Kherson by night: On the frontlines in two worlds

Reading Time: 16 minutes

The deep bass whoomph of outgoing artillery is enough to keep me on the edge of my guesthouse seat—a place that gets no business outside of NGOs and the like visiting Kherson. The crackle, fizz, and loud thump of incoming munitions, on the other hand, can make you jump. These explosions are close enough to rattle the windows and make the room shake.

We entered the town at night for reasons of safety—not so much for ourselves but for the host of the establishment where Greg and Zhenya often stay when delivering aid to the area. The city has its fair share of collaborators and drones buzzing in the night sky looking for such accumulations of people. The four of us are in a Ukrainian Nissan Navarro. Most similar pickups we have passed today have been foreign, often British, crowdfunded and donated from abroad to help the war effort.

The invisible city

We stop at a supermarket that you wouldn’t know was a supermarket, or anything at all right now. The city is a modern iteration of Blitz London, with every window blacked out or sealed tightly with layers of curtains and every street light switched off. The place is eerily quiet and completely dark.

“That’s a gas station next door,” said Greg, who runs an NGO getting various aid to frontline units. “And it’s open.”

“No way!” I could see nothing but a small green light coming perhaps from a pump. Quite how you would negotiate filling up your vehicle in these conditions is beyond me.

Before entering the supermarket, Greg’s charity partner Zhenya makes sure the lights are properly blacked out on the back and partially blacked out on the front. He tapes card over the central interactive screen on the dash. We will be driving the rest of the way with sidelights until the final few hundred meters in complete darkness. We won’t even look at our mobile phones as they emit too much light.

The supermarket summons us only with a crack of light under its automatic doors. The windows are completely boarded up with chipboard. Where most businesses have closed down in this once-bustling small city on the Dnipro River, chipboard merchants must be having their best years: every other window is boarded up.

But when the automatic doors are triggered, there is no hiding the bright lights of the supermarket beyond. It is a veritable Aladdin’s Cave—nothing unusual, but with its clean interior and stocked shelves in the context of a pitch-black neighborhood, the shop becomes something more. The security guard eyes us suspiciously as we purchase food for our rooms tonight.

There will be no restaurant meal this evening in Kherson, that much is certain.

Outside the bright interior of the supermarket, an old woman is standing with a small paper cup, begging for some sustenance. Zhenya stops to talk to her, to get an idea of her story, of who she is. Dirty and with the aroma of someone who genuinely lives on the streets, she proudly talks of how Ukraine will prevail. Greg and Zhenya take her back into the store to load her up with food.

The security guard side-eyes them again as they purchase food for a woman without a room for the night.

Eventually, we return to the truck. “Is it time to get the body armor on?” asks Pierre, a British humanitarian worker who normally works in Ukraine’s eastern town of Kramatorsk. He’s used to what happens next, joining us on this loop of the whole frontline with his own body armor and helmet.

It’s always better to be over-prepared and cautious when operating in a warzone. Wearing body armor unnecessarily has killed few people. But not wearing it? It’s not worth the risk.

I don the front and back plates for the very first time. Pierre and Greg help me put it on in the pitch black under the light of a head torch. I have primary progressive multiple sclerosis and my balance is not good at the best of times. Having these heavy weights thrown over my shoulders and have Pierre give me a friendly whack on my front with a “There you go Johnny,” and my online moniker “A Tippling Philosopher” briefly changes to “A Toppling Philosopher” as I wildly grab Pierre’s arm to stop me falling on my posterior.

It’s at these times that I wonder what I am doing here.

That I’ve not been nervous since being in Ukraine is testament to the care and thought given by Greg and Zhenya as they have organized this trip around Ukraine for us. And yet, when the weight of those plates sandwiches my upper body, and the helmet is clipped tightly around my face, I can’t help but feel a sense of tension. The protective gear just naturally evokes an increase in danger level.

Things have just got serious.

When we are finally prepped, vehicle and bodies, we get back in the pickup for the last leg. We travel first by sidelights alone, and then for the final tw this o hundred meters, Greg alights and walks us to the guesthouse gate, the Nissan feeling its way blindly in the darkness.

Kherson can feel like a ghost town in the day, but at night, the term takes on a whole new meaning. If you’re afraid of the dark, this is not the place to be. Whoomphs and thumps punctuate a deadly silence. We were lucky on the first night—the artillery activity was fairly light. But on the second night, munitions are being slung onto both sides of the Dnipro with seemingly wild abandon.

Sometimes, on the second night, a series of explosions thud into some target nearby, somewhere. Two and then another three crackling booms in quick succession. Rinse and repeat. Each time, the room shakes, as does my constitution.

