By Angus Watson, Ivan Watson, Olha Konovalova and Dan Hodge, CNN
Soldiers carrying firearms and grenades, looting personal property and fighting with other fighters to the point of armed clashes over their uncompromising profession in early March.
After living 4 months under Russian rule, farmer Andrei Halilyuk traveled on foot, by bus, by car and by rubber boat down a river to the Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih. Grandpa took 12 hours on roads full of landmines.
He calls the invaders ‘barbarians. ‘” There is no word for them,” he said, describing pro-Russian fighters from Donetsk occupying apartments.
“How is it possible for young people to be there if they are drunk with guns and grenades in the village?How can a child see this?” Halilyuk asks.
The lack of a field among the hodgepodge of mercenaries, recruits, separatists and infantrymen that Russia relied on to attack Ukraine contributed to the chaos of its occupation. Halilyuk says that in his village, fighters from the Russian-friendly Donetsk People’s Republic opposed their Russian opposite. numbers while trying to borrow the car of a local man. The result was a violent armed argument between two teams believed to be on the same side.
“They almost shot others,” Haliluk says. They armed their weapons in opposition to others.
“And they came here to lose us. From whom?Do we ask you that?Did we ask you to come here?
Every day, some 400 more people arrive at Kryvyi Rih from the Russian-occupied territories and the shock zone, grateful to have reached the relative protection of the trading city about 40 miles north of the front line. In total, more than 61,000 have taken safe haven there since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.
A local Kryvyi Rih official told CNN that directors began printing documents for other displaced people on the day of the Russian invasion, predicting the mass exodus that would follow.
“I woke up every morning with explosions and gunfire, and then I fell asleep at night with explosions and gunfire,” Halilyuk says. “Here it’s quiet. Yes, there are air raid sirens from time to time, but it’s not like you’re in bed shaking back and forth.
A Ukrainian reaction to the south drove Kryvyi Rih out of Russian artillery, according to the local army administration. But no place in this country is immune to Russian missile attacks.
Today, Ukraine launches its own missiles in Kherson: donated army equipment, such as the U. S. cellular rocket formula. USA HIMARS, to attack deep into enemy territory.
Ukrainians say blows to Russian ammunition depots and command posts in Kherson have made it easier for them to retake villages, reaching out to civilians they say are seeking to drive out the Russians.
When Russian troops first took Kherson, citizens were met with an armored body of workers’ transports with protests, waving the blue and yellow flag of Ukraine.
Today, the profession has cut off the city’s communications with the outdoor world, but the Ukrainian government says it remains a local resistance movement. Anti-Russian graffiti and effigies of Russian troops remind the occupiers of their existence.
“People perceive that the liberation of the territory will take place, that the collaborators and occupiers will remain there forever,” said Nataliya Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian army’s southern command.
“People don’t need to paint with them. They don’t need to teach their curriculum, they don’t need to treat their soldiers. They don’t need to. It’s resistance,” she says.
Home to some 300,000 people before the war, Kherson is the largest population the average Russia captured in its five-month campaign. There, the newly installed regional directorate has continuously declared that it will hold a referendum to become a “full” member of the Russian Federation. Federation.
The White House believes Russia’s effort to officially annex the Kherson region, as well as parts of Zaporizhzhia and the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, could take a position before the end of this year. The Russian ruble would be the official currency and Ukrainians would be forced to apply for Russian citizenship, the White House announced tuesday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov gave the impression of verifying those intentions on July 20, when he said Moscow’s geographical objectives now extend beyond Donetsk and Luhansk to “the Kherson region, the Zaporizhzhia region and a number of other territories. “
In Kherson, the ruble is already flowing and the official bureaucracy is distributed in Russian, the locals speak the language or not.
Endocrinologist Dr. Maksim Ovchar says he helped his Ukrainian neighbors translate those forms but refused to paint for the imposed administration.
“I lost my job. My house. Some of my friends I lost, (were) killed by the Russians,” he says.
The 26-year-old met CNN at a shelter for displaced people in Kryvyi Rih, where he burst into tears and admitted he was embarrassed to turn to charity. But Moscow was a teacher he didn’t want to serve.
“They sought to co-opt me,” he says, “to make me a member of the public administration of the physical profession. I was the last endocrinologist in town and probably in the area. Because everyone fled.
Dr. Ovchar says he was detained twice for his stubbornness, and the armed Russians eventually threatened his circle of relatives before fleeing Kherson with his grandmother. Ovchar chose July 7 to travel while, he says, Russian troops were drunk celebrating the anniversary of an elderly army victory in Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine.
Many major roads leaving Kherson were closed by the Russian army. On the front line, the town of Zelenodolsk, an hour’s drive south of Kryvyi Roh, piles of discarded bicycles speak of makeshift escapes.
Recent drone footage captured by a Ukrainian soldier shows a scruffy column of women, young and old walking along a dusty road to safety. Cars were shot down on other roads, the fugitives say. The city was bombed by the Russians several days this week.
At the Kryvyi Rih Reception Center, Dr. Ovchar’s face writhes with tears and anger as he admits that his hatred of the Russian war has led him to his own Hippocratic Oath.
Ukrainian doctors treated the wounded Russians when they arrived at their hospital after fighting with the local resistance. Now, he said, he would kill them if he had the chance.
“Despite the concern and the fact that I am a doctor, I cannot harm a person, but I will honestly tell you that if there was a Russian, I would kill him if I had a gun. “
El-CNN-Wire™
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