed to have destroyed a lot of what was functioning. Residents say they haven't had water or electricity or heat for days, if not weeks. Hadassah was functioning in a semi-normal way

until the last little while, when it was basically disconnected from Russian infrastructure, or Russian-provided infrastructure. And they offered residents, said, listen, we're going to be leaving, and you can move with us to Russian-controlled areas on the other side of the river. And a large number of people appear to have done that, based on the fact that the city is fairly empty when we got there.

How large a number are we talking? The Russians say 115,000. They have yet to give, say say anything completely accurate this entire conflict. So I wouldn't put too much weight on that. Some people may have just not come into the streets yesterday because they're not sure what's happened. I mean, it's been a bewildering year to live in Kherson. On March the 1st, you know, people had described to me,

a lady was sitting at the bus stop waiting for a bus that morning, and all of a sudden there's Russian soldiers and tanks going down the road. And now November 11th, youth, 250-some days later, you have the opposite happening. You wake up, and the person in the post office says, I saw Ukrainian troops in the city. There will obviously be people who are just not sure if this new situation is going to last, what it means, are the Russians coming back, is this all part of some elaborate trap, as the Ukrainian president's office has suggested, although he was in Kherson on Monday and proclaiming that this is, you know, back under Ukrainian control and a big step towards, you know, perhaps bringing an end to this war. You said, so we talked about like the, you know,

potential 115,000 people who would have left the city kind of ahead of the Ukrainian troops coming in. Why would they have done that? What are kind of, I guess, the reasons behind that potentially? And obviously we couldn't interview those people, but we interviewed people who had decided to stay and who talked to some of their friends who had left. And it was obviously a big decision for people to make. And number one, people didn't know if there was going to be a big battle for the city and the Russians were offering safe passage away from a city that could become another Sarajevo, another Grozny.

But also, I had it explained to me that people were at some point just accepted that the Russians were here and this is now the government and people were taking jobs with this new government. People were getting paid and getting paid fairly well by this new government. People were getting paid and getting paid fairly well by this new government. The Ukrainian police, security services might view these people as collaborators, and there might be obvious repercussions for having collaborated with an occupying power. We've seen before, Mark, that after Russian troops retreat from Nary, they've held, we've seen evidence of atrocities that have been committed. So of course, I'm thinking of Bucha, the mass graves that were discovered, Bucha outside of Izium as well. Is there any evidence of this here at this time?

So President Zelensky said in his nightly address overnight Sunday, that Ukrainian investigators had once more uncovered the number he gave us, 400 alleged war crimes, and that bodies of civilians and bodies of Ukrainian soldiers had been recovered. Obviously, we have no way of putting that to the test. In the case of Kherson so far, the people that I talked to, it does sound like it was pretty awful those first few days. One young woman described to me how there were just cars in the streets and bodies in the cars because the Russians were just shooting at cars. And in the first days, Hedison residents, there was quite a large pro-Ukrainian

demonstrations, a series of them in the city. People were walking through, standing on tanks, waving the Ukrainian flag. And the Russians let those happen. And there were some interesting scenes back there that really actually helped inspire the overall Ukrainian resistance. You'd see grandmothers sort of walking up to soldiers and head of son and telling them, what are you doing here? And apparently, what I heard yesterday from several people was that while these were allowed to happen and we didn't see the kind of crackdowns that I think people were fearing, later on Russia's security service would track down using cameras.

Those who had taken part, people would just be walking down the street, have a bag placed over their head, get thrown into a car and drove off. And some of those people were interrogated for days or a week. Some of them never came back. And so, yes, I think it's fair to say it was a very repressive rule that, you know, we are going to hear more and more about bad things that happened in Kherson. As we learned in Bucha and Izum, they tend to come out over time. Yeah. And I understand there's also some concern that Russian troops maybe have planted mines

or booby traps in the area as they were retreating. Is that a legitimate concern there too? So, I mean, there was at least one person I think killed yesterday and several wounded by mines around the region. So it's not just the city of Kherson, but the surrounding area. There's a military airport. All of this has been suddenly handed back to the Ukrainians. And when I was in Kherson, the regional governor was saying

that people shouldn't be gathering in the city center because there's mines everywhere and we haven't had time to clear them. People were broadly ignoring that and coming out to celebrate. We'll be back in a minute. In previous Ukrainian advancements, we heard about them relying heavily on weapons supplied by Western countries. And in fact, just on Monday, Canada announced 500 million in military aid to Ukraine. Do we know what role Western weapons and supplies played in retaking Kherson? I think it's fair to say that long range artillery provided by Western countries and

Canada's provided, I think, four M777 howitzers, which are very long range, longer range than anything the Russians possess. The Americans provided 100, I think. And particularly something called a HIMARS. It's a long range rocket system that the Americans have provided to the Ukrainians. These basically made the Russian positions on the left bank of the Dnieper, where the city of Kherson sits, unsustainable because they're able to destroy the supply lines. The Ukrainians kept hitting the bridges across the Dnieper. They were able to hit convoys that were bringing in supplies.

