Where will Kherson’s freedom fighters go next?

When Vladimir Putin’s troops first invaded Kherson, they marched into Eugene Chykysh’s hipster coffee shop. ‘They all asked for cappuccinos with four sugars,’ Eugene told me. Later, another Kherson resident says that the soldiers who raided his house took ten kilos of sugar from him. Eugene is one of the few Ukrainians in Kherson who even talked to the Russians. Most people I speak to say they simply avoided them, staying indoors as much as they could, and venturing out only to buy groceries from the few shops still open. It was like lockdown on steroids, they say, and with no Netflix to pass the time because the Russians switched off the internet. Putin’s 30,000 troops withdrew a few days ago, but many residents have become so isolated that they’ve only just found out that the soldiers have gone. Fear of collaborators is another reason residents give for spending the past nine months indoors.