Fighting the good fight

My noise-cancelling headphones do a surprisingly good job of cutting out most of the background noises of war as I commit to some more online content for my YouTube channel. My internet community has driven me to be here, fighting my own war in the information spaces. My body has its own battle scars (the “sclerosis” in multiple sclerosis means “scars” or “lesions” in my brain) that mean I could never fight in any battle on a frontline even if I wanted to. Instead, my way of fighting is with words. My enemies, still the Russians, exist as trolls and bots, narratives and propaganda in the virtual world.

I cannot offer light to the darkness of Kherson, but I can offer enlightenment to the corners of the world where the insidious creeping murk of disinformation has taken hold.

As I prepared for this trip, and even at many points along the way, I have questioned why I am here. I guess we all have a desire to matter in some way. To family and friends. To classrooms and colleagues. Or, in my case, at least to some large extent, to the world that watches my online content and reads my articles.

But mattering for me is not a personal desire for validation but more about making a positive difference to the world in a medium that I can affect. It’s a moral obligation.

The Kremlin has entire buildings, such as the infamous “Internet Research Agency” in St. Petersburg, brimming with employees being directed—being paid as a job—to spread falsehoods and amplify narratives that benefit Russia around the world. They hammer wedges into cultural cracks and political divides to form ideological chasms. All of this confusion and discord only help Putin realize his geopolitical strategic objectives.

It seems evident that every other divisive handle on Twitter is a Russian troll, platformed by a useful idiot (I’m looking at you, Elon Muskovite) who is himself doing Putin’s bidding. Sadly enough, the West has no answer. We don’t employ teams of internet trolls (is there a word for a good troll entity, a geopolitical Shrek?) to counter these narratives with a positive ideal of what democratic life could be like in Russia without Putin as a dictator.

We will have covered 4,000 kilometers on this road trip by the time we return to Kyiv. I have learned so much from a hugely privileged position of speaking to primary sources in a variety of military and civilian contexts. Every leg from village to town, every night in a guestroom or a humanitarian center, is an opportunity for me to jump online and relay my experiences. I record videos and write articles at every opportunity. Including in a Kherson guestroom a few kilometers from the frontline. It’s amazing what internet access can facilitate.

This is why I am here. The truth and reality of what is going on demands amplification. I am not a New York Times reporter tasked with some sensationalist story to get clickbait hits. This has been observed throughout the latter part of this war with many mainstream outlets either reporting some success against the odds or more likely presenting some sense of overwhelming doom and gloom to satisfy the audience’s hunger.

But that’s not how a philosopher ends up reporting.

Epistemology is the study of truth and knowledge. When “epistemic security” is so obviously threatened, truth and accuracy are the whetstones upon which I sharpen my rhetorical sword.

That first night, even as I looked at the comments on my channel’s page to the first video released about my experiences in Kherson, from Kherson, the Russian trolls were active. They exploded onto the threads with successive thuds of unjustified skepticism and attempted to spread their influence with a heavy machine gun fire of lies. Of course, I couldn’t help getting drawn into wars of words.

I have now got to the point where ideals of freedom of speech, of allowing people to say what they want so that there can be good-faith dialogue, is, in these times, counterproductive. When it is someone’s actual job to spread lies and sow poisonous seeds of disinformation, then I have no problem in shutting down those comments. It is the air defense to those delusional cruise missiles being fired directly from St Petersburg or Moscow.

This is war. And I’m presently on the frontline in both the real and virtual worlds.

On a one-way ticket

Driving out of the city provides depressing vistas. Broken windows, boarded-up shopfronts, pockmarked roads, and solemn-faced men and women resiliently holding onto their daily lives.

Men and women. For you can see no children here. At least, we didn’t. This is certainly a sign of war. Kherson is no place for the young. Instead, wartorn settlements are more often the home to those who have nowhere else to go—the old, the vulnerable (mentally and physically), those without friends and family to rely on, those without prospects. Such people are the last to leave frontline towns and villages.

Kherson is not the sort of city where prospects and potentials are realized.

Instead, it is a place in terminal decline. When it was liberated, the inhabitants rejoiced in a euphoria that saw President Zelenskyy risk visiting to add to the sense of moment. Sadly, the newborn prospects and nascent potentials were short-lived. The Russians may have ceded the city back to the Ukrainians but they soon went about making sure that the Ukrainians could not make use of it. Daily barrages of deadly munitions have chipped away at Kherson’s infrastructure, its houses, its ability to stand proud and Ukrainian.

Economic systems don’t flourish easily in war. When young families and workers move out as shells rain down, then businesses struggle. As businesses close, jobs are lost. As jobs are lost, those people have less money to spend in the remaining business concerns. It’s a vicious cycle that leaves many of those left unemployed and dependent on aid.

It is a heartbreaking scenario because, when walking around the neighborhood in which we were staying, I can’t help but think that Kherson would be a wonderful place to stay in times of peace and prosperity. Being on the river, it has an almost coastal appeal. It is the gateway to Crimea, a crossroad of sorts. Options that are now sadly truncated.