And see what you had was this large number of troops, Russian troops, on the west bank of the river who effectively couldn't be resupplied. You couldn't rotate in fresh troops. You couldn't bring in reserves. So at some point, despite the fact this was politically embarrassing for President Putin, the sort of general staff in Russia decided they had no choice but to pull back across the river. Of course, what that's done now is allow the Ukrainians to pull these same long range weapons further forward. And now they can target other things that were previously out of reach in the occupied areas. Yeah. Now, this is the third major retreat that we're hearing about for Russian troops. The first was withdrawing from Kyiv earlier on in the spring. The second was withdrawing from

Kharkiv in September, when we last talked to you on the podcast, Mark. And so now this third one from retreat from Kherson, how significant is this advancement into Kherson, like the Ukrainian army retaking Kherson in the broader context of this war? It's a major defeat for the Russians. This was, you know, the only sort of provincial capital they had taken since February 24th. And President Putin was on television saying residents of Khersonerson are Russian citizens forever, just six weeks ago. So it's a major political setback. It's more like the Battle of Kiev than it is the Battle of Kharkiv. The Battle of Kharkiv was a Ukrainian breakthrough

that made the Russians retreat chaotically. It was more like Kiev where they realized this is not sustainable. We can't achieve what we want to do here. So we're going to pull back and reposition our troops in a better way. And I think what the Ukrainians certainly expect is the Russians are going to take tens of thousands of soldiers who would have been required to defend Kherson, move them around to another front, and to counterattack from there, mostly focusing on the eastern Donbass front. But it's a big deal because now you've got a question mark.

Kherson is the gateway to Crimea. So now the door to Crimea is open, which that opens an entirely, a discussion I'm sure that President Putin never expected to be having when he started this war back in February, that this trophy, his one real gain in terms of territorial conquest, what he thought would war back in February, that, you know, this trophy, his one real gain in terms of territorial conquest, you know, what he thought would put him in the history

books alongside Peter the Great, is now at risk. Yeah, that's an interesting point. So, I mean, what could this signal, I guess, for Crimea? Is this giving Ukraine kind of a closer, a way to potentially even retake that territory, which Russia has annexed in 2014. This certainly is the conversation, the hope among the Ukrainian population that this is going to lead to an offensive in the direction of Crimea. I think we're seeing a whole lot of background negotiations these days. The Americans and the Russians are speaking through back channels because of the threats that President Putin has issued in recent weeks to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, in the Ukraine conflict. And most people think that losing Kherson was a massive embarrassment for him. But it's not the same as

an attack on Crimea, which you would say is, you know, this is a direct assault on, you know, what is really forever Russia. And as you pointed out earlier, NATO weapons playing such a big role in this conflict, I think he would feel or certainly threaten to use the biggest weapons he has in his arsenal. So Crimea is, I think that's going to get very tense if the ukrainians move in that direction um but at the same time this is this is the you know from a ukrainian perspective that's that's also occupied territory they don't draw distinctions between harrison and zaparizhia and donetsk and crimea this is all territory that was ukrainian until 2014 they're not the aggressor country,

they're just liberating their land. And so it's, you know, there's a political reality of the West, I think, is now sort of pushing President Zelensky's office to at least show that it's open to some negotiations. Most Ukrainians think, you're asking us to bargain away territory just when we're starting to win this war? No. So, I mean, that puts President Zelensky in a very difficult position between his allies who are supplying the weapons that are allowing Ukraine to make these gains, who are saying, you know, hey, don't push this too far. And his population, which is saying, don't stop now.

This is all our land. Do we have a sense, Mark, how much Ukrainian territory does Russia still control? It's difficult to estimate. I think it's depending on whether or not, you know, what the front line is at this moment. It's close to 15 or 20 percent, somewhere in that range. Still significant than a fifth of the country. Yeah.

Most of that is in the Luhansk Oblast, as well as Crimea. They occupy a large part of Donetsk and the sliver, really, of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. Just lastly here, winter is, of course, coming up fast. How is the cold weather and the snow, how is that going to change things in the war? The main effect that winter is going to have is probably on public morale here in Ukraine and on the population. You know, Kiev or the globe has an apartment, you only get electricity now 12 hours out of 24. There's apparently enough gas to keep the heat on for the winter. That will be tested if it's a cold winter, and Ukrainian winters can be cold and harsh. That obviously makes it more and more difficult.

Ukrainians have impressed the world with their resilience, their willingness not just to the military, but the civilians to stay where they are. This is our land. That becomes harder and harder to do when it's cold, if you have elderly people with you or children with you in terms of the effect in the military you know you get different assessments on that I mean everything changes in cold weather I mean bullets move more slowly the time you have to to treat a patient grows shorter the ground if it gets really cold will freeze and so what is now a

muddy terrain can be a hardened terrain and so what is now a muddy terrain can be a hardened terrain and so they can actually in some ways you know some specific ways will be very hard to to be in a trench obviously and to be holding a front line and canada is actually one of the countries that's been supplying a lot of uh cold weather uniforms to the ukrainian military which you know doesn't sound like the most important aid you can provide but i can promise you that gets mentioned a lot. All the way down to if you're driving a tank, it might actually make life a bit, you can move faster.

So I spoke last week with the head of Ukraine's National Security Council, and I said, do you expect the front line to stabilize during the winter? Is it going to be hard for armies to move? He said, no, nothing right now. The weather does not matter. We're pressing ahead with our plans. I'm sure the Russians are going to do the same. Mark, thank you so much for your reporting here and for taking the time to speak with me today.

Thank you, Menaka. That's it for today. I'm Menaka Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.