Call me Uliana Shevchenko.

It's an alias I have to use because the Russians have occupied my town.

It's not easy for an artist to change names, but it has to be.

Konrad Schuller

Political correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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My city is Kherson in southern Ukraine.

Many speak Russian here, and that's why the orcs say: Russians live there.

That doesn't apply to me and neither does a lot of my friends, even though we grew up speaking Russian.

I'm bilingual, and it works like this: I speak Ukrainian at work and on Facebook too.

But at home we speak Russian.

Some of my friends now totally reject Russian.

I don't, I use both languages.

But maybe I can only do that because I haven't suffered as much as others.

It comes as no surprise to us that Putin now wants to annex our city through a referendum.

I think he's doing it at home because of his mobilization.

It's easier if he can say to his citizens: Kherson and the other Ukrainian areas that we occupied, that's Russia.

But everyone knows that this referendum is worth nothing anyway.

In Cherson only a quarter of the people are still there, the rest are gone.

How should the few who stayed be able to express the “will of the people”?

Sorry, just lost the connection.

As we spoke, there were explosions somewhere.

My husband and son are out on their bikes and my mother-in-law is worried.

Two days after the war started, my parents insisted that we move in with them because they have a basement with a concrete ceiling.

So, with a cat in our backpacks, we ran along the narrow streets of Voenka district to the sound of sirens.

The explosions and gunshots gave me panic attacks.

Hot waves ran through my body, my stomach turned, my heart started beating wildly.

I started gagging, arms and legs shaking.

I couldn't sleep because I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to save my son and my husband.

Now I'm no longer afraid because my family and I have been living under occupation for half a year.

We're just trying to avoid all places where something can hit.

If necessary, we then also accept longer distances to the supermarket.

We just want to be set free.

And if there is destruction from the fighting - I'm willing to sit in the basement to see our soldiers on the streets at the end when we get out again.

My husband had a small business, but the Russians occupied his premises and put a post in front of it.

All the equipment, all the operations are gone.

Now our family has stopped eating meat.

In the beginning, after waiting in line for a long time, I was sometimes able to buy frozen chicken fillet.

The last time, however, the flesh was punctured with a syringe.

Sellers pump up the fillet with water so that it weighs more when it freezes.

We haven't bought meat since then.

I photographed my last hamburger.

I actually wanted a cheeseburger, but someone else had already bought it.

We call the occupiers "Russians" because if you pronounce it in English, it sounds like "fascists".

In early June, they shut down Ukraine's phone and internet services.

The whole city was in shock, people were looking for WiFi in cafes.

Then the Russians sold Russian SIM cards in exchange for passport data.

We didn't want that, so we bought a SIM card on the black market.

The whole family uses it now.

If we want to see a movie, my husband goes somewhere and downloads it.