Island of war

Evacuating the island

Following Russia’s attacks on the bridge connecting the Korabel island district to the mainland, 1,641 civilians, including 56 children and 169 people with limited mobility, were evacuated to temporary accommodation centres across Ukraine, authorities in Kherson have reported. According to different estimates, the island’s population numbered between 1,800 and 2,200 prior to the attacks.

Evacuating across the damaged bridge means dodging bomb craters, burnt-out cars, and scattered shrapnel, while moving as fast as possible. Volunteers leading the evacuations stop to replace punctured tyres before returning for more evacuees, risking shelling or drone strikes from the Russian-occupied left bank.

Another challenge is convincing island residents to evacuate. The elderly, for example, are reluctant to leave their homes, despite the prospect of being left in complete isolation on the island without access to gas, electricity or water.

Yet, despite the multitude of threats, more and more residents are returning to their homes on the island.

‘I watch the occupation, liberation, and war from my window’

“How can you pack your whole life into a couple of suitcases?” asks Halyna*, a pensioner from Korabel island, fighting back tears. “Volunteers and police showed up at my door. I refused to go. But after the bridge was hit, all my neighbours left immediately and I was on my own in a nine-storey block of flats. The gas would go off during shelling, leaving no way to cook, so I’d make pasta in the kettle. Now there’s no electricity either. After a few days, the police came again and said no one would repair the electricity and gas in the building and that food wouldn’t be transported to the island.”

Halyna is 76 years old and has been disabled since she suffered a stroke 10 years ago. Her son installed a handrail in the apartment to help her move between rooms, but she hasn’t been able to leave the building in three years since the lift went out of service.

“I’m already used to being on my own,” Halyna continues. “I watch the occupation, liberation, and war through my window. I used to live with my son, but he was killed during shelling two years ago. Then a social worker would come over once a week and bring groceries, but she doesn’t come around anymore. I was afraid to leave the apartment. But I didn’t want to starve to death.”

Halyna was taken out of the apartment on a stretcher, carried down six flights of stairs, and quickly taken across the bridge to a hospital now serving as a temporary shelter for elderly evacuees. At the hospital, they are fed and have their blood pressure and temperature checked. But they’re only allowed to stay for up to two weeks before they have to find alternative housing.

‘I wish I’d died in my own home’

Halyna explains that evacuees with nowhere to go are sent to the Point of Invincibility, a temporary public shelter set up by Ukrainian authorities to provide essential services like power, heat and internet for people who lost their homes as a result of Russian attacks.

“I don’t know how long I can stay there,” says Halyna. “They say until the end of the war. But what if the war lasts for years? Some evacuees are taken to a psychiatric hospital in Stepanivka [on the outskirts of Kherson] that has a geriatric department.” Halyna knows a woman who stayed there who called conditions “very bad” and overcrowded.

Halyna doesn’t know what to do next. She has no relatives to stay with and isn’t able to rent an apartment. A studio in Kherson goes for at least 5,000 hryvnias (€104), while Halyna’s pension is only 3,600 hryvnias (€75). She could move to a less dangerous region of Ukraine to live in a refugee hostel, but those are also overcrowded.

“I don’t know what’s next for me,” Halyna says. “One thing I know for sure is I won’t leave Kherson. I was born here and I’ll die here. I was in my apartment when the island flooded last year. The water engulfed the first two floors. But I survived. I could cope with shelling too as long as I had enough food and water. I keep wondering what will happen next. I can’t sleep. Why has this all happened in my old age? I wish I’d died in my own home.”

Across the bridge

“Everything that hits the bridge also heads straight towards my building,” says Nadezhda*, a pensioner who has lived near the bridge all her life. Shrapnel has shattered all the windows in her apartment, and part of a wall has collapsed, forcing her to evacuate to her family’s home near the centre of Kherson.

Over the past three years, Nadezhda, her daughter, and granddaughter have evacuated from Kherson twice — only to return both times. They moved to Odesa and Kyiv, which drained the family’s savings. Nadezhda’s daughter had a job in Kherson but struggled to find work elsewhere. Despite the threat of daily shelling, they decided to return. At least in Kherson, they had their own home.

Nadezhda’s granddaughter now volunteers to help evacuees, putting on a bulletproof vest before leaving the house. “We’re worried sick waiting for her to come home at night,” says Nadezhda.

‘They’ll shell us every day but they won’t occupy us again’

Since Russian troops struck the bridge, local residents have voiced fears of a renewed Russian occupation.

“The bridge had no military or tactical significance,” Yuriy Sobolevsky, the first deputy head of the Kherson Region Council, told journalists. Instead, the bridge was primarily used for civilian transport, according to Vladyslav Voloshyn, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s Southern Defence Forces.

Oleksandr*, a Ukrainian drone operator who grew up in Kherson, said Russia likely targeted the island because its high-rise buildings make it a “convenient place to control drones”.

“They’ll shell us every day but they won’t occupy us again,” says Oleksandr, expressing doubts about Russia’s ability to launch a large-scale offensive on Kherson. Referencing a recent Russian drone attack on a shuttle bus that killed two civilians and injured six others, he added, “killing civilians is a hobby for Russians”.

Oleksandr says civilians who remain on the island and in other coastal areas of Kherson are “impeding the military", adding that “this is where the shelling is heaviest, and supplying food and medicine to those who remain in the danger zone, or repairing the communications destroyed on a daily basis, puts everyone at risk”.

First responders are often hit in drone strikes — they arrive to tend to the wounded, only to be hit in a second attack. This year alone, 98 people, including a one-year-old boy, have been killed in Russian drone attacks, according to Kherson Governor Oleksandr Prokudin. Another 939 have been injured.

‘Where will they go?’

If the bridge does collapse, those who remain on the island will be cut off from mainland Kherson, without access to food supplies. They wouldn’t be able to receive deliveries by boat either since civilians are strictly prohibited from entering the river. Any unidentified vessel is attacked by both Ukrainian and Russian forces.

Oleksandr hasn’t been able to visit his mother’s grave, located on Kherson’s left bank, for the past three years and doesn’t know when he will be able to next. “There’s no end in sight to these attacks,” he says. “It’s impossible to recapture the left bank of the Kherson region by military means. We’re desperately short of people.”

If a peace agreement froze the current front lines, residents of Russian-occupied territories would see that no one would come save them, says Oleksandr. However, he doesn’t expect a mass exodus from Russian-occupied territories either. People have grown poorer during the war and now prioritise basic needs like food and shelter over the colour of their passports, he says.

“But something has to change,” says Oleksandr. “Fighting at this pace for a fourth year is impossible.”

*names changed