In the jungle of Kherson. A report from the city of survivors

Kherson, from our correspondent. There’s no need to stay silent; noise does no harm on the streets of Kherson; drones don’t listen, drones see. So you have to hide, duck under the trees, park under the trees, rest under the trees. It feels like the jungle, yet it is a city – it is Kherson – and the lads of the 34th Brigade are its eyes and ears. They roam the streets with rifles in hand, talking to other groups of soldiers stationed in different corners – like them, hidden under the trees – sharing information: the drone has passed, the drone has struck, the drone has been shot down. Everyone is tracking the drones – either with their eyes, their ears, or with the ‘Chujka’ (the seagull), the portable detector for FPV aircraft. The soldiers monitor the flight path and pass on information. The aim is to shoot down the drones before they shoot them down or crash into civilians on foot, on bikes, in cars, or into a house. The Russian drone entering Kherson’s territory follows one rule: strike and never return. Obviously, it is the pilot – the soldier stationed kilometres away who flies the drone – who chooses what to strike. He sees everything; he knows the faces of Kherson’s defenders and their emblem, a lynx with shaggy fur; he sees them die and, in the moment before the drone explodes, he sees the Ukrainian soldiers trying to take it down, ‘just as happened to Misha yesterday – he kept firing right to the very end’, and through the fibre-optic drone that killed him, a soldier on the other side of the front line watched him die.

This is the flesh-and-blood reality of the drone war, which is not just about distance, plastic, Starlink, tiny cameras and engines, but involves a great deal of bloodshed; it is anything but cost-free, and no one knows this better than the 34th Brigade. Serhii often walks the streets of Kherson; he’s armed with a rifle to shoot down drones. He knows the city very well – he studied it and saw it before the Russians arrived to destroy it. He walks calmly; he isn’t the drone specialist, and besides, he’s easily distracted at the moment: his leave is due soon, and he’ll be spending a few weeks in Italy, in Bergamo. “Of course, the trains are expensive over there,” he says. The real specialists are Iuri and Koplja, who are waiting for us under the trees at a certain spot in the city. A very close explosion is heard: “It had spotted you,” says Iuri, referring to a drone that had tracked our arrival; it had taken an interest in us before we vanished swiftly and unawares beneath the tree canopy. The Russian pilot on the other side of the front line had then given up on us and set about looking for something else, his eyes fixed on the residential streets. The search didn’t last long; before long he saw nothing more, and his drone was shot down before it could fulfil its design purpose: to strike. Iuri is the tallest, “the tallest and the wisest. He really does have the answer to every question,” jokes Serhii. Iuri really does know everything; he is the living memory of every downed drone. He’s like an antenna scanning the city’s streets; at one point he disappears, only to return holding a Russian fibre-optic drone that had been shot down moments earlier. In his hands it looks like a tiny toy, too small to do any harm, too much like a trinket to be lethal. Yet it kills and is actually quite heavy, but this is how Iuri carries on with the war – as a matter of habit, without fanfare; he’s here in Kherson, shooting down any drone he spots. Koplja is a nom de guerre; it means ‘drop’. The reddish-haired soldier with a round, friendly face clutches the Chujka in his hands; he’s the one in charge of interpreting this device, which signals the arrival of certain types of drones – unfortunately not the fibre-optic ones. Koplja listens to the Chujka; if something doesn’t add up, he speaks to the other teams stationed around the city: the detector can be wrong, but his comrades aren’t. He cannot tolerate wearing his helmet; he removes it as soon as possible, putting it back on only when Serhii reprimands him: “Your helmet!” Serhii pays attention to discipline; it is part of his job – he is the brigade’s spokesperson.

