A double line of concrete pyramids winds through rolling farmland on the outskirts of the city of Kherson. The pyramids, anti-tank fortifications known as dragon’s teeth, are a sign of new defenses Ukraine is building in the south against an anticipated Russian offensive.
In a nearby town, residents focused on a more immediate task: collecting donations of construction materials.
People in the Kherson region have been slowly rebuilding their homes and livelihoods since a Ukrainian counteroffensive forced Russian troops out of the area west of the Dnieper River 18 months ago and ended a brutal occupation.
Many have fixed their roofs, windows and doors, but as they begin to plant crops and tend their gardens, they are preparing for another Russian attack.
“Anything is possible,” said Oksana, who stopped weeding the flower bed in front of her house. Like most people interviewed for this article, she only gave her name for fear of Russian retaliation. “There is talk of a major attack between May and June. We are reading that they will recover Kherson.”
His two sons joined the army after the Russians were expelled and complained that they lacked weapons, he said. “It’s very difficult,” she said of the situation on the front lines.
For those who lived through eight months of Russian occupation, the memories have fueled fears that the Russians will be tougher a second time.
Oksana told how her family had lived under the gun of Russian soldiers housed across the street and how her husband was almost killed when he was wounded in the neck by a shell explosion.
“It was terrifying,” he said. Her face crumpled as she began to cry.
Down the street, a veteran soldier, Oleksandr Kuprych, 63, keeps a shotgun in his greenhouse and said he would use it if the Russians returned.
“I will send away the women and children,” he said. “And I will be here. “I have my trench and my rifle.”
In his house he also has the helmet of a Russian soldier damaged by a long cut from an axe.
Kuprych said he had killed the soldier with an ax and buried him and his rifle in the tree line above the village. The soldier was one of two who had shot at villagers who were trying to climb a hill to find a cell phone signal.
“I was so angry that I put all my strength into that ax blow,” he said.
When the Ukrainian soldiers recaptured the village, he showed them where he had buried the soldier. They took the body and the rifle, but let Mr. Kuprych keep the helmet. The episode was written in a book about Kherson’s resistance under occupation.
Kherson’s rural communities are resilient but highly degraded. Some frontline villages are so devastated that only a few families have been able to return and fix their homes. Electricity and gas are back on in most places, but water has to be trucked to some villages. Irrigation canals remain destroyed, leaving farms and businesses largely abandoned.
There are few jobs and most families live on handouts. International charities have provided residents with cows and cash to buy chickens and seeds.
Some of the largest villages, such as Myrolyubivka, are filled with families displaced from frontline communities. Blue tarps are placed over damaged roofs and orchards are carefully tilled.
However, these villages, less than 32 kilometers from the front line, remain targets of Russian rockets and bombs. Myrolyubivka recently completed a large underground basement for schoolchildren to gather twice a week for classes and games. But before work on the basement was completed, Russian missiles hit the local hospital, demolishing an entire wing and several houses.
“Let them die, you bastards,” Tamara, 71, said of the Russian troops as she pushed her bicycle down the street. “I was tending my garden and the shells were flying back and forth over my head, and it’s still boom, boom, all the time.”
In another village, community leader Lyubov recounted a litany of destruction caused by the 2022 fighting. “The school is damaged, the kindergarten is damaged, the house of culture is damaged and the hospital is destroyed,” he said. . He asked that his last name and the name of the village not be published to avoid being targeted by new Russian missiles.
The United Nations and international charities have provided building materials to residents to repair more than 100 houses in the village, but 50 were beyond repair, he said. “We’re waiting for money for that,” she said.
Russian bombing is not the only source of difficulties. The destruction of the Kakhovka dam last year, which caused widespread flooding in the Kherson region and the draining of the Kakhovka reservoir, has lowered the water table and left some villages with infected or dry wells.
There are hundreds of hectares full of mines and unexploded ordnance. The fields are abandoned and white ribbons fluttering among the stalks of weeds warn of the existence of mines.
Authorities say it will take years to remove the mines, but some farmers say they cannot afford to wait. Some have paid private contractors to clear their fields. Others have begun sweeping their fields with a metal detector.
“We found anti-tank mines and anti-personnel mines,” said Oleh, a 35-year-old farmer and mechanic, as he leaned under the engine of his tractor. “It’s the same every day. Demining and then planting.”
Their town is on the front line and is one of the most severely damaged. Only a few families and only 10 children live there, because there is no school, said his wife, Maryna, 33.
Beneath the physical destruction lie deep wounds caused by the occupation.
A dilapidated two-story house on the outskirts of the village of Pravdyne served as a Russian position during the occupation. Packs of Russian cigarettes and a ration packet were scattered on the ground among broken glass and debris. Beyond them were burned armored vehicles.
At the beginning of the invasion, Russian troops killed six guards of an agricultural company and a 15-year-old girl accompanying them, blowing up the house where they were staying. Researchers exhumed their bodies after the occupation and found two of them. she had been shot in the head, according to details released by the Kherson regional police. The filing cited a man serving in the Russian Marine Corps for his role in the murders.
Many families have men on the front lines or have lost relatives in the war. “Who will answer for it?” said Naira, a psychologist whose husband of her niece died in the fighting.
While a proportion of the urban population in southern and eastern Ukraine has Russian roots, the rural population is overwhelmingly Ukrainian. Few villagers worked for the Russian administration during the occupation. Some left with Russian troops. Others were accused of collaboration and imprisoned by Ukrainian authorities, said farmer Viktor Klets, 71.
But in the rest of the community divisions were manifesting through petty jealousies and complaints about the compensation amounts people were allocated, he said.
There were still Russian sympathizers in the village, but for now they were keeping quiet, Klets said. There was solidarity among those who survived the occupation together, but others who left and later returned accused them of stealing their homes, he said.
“The war changed people,” said Lena, a 45-year-old neighbor, standing next to him. “She made people meaner.”
As for the future, villagers often quote the same proverb. “Life is like a long field,” Klets said. “Anything could happen along the way.”
Yuri Shyvala contributed reporting from Kherson, Ukraine.