Published in The Sunday Post, print-only, 9th November 2025
Full text:
In the port city of Kherson, binmen wear bulletproof vests, the director of the parks departments wields a semi-automatic shotgun to aim at the drones flying overhead, and children play underground in bomb shelters.
On a drizzly day Rima Konda, 59, watched as council workers in a cherry picker boarded up shattered windows in a high-rise. Her own flat, where she lives alone, is nearby, and a rocket strike narrowly missed it in late October.
“We all get scared,” she said in a quiet, tired voice. “I hope for victory, I think it will be soon. I hope and pray.”
According to a recent UN human rights report, Russia’s actions in Kherson, and throughout southern Ukraine, are a war crime. Russian drone pilots can see their targets on a video feed, and they hunt civilians on the streets of this city, closing in on them as they try to hide under trees or in doorways, and detonating. Often, they post their gleeful footage online. It is, the UN report said, an attempt to create a “permanent climate of terror”.
Khersonians are killed nearly every week by drones, artillery, and rockets, sent by the Russian forces camped just across the Dnieper river. It’s nearly three years since the city’s liberation on 11th November 2022. The footage of residents greeting Ukrainian troops with cheers, hugs and tears gripped the whole world, a moment of hope. No one knew then what would come next.
Now, about a fifth of the pre-war population remain – and parts of the centre are too dangerous to approach. The iconic council headquarters was smashed in two by July’s aerial bombs. The drones are almost constant and artillery, especially at night, thuds and whistles, hitting various districts of the small city.
And yet the place is absolutely, defiantly alive. 66,000 people can’t or won’t leave – and life is made possible by the efforts of civil society, from volunteer networks to local government.
Volodymyr Tsiktor is director of Parks Kherson. Just three months into the role, aged 34, he has to think about green spaces, amenities, the endless headache of waste disposal. But as this is Kherson, he also has to think about clearing rubble, preventing fires, and boarding up windows – and about his 343 employees who risk their lives to keep the city tidy and functioning.
Days before Tsiktor said, a Russian drone had flown right into the cab of a bin lorry, seriously injuring the driver. “His eyes and head were badly wounded and at first he couldn’t see at all. They operated and he’s stable in hospital in Odesa, starting to see a little, thank God.”
There is no way the drone pilot didn’t know it was a municipal worker he was trying to kill, Tsiktor insisted. “These monsters on the left bank [of the river], they know it isn’t a military vehicle. They don’t care.”
Sitting in his office, Tsiktor’s phone buzzed with calls every other minute, and he tapped them away. “My first responsibility is to my colleagues,” he said. “When I came into the job we didn’t have enough bulletproof vests or helmets, but now they’ve found money in the budget.” He also keeps a shotgun in the office. Small arms fire is often heard across the city, as people try to take down the drones before they find their target.
The refuse workers are trained in emergency first aid and mine safety, because nestled among the fallen leaves that carpet the city in early November are green ‘petal’ mines, dropped from the air, often indistinguishable from a curling leaf. They’ll take your foot off, at the very least.
After a strike people call a hotline to Parks Kherson, asking for help with repairs. Nataliya Volska, 28, must prioritise, triage, and dispatch teams across the city. “If there’s a big attack it could be 40 or 50 calls,” she said. They estimate their teams have boarded up 60,000 windows in the last few years.
In these conditions, life goes underground. The civil defence department of local government has a programme of repurposing basements to make them safe and comfortable bomb shelters. Olga Lyashenko, 57, the deputy head, leads this effort.
“They’re designed so you can stay down there for 48 hours,” she explained: there’s food, water, air supply. She’d been running a daycare centre when Russia invaded, taking 200 people into that basement for two months. “I didn’t sleep for three days”, she recalled.
Nataliya Chekhun’s toy-strewn underground shelter is a haven for families. Parents can drop in for tea and biscuits and the children can play down here – the youngest of her regular group is a baby, the eldest is 12.
“50 per cent of the children have problems with speech,” Chekhun, 60, explained. Years of sitting at home have done this – before war, there was Covid. Schools are still shut. The shelter is funded in part by UNICEF and other charities.
“Some children are very unstable emotionally, and need constant reassurance,” Chekhun said. “But I do see so much progress.” She gestured towards Rostik, a five-year-old boy clutching some little dinosaurs. “A month ago he didn’t speak much, but now he can ask me for things. They learn to talk to people outside the home.”
All over Ukraine people are gearing up for yet another grim winter – yet again, Russia is attacking energy infrastructure and the major cities have scheduled blackouts. There is an exhausting sense of deja vu. But Ukrainians are now experts in survival. They know how to keep a city running against the odds. As one Parks employee put it, while planting trees on the city outskirts: “It’s not like this is our first year of war, is it?”
Nowhere is this civil defence competence more evident than Kherson. Despite drones threatening the highway out of the city, supplies get in: there’s a well-stocked supermarket behind chipboard doors. People can do their shopping with a protective measures protection: tall gabions protect the bus stops, and concrete bunkers, some spattered with shrapnel marks, stand on street corners.
Parks director Volodymyr Tsiktor was recently in Estonia, sharing some of this expertise with partners there. “We came to tell them what they need to do now – protecting critical infrastructure, practicing response plans.”
“People basically didn’t understand how it’s possible to live in Kherson. And they don’t quite understand that the same could happen to them too,” Tsiktor said, adding that despite the Baltic states’ proximity to Russia, “they all hope they’ll be protected, that NATO will come with a big summit”. With a wry smile, he suggested they prepare for the worst by learning from his city.
ENDS