The teams stationed in Kherson do not remain stationary in one part of the city, waiting under the canopy of trees; they follow routes throughout the day, patrolling – they do not wait for the drone to come to them; they, too, go to the drones. Yurii starts walking ahead of everyone; it is difficult to keep up with him at that brisk pace. He is followed by Koplja with his Chujka, and bringing up the rear is Serhii, who looks around. In recent days, the drones have burnt down a small park in the city centre; there’s an abandoned restaurant and a children’s playground. “My university used to be back there,” Serhii points out; he studied journalism. In Kherson, people speak in the past tense – a lot of “was”, very little “is” anymore. The restaurant was, the playground was, the university was. The war is. Nobody sets foot in the little park anymore; only soldiers carry out their reconnaissance. Civilians living in the area walk briskly because the trees have been burnt down and there are no anti-drone nets here – it’s too exposed. It’s no longer a park; it’s become a firing range. The people of Kherson live with the risk without even asking themselves what it is anymore. Knowing that every day could be their last isn’t even a thought that crosses their minds; they simply live their lives, walking through the urban jungle – some even sit on the benches. In Kherson, fear isn’t talked about; it’s a feeling that is simply lived.

Everyone greets the soldiers with a nod, without speaking; people only speak when they have something to ask. “What did they hit?” At the roundabout leading into the town centre, a moving car was hit; a passer-by who heard the explosion asks for information, knowing that the soldiers will know. Even civilians live with their ears pricked out to identify the drones; they hear the hum of the engine and start to hide or try to ignore it. Sometimes they report the noise to the soldiers when they meet them in the jungle of trees and anti-drone nets. “‘Lads, whose is that?’ asks a man, vaguely pointing to a spot in the sky, in a fanciful attempt to pinpoint a sound. ‘That’s ours,’ says Koplja, and that ‘nash’ – ours – is an adjective that here in Ukraine brings hope and reassurance. It’s the magic word; it’s the opposite of fear; it’s a sweet sound. Anything that refers to the first-person plural is reassuring and welcoming. Since 24 February 2022, Ukraine has been a ‘we’, and here in Kherson they know this all too well after living under occupation for eight months; they know perfectly well the feeling of relief one feels when being welcomed back by ‘our people’; they experienced that sense of lightness when the news spread that ‘our people’ were arriving to liberate the city and the enemy had been driven back. It is a chorus of ‘us’ and ‘our people’ against ‘them’ – those on the other side of the River Dnipro, who watch through drones, who watch people die from a distance just as they watched Misha die.

At the far end of the park there is a bench, with a military jacket draped over it. It is worn and full of holes. It looks as though it has been there for months, but it was only placed there the day before, when Misha died. His blood is still on the ground, a pool that has congealed with the soil. It’s hot in Kherson today; the rain hasn’t come to wash away the traces of the young man’s death, and his fellow soldiers seem to prefer it that way. They will continue to pass by the scene of Misha’s final moments – the last shots fired, his last attempts to shoot down the drone. They want to see what remains of his selfless struggle against the enemy from afar. They look at his jacket, they look at the pool of blood, they look at death. They contemplate it. “He took the mission very seriously; he kept firing at the drone right until the very end.” Until it exploded right on top of him. On the ground lies the drone – or what remains of it – tangled up in the fibre-optic cables. Misha hadn’t noticed it arriving; fibre-optic drones make no noise, and not even the Chujka can identify them. He’d started firing at it, but it was too late. “Look at the cables,” says Yuri. “They don’t snap if you pull them. To cut them, you have to do this,” and he begins to form a loop with the cable, pulling one end downwards until it snaps.

After the park, you reach the river; you can hear the Dnipro flowing but cannot see it. In November 2022, when the Ukrainians liberated Kherson, the Russians took up positions on the opposite bank and the river became inaccessible. From that moment on, Moscow decided that Kherson must be destroyed; it demolished the town hall, targeted the churches – including the one from which the soldiers, before withdrawing, had removed the remains of Grigory Potemkin, the lover of Tsarina Catherine II, who had been sent to found New Russia – and attacked the theatre, the market and the empty schools. Every symbol of the city – of its cultural, religious and civic life – is now inaccessible. The drones arrive, skimming the water’s surface to avoid detection; as soon as they cross the Dnipro, they suddenly rise. The hunt begins; sometimes it is an ambush. The areas closest to the river are therefore the most dangerous; it is vital for the soldiers to patrol them because the sooner the drones are shot down, the more lives can be saved. Yuri is always at the front of the line; we walk along a dirt track. Misha’s bench is now behind us, but we’re still in the area right by the Dnipro, and he – the eyes and ears of the lads from the 34th Brigade – is the first to sense a drone passing overhead. He signals for us to find cover; the only option is a rather scrawny tree. “Quick, quick,” he says, getting ready to take aim. The drone can’t see us; the soldier from Moscow doesn’t know we’re there. Koplja signals to his comrades stationed elsewhere in the city the direction the drone is heading.

