"You want to stay alive," says Maxym.

He is against the Russians, but he does not condemn the young man who now works for them as a police officer in Oleschky.

Oleschky is a small town in the Cherson region, 20,000 inhabitants, everyone knows each other.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in Politics.

  • Follow I follow

"The boy was with the police.

When the war started he started selling meat at the market.

And one day Russian soldiers came, put a sack over his head and took him away, a girl from the market told me that.”

When he reappeared, he was in the service of the Russians.

"It's difficult to say whether he volunteered with them." Only a few in the city defected to the Russians, says Maxym, "and we don't know what threats and coercion were involved."

After a short pause he adds: "I wouldn't put up a fight if I were you.

That's pointless.

And it is completely unclear when the Ukrainian army will come.”

"You're always afraid"

For now, Maxym is not in danger of getting into such a situation.

After two months under Russian occupation, he had seen and experienced enough to consider staying more dangerous than fleeing.

At a friend's auto repair shop, the Russian soldiers removed everything that could be removed and destroyed the rest.

In the neighborhood, the Russians took away six young men who were repairing a car in front of a house because a former Donbass fighter was suspected among them.

"They pick people up and ask them questions based on completely unclear criteria, even those who have never had anything to do with politics," says Maxym, whose political commitment is limited to voting.

“The Russian soldiers get drunk and do some nonsense.

You're always scared."

So they set off, two families with children, and drove across the front in two cars to the free part of Ukraine.

On the way they were accompanied by the noise of gunshots and explosions.

They knew beforehand that they had to go through contested territory, and they also knew that some had died trying to escape.

But there has never been a safe route since Russian troops occupied almost all of the Kherson region in southern Ukraine in a matter of days in February and March at the start of the war.

According to estimates by Ukrainian authorities, around half of the more than one million people who lived in the Kherson region before the Russian attack left the region via such dangerous routes.

Most of those who stayed have good reasons: "Daily life in Cherson has become incredibly difficult," says Stanislav Troshyn, deputy chairman of the regional parliament before the war, who left Cherson at the end of April.

“If you have parents or grandparents over 70, then you don't have a choice.

You either have to stay there with them or you sentence them to death.”

Those who have fled can still keep in touch with their relatives and friends who have stayed behind, but it has become difficult.

At the beginning of June, the occupiers switched off the Ukrainian cell phone providers and cut the connection to Ukrainian internet providers.

You can now only access the Internet via Russian providers from the Crimea, and even that is unreliable.