We find a rare open coffee shop and stop in for a breakfast beverage. My tea is surprisingly delicious. Before we enter, though, Zhenya gets talking to a local who is passing by. The man ushers him around the corner to show him the dilapidated environs of his abode. He is unemployed (and I wonder whether he has been drinking) and is vocal in his complaints of not having received aid for two weeks now. In the coffee shop, three men come in to order some refreshments. They are dressed in council overalls. It appears that the few jobs that remain are underwritten by the local government: A desperate attempt to keep the place running and stimulate the local economy.

Kherson is a city that is short on hope, and its last vestiges dwindle with each shell or mortar bomb that lands in its already crippled streets. One wonders what future lies ahead for a city hiding behind a river and caught between two armies that appear unable to significantly shift the lines one way or the other. The jubilation felt at its liberation by the Ukrainian army showed you where the city’s heart really lies: There was no such spontaneous outpouring of positive emotion when Kherson was initially occupied (or “liberated,” as the Russians claim). When the Russians came, there was open protest.

Not quite how Putin envisaged his special military operation, a three-day brisk removal of the Ukrainian government’s, and installation of a pop at one, and a couple of weeks to clean up. After all, parade uniforms were found alongside meager rations (to last only five days) in abandoned APCs in the first week of the war. There appeared to be no Plan B for Putin in what might eventually be seen of as one of the world’s most costly miscalculations.

Two years later, there have been no parades as a full-scale war continues to grind away at both nations’ young adults.

State terrorism

In times of such challenge for the residents of the riverside settlement, the battle for hearts and minds is as important as ever.

The evidence from daily events here shows that the Russians are not winning the hearts and minds of those who remain in Kherson but, rather, the occupiers are trying to crush those hearts and extinguish those minds.

An important distinction that separates the city from the other settlements that I have visited near the front line is an almost complete lack of military personnel within it. In every other village and town, every other person dons a military uniform. Here, they are absent. There is no strategic value for the military being inside the city’s boundaries and mixing with the civilians. It is not the place for a howitzer battery or a radar unit. That equipment sits in the fields or tree lines or within villages throughout the regions.

When the Russians hit Kherson on a daily basis with artillery shells and mortar bombs, one is left perplexed. There is no military value to striking targets within the city. Indeed, it appears that there are no real targets. It is indiscriminate. The day that we left Kherson was a bad day for the residents as a bus was hit and other civilian infrastructure shelled. The images of previous strikes on the city, such as those on bus stops, leaving innocent civilians killed remain with me.

Simply put, every day in Kherson amounts to a Russian war crime. Probably several. Every strike on the city is an attack on civilians and not an attack on the military. This is state terrorism. The intention is to terrorize those who were once jubilant, those who chose to stay, to terrorize them into leaving. If the Russians can’t have Kherson, then no one can.

There is a deep-seated vengeance to everything that the Kremlin does in this war.

Peaceful? A museum of violence

As we leave the city, with its arrays of chipboarded windows and car dealerships devoid of cars or dealers, with its remaining market stalls offering scant retail solace, with its buildings either empty, destroyed, or secreting away those who are still too hopeful or too desperate, we drive to a nearby village. The place is called “Myrne,” the Ukrainian word for “peaceful.” There is painful irony with this that strikes at my heart.

As we approach the village, the fields alternate between the perfectly plowed and famously black fertile Ukrainian farmland soil, and areas of scrubland. I ask Greg what the little white tags are that flutter in the light breeze, attached to rods. “Those indicate minds or potential mines,” he explains. “The fields have been de-mined, but there’s a lot of land here that remains incredibly dangerous.” When we stop to take some pictures, Greg warns us not to step more than a meter off the road.

Too many limbs and lives are lost to mines.

At last count, some 28% of gross on oblast has been de-mined. The process of ridding Ukraine from these munitions, in places buried with insane density, will take decades and more. Wars like this tend to last a lot longer than any peace negotiations would otherwise indicate.

We are there to deliver aid to a child (Mykhailo, whose name I have changed) who lives in a house that is undergoing repairs. Outside the house opposite, there is a pile of old and broken windows, having been replaced by new ones in several of the buildings we can see. There is a placard attached to the fence of Mykhailo’s house to indicate that these repairs have been funded by the EU via Czechia. It is encouraging to see some structural assistance make a tangible difference. Elsewhere, there are blue tarps covering the roofs of a number of houses, each with the logo of Samaritan’s Purse. The bright blue of these coverings stands in stark contrast to the grim grays of the mounds of nearby rubble.

The combined work of government institutions and humanitarian organizations are incredibly welcome here that one can be forgiven for thinking it is a drop in an ocean of needs.