Their communications form a protective shield, a dome that tracks trajectories; the soldiers of the 34th are the network beneath the anti-drone network, which fails to cover the whole of Kherson. A buzzing sound can be heard; the ears quickly get used to the warning signal and are the first to react. “Nash, nash,” Koplja reassures us, uttering the magic word. We let ‘our’ drone fly overhead as it searches for its own kind to shoot down. “Sometimes the direction is enough to tell – theirs never fly towards the river; they never return home. Ours, on the other hand, go out to look for them and move all over the place,” Koplja professionally shares his knowledge, then he too picks up a strand of fibre-optic cable from the road – Kherson is full of them – and demonstrates, just as Iuri had done a short while earlier, how it snaps. It would be rather rude to point out that the trick has already been revealed; and, after all, watching it being done for a second time isn’t even boring.

“Have you heard of Verona coffee?” asks Serhii, perhaps still thinking about his holidays in Italy. “It’s lovely. It even has Venetian masks inside.” Walking through the streets of Kherson, it’s hard to see the connection between the armed mission we’re on, the drones we’re hunting and that are hunting us, the constant explosions, and any old ‘Caffè Verona’ – of which there must be a thousand around the world. The connection, however, is a physical one: there is indeed a ‘Verona’ café in Kherson, and, amidst the damaged buildings and the residents asking for directions regarding the drones’ flight paths—after hours spent talking only of fibre-optic cables, brigades, protective barriers, one almost feels unprepared to discover that the Caffè Verona in Kherson does not belong to the category of ‘was’, like the burnt-out playground or Serhii’s destroyed university, but to that of ‘is’. Caffè Verona ‘is’; it’s situated very close to the river and even has an outdoor seating area under a wooden canopy with a few chairs. Iuri, with a pride that pierces through his impassivity, approaches the door of a place that appears to be closed. Instead, he opens it, anticipating the element of surprise: ‘It’s open!’

Inside, it’s all dark; small bedside lamps illuminate only the tables furthest from the windows. The chairs are made of wood, and perfect Venetian masks hang on the walls, without any artificial effect; the barista smiles from behind the counter, moving about his gleaming coffee machine. He knows Iuri, Serhii and Koplja very well by now; he has a long, immaculately groomed beard, the king of a rediscovered hipster haunt in Kherson. There are holes and burn marks along the walls; the drones did not spare the Verona café, yet the barista has never left this spot. “I was open even during the occupation; the Russians would come in, wanting to pay in roubles, but I didn’t want roubles. After a while, everything started to run out,” he says without drama or emotion, as if recalling just another day, now over, not even worth too many words. “Milk, for example – we couldn’t buy it any more, so we started getting it directly from the farmers”. He advises against sitting near the windows; the darkness offers protection, and in this candlelit corner one must feel safe. It is an unreal dimension, an imagined Verona; then the door opens again and we return to Kherson, to walking beneath the trees, beneath the barbed wire, amidst the gunfire, amidst the explosions, where every step is a gamble, but you have to take it, because in Kherson people live, drink coffee, go shopping with death watching over you from above, and life is a medal bestowed upon the survivors.

Iuri and Koplja are staying; their tour is over, they’ll start another one, but their home is Kherson. To leave the city of survivors, you have to drive very fast – at motorway speeds right through the city centre – to shake off drones and second thoughts. One of the images greeting those arriving in or leaving Kherson is a giant photograph of a soldier clutching a watermelon, the region’s delicacy. On the roads outside the city, once the petrol stations – reduced to ashes – have run out all the way to Mykolaïv, the roads are full of farmers, the verges overflowing with watermelons. Summer in southern Ukraine has a distinct flavour, a celebration of survival. “The female watermelon is sweeter,” says a farmer’s wife as she walks barefoot amongst the fruit piled high in her pick-up truck, searching for signs of femininity on the dark green rind. She, too, has survived; everyone along this road has.