Fleeing the shelling, civilians on Saturday left the southern Ukrainian city, whose capture they had celebrated just weeks earlier.
The Kherson exodus came as Ukraine solemnly remembered the Stalin-era famine and sought to ensure that Russia’s war in Ukraine did not deprive the rest of the world of its vital food exports.
A line of trucks, vans and cars, some pulling trailers or carrying pets and other belongings, stretched for a kilometer or more on the outskirts of Kherson.
Days of intense shelling by Russian forces sparked a bitter exodus: many civilians were happy to have their city back, but complained that they could not stay.
Cars are seen leaving Kherson on Saturday. (Bernat Armang/Associated Press)
“It’s a pity that we are leaving our home,” Yevgeny Yankov said as the van he was in moved forward.
“We are free now, but we have to leave because there is shelling and there are casualties among the population.
“Everything was on fire”
Popping her head from behind, Svetlana Romanivna added: “We went through real hell. Our neighborhood was on fire, it was a nightmare. Everything was on fire.”
Emily Fori, emergency projects coordinator for the aid group Médecins Sans Frontières in Ukraine, said the evacuation of 400 patients from the Kherson psychiatric hospital, which is located near a power plant and the front lines, had begun on Thursday and was planned to continue in the next days.
A damaged house in Dnipro, Ukraine, is pictured on Saturday after a Russian missile strike. (Mykola Sinelnikov/Reuters)
Ukraine has faced a fierce onslaught of Russian artillery fire and drone attacks in recent days, with shelling particularly intense in Kherson. Often, the barrage primarily targets infrastructure, although civilian casualties are reported. Repair crews across the country scrambled to restore heating, electricity and water supplies that were completely destroyed.
Russia has stepped up its attacks on critical infrastructure after suffering setbacks on the battlefield. A prominent Russian nationalist said on Saturday that the Russian army does not have enough doctors, in a rare public acknowledgment of problems in the army.
Meanwhile, in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is overseeing a busy day of diplomacy, welcoming several European Union leaders for meetings and hosting an “International Food Security Summit” to discuss food security and agricultural exports from the country.
The prime ministers of Belgium, Poland and Lithuania attended, as did the president of Hungary, and many others participated via video.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmykhal said that Ukraine – despite its own financial difficulties – had allocated 900 million hryvnias (US$24 million) to buy corn for Yemen, Sudan, Kenya and Nigeria.
Zelensky said Ukraine is working to transport its grain on ships and to countries that need it.
“Our goal is ambitious and concrete – to save at least five million people from starvation,” he said.
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The reminder of food supplies was timely: Ukrainians were marking the 90th anniversary of the start of the “Gladomora,” or Great Famine, which killed more than three million people in two years as the Soviet government under dictator Joseph Stalin confiscated food and grain supplies and deported many Ukrainians.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz marked the celebration by drawing parallels with the impact of the war in Ukraine on global markets. Exports from Ukraine have resumed under a UN-brokered deal, but are still far from pre-war levels, pushing up world prices.
“We cannot tolerate what we are witnessing”
“Today we are united in the demand that hunger must never again be used as a weapon,” Scholz said in a video address.
“That is why we cannot tolerate what we are witnessing: The worst global food crisis in years, with appalling consequences for millions of people – from Afghanistan to Madagascar, from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa.”
He said that Germany, together with the UN World Food Program, will provide an additional 15 million euros for additional grain supplies from Ukraine.
Scholz spoke as a cross-party group of lawmakers in Germany sought to pass a parliamentary resolution next week to recognize the 1930s famine as “genocide”.
Last year, Ukraine and Russia provided about 30 percent of the world’s exported wheat and barley, 20 percent of corn and more than 50 percent of sunflower oil, the United Nations said.
Kyiv’s water supply has been restored
In a post on the Telegram social network on Saturday, Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko said more than 3,000 specialists for a local utility company continued to work “round the clock” and had managed to restore heat to more than 90 percent of residential buildings.
Although about a quarter of Kyiv residents were without electricity, he said water had been restored to everyone in the city.
People use their mobile phones as lamps to browse goods at a sporting goods store during a power outage in Kyiv on Saturday. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
The fight to restore power came as Belgian Prime Minister Alexandre De Croix met with Zelensky in Kyiv on Saturday.
“This could be a difficult winter,” he said, alluding to Belgium’s contribution of generators and support for schools and hospitals in Ukraine, as well as military aid such as “fuel, machine guns, self-propelled artillery and so on.”
“And by standing here, we hope that we are giving you hope and resilience to fight through this difficult time.”
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