Looking out of the window of the pickup that bounces around the potholes of the road, the ravaged landscape paints a grim picture of villages upended by war.

Every other house here in this once-occupied area has been massively damaged. Many can no longer be defined as “houses.” Pierre knew we were visiting this family today: This was his own personal mission, a chance to matter and make the world a better place in his own meaningful way. He had seen videos of Greg and Zhenya help this young child before. The man with whom I a have been sharing the back seat of the Nissan for the past week or so had bought a tablet specifically for the boy. For several years now, in regions near the front line, all children have had to learn online. There has been no attendance at school because the gathering of that many people is just too dangerous. A single shell could blot out the lives of thirty children in one fell swoop.

A whole generation of children are having their childhood stolen from them.

Pierre and I snap pictures of Mykhailo sitting on the huge casing of an S-300 missile. This is a surface-to-air missile used by the Russians, here in its secondary mode. Instead of being fired into the air to take down a Ukrainian aircraft, they use them to fire at targets on the ground. Unfortunately, though, these missiles used in this way take a ballistic trajectory and are very difficult to shoot down by air defenses given the speed and angle of their terminal phase.

I cannot for the life of me think why such a missile would be shot into this peaceful village.

Mykhailo’s father shows us a whole array of missiles and pieces of equipment he has picked up off of the neighboring fields: Russian Grad and Smerch missiles, an American air defense missile head, fuzes, a door to a military vehicle, some explosive reactive armor (or ERA, as it is known). This is an Aladdin’s Cave of a very different kind and one that shouldn’t be sitting in the middle of the village where children play and chickens peck. There are no golden trinkets, or even Kherson groceries—there are nothing but rusty remnants of weapons of destruction, collection pieces in a museum of violence.

A tale of two cities

An hour and a half away, we are grabbing a coffee (I’m a Brit, mine’s a tea) in the city of Mykolaiv. It feels like a different world. People bustle, and businesses are busy. A man warbles from a microphone and speaker outside a mall, trying to attract trade (but almost certainly doing the opposite). We take our refreshments sitting in a beautifully kitsch establishment that doubles as a coffee museum, a place of culture.

Here, the four of us are privileged to have the opportunity to talk to a military contact. We swap ideas about how the war is going, sifting through each other minds, trying to better understand this senseless war from perspectives both inside and outside of the country.

Mykolaiv is a place that has its fair share of missile and drone attention, but right now, our experiences are a world away from those keenly felt in Kherson. There is a genuine worry that the further from the front one travels, the further away the war seems. People can, to a degree, maintain a sense of normality. It is a war happening somewhere else to someone else. Crucially, this is a phenomenon that is magnified outside of the country.

After four months of delay, the US Congress has still not delivered a serious aid package to Ukraine as the war has, for some Trumpian reason, become a partisan affair. Reagan is turning in his grave. This is a war happening somewhere else, so very far away, to some other people, so irrelevant to us.

This last element is dangerous thinking that can undermine a century of geopolitical chess moves and play.

However, every few nights, with the explosions of Shahed drones and Kh-101 cruise missiles in Mykolaiv and Dnipropretrovsk, in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, there are ever so dangerous reminders that this is a war for everyone in Ukraine, intended to affect everyone in Ukraine.

I see it as my job to continue to sound the reminder that this is also our war, too. I’ve spoken to enough Ukrainians now who forcefully make this claim. We are at an inflection point in modern history, witnessing a re-emergence of the Cold War as an increasingly hot one, and the more we dither, the more Putin and an axis of evil profit. It is a zero-sum game of global and existential proportions.

Time is running short, but not for Putin. He plays the long game. For Ukraine, there are only so many bus shelters left in Kherson, only so many market stalls to stock, before the last grain in the sands of time tumbles. Kherson knows it and the world needs to sit up and pay attention. The silence between explosions in the Kherson might, the quietness of the neighborhood streets around the guesthouse before the curtained bus trundles by, the dreary inactivity in the foreground of now-drab shuttered buildings—all of this screams at me, a strangled and desperate cry to the world to keep looking and to start really doing.

It’s not long before the next shell lands and finds its mark. Any mark. It’s an attempt to stifle that cry.

Every explosion is the sound of another precious life lost. This side of the river, those aren’t in endless supply.

***

Jonathan MS Pearce is presently traveling the frontlines of the war in Ukraine to report on the conflict. As a liberal atheist philosopher, he is reaching across the aisle to journey with an NGO run by an American Christian pastor and his Ukrainian charity counterpart. Together, overcoming such differences (and with a number of other YouTube channels), they are working hard to report on the war accurately while supporting Ukrainians both in the military and humanitarian sectors. You can donate to their efforts here. They believe this is one of the biggest geopolitical challenges in the world right now that the world can ill afford to ignore.