标题: 2022.05.27 俄罗斯占领下的生活 [打印本页] 作者: shiyi18 时间: 2022-5-28 15:11 标题: 2022.05.27 俄罗斯占领下的生活 Collaborators, demonstrators, soldiers, spies: life under Russian occupation
In Kherson, Ukrainians find it hard to judge the acceptable limits of resistance and co-operation
May 27th 2022
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By Wendell Steavenson with Marta Rodionova
In the early days of the war, before the Russians arrived, a number of Ukrainian soldiers, intelligence officers and police officers disappeared from Kherson, a city of just under 300,000 people on the estuary of the Dnieper river in southern Ukraine. No one knows why they left. Uncertain about what might happen, people formed queues for cash, food and petrol. Soon everything had run out and shops closed. The mayor called for volunteers to distribute donations of food to families in need, prevent looting and respond to calls for assistance. One of those who signed up was Serhiy Pavliuk (pictured), a big bear of a man with a wave of chestnut hair and a long beard that makes him look like a biker. He is a theatre director with more than 140 productions under his belt and the father of five children – “prolific in both areas”, he told us, laughing.
The city was split into five districts and Pavliuk found himself working with Danylo Sanitar, a 25-year-old opera singer who had recently performed in one of his productions. Sanitar assumed informal command of several-dozen volunteers who patrolled the central district. On the second day of the war, a missile hit a water-pumping station near Pavliuk’s dacha and he helped to put out the fire. A few days later, Pavliuk, who doesn’t drive, asked his wife, Tatiana, to take him to a closed supermarket where the owner had given him permission to distribute stock to the needy. They were stopped at a Russian checkpoint. Pavliuk raised his hands in the air as Tatiana sat shaking beside him. The Russians searched the boot of the car, then let them go. “That was the first time I met them,” he said.
Russian forces occupied Kherson on March 2nd. They took the strategic Antonovskiy bridge over the Dnieper river after several days of fighting, and tanks and troops poured into the city. It’s still unclear why Kherson fell so easily. “There are lots of versions,” said Pavliuk, shaking his head sadly. (In early April, Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, sacked the head of intelligence in the Kherson region, saying, “I don’t have time to deal with all traitors, but gradually all of them will be punished.”) Russian troops moved east towards Mariupol and west towards Odessa. The Ukrainian army managed to halt the westwards advance outside of Mykolaiv, 45km to the north-west. Kherson, though relatively untouched by fighting, became trapped behind the front line.
Pavliuk is an avowed Ukrainian nationalist who, as a student in Kyiv in 2004, had taken part in the Orange revolution, an uprising against a rigged presidential election. In 2014 he rallied demonstrators in Kherson to support the Maidan protests in the capital, which overthrew Ukraine’s Russian-leaning president. Yet Kherson has always been a mixed city politically. In 2020 the pro-Maidan mayor of the city was voted out and replaced by a local businessman whom residents assumed was mildly pro-Russian, despite talking about political neutrality. More than anything, Pavliuk said, the politics of Kherson are intimate: it is a small city and everyone knows each other’s business.
One small girl pointed at a Russian tank and asked her mother, “Why is the big elephant trying to kill us?”
In those first confused days of the invasion, Pavliuk watched a Ukrainian tv journalist declare that Kherson was a pro-Russian city. On Facebook people said that Kherson had surrendered because of its Russian sympathies. “Imagine how bad I felt. It felt so unfair,” he told me.
Two days after the Russians occupied the city, Pavliuk spotted a torn Ukrainian flag lying in a puddle. He picked it up and tried to run it back up the flagpole. He felt a “kind of childish heroism”, he later recalled. As he was working out the mechanism, a Russian officer appeared and yelled, “Clear off!” Pavliuk pretended not to understand and answered, “What?” in Ukrainian. “Clear off!” the Russian repeated, sliding back his rifle bolt. “Take your flag and go away!” Pavliuk left before he got into any more trouble.
Pavliuk sensed that something was going to happen that day. He put on his running shoes and ran to the main square. He remembered feeling “very angry. You can’t control yourself. You are tired of being frightened.” He found about 15 people there, protesting and waving Ukrainian flags as Russian journalists filmed their soldiers handing out humanitarian aid. He uploaded a video onto his Facebook page of himself yelling “Leave!” at the Russians. By the time he got home the video had gone viral.
The next day the protesters in the square numbered 2,000. Pavliuk was conscious that he had encouraged people to come out onto the streets. Having experienced violence from provocateurs during the Maidan uprising, Pavliuk worried about their safety. He went into a building near the square, which formerly housed the Ukrainian secret services and was now occupied by Russian troops. He explained to the Russian soldiers there that the demonstration was peaceful.
The Russians seemed bemused by Pavliuk. He was wearing a leather jacket and black boots, and had plaited his beard into the shape of a trident, the national emblem of Ukraine. The soldiers took his mobile phone and passport, and passed him up the ranks. A senior officer tried to insist that “there are no demonstrations”, as though denial might will the crowd away. Finally the Russians became exasperated and thrust Pavliuk, stumbling, back into the square.
Pavliuk was heartened by the turnout but worried as soldiers began to shoot in the air to disperse the crowd. In the mêlée, one elderly woman tried to denounce Pavliuk to the Russian authorities for filming her. Pavliuk could see Sanitar holding a yellow radio and attempting to marshal people. Eventually Pavliuk, Sanitar and other volunteers managed to convince the crowd that they had made their point and should walk in a show of unity towards the war memorial.
Over the following days, city residents repeatedly came out to demonstrate. Pavliuk’s family and friends encouraged him to reduce his involvement, arguing that he should be more careful now he was known to the Russians. Pavliuk was in two minds: he believed that the protests were necessary to show the rest of Ukraine that Kherson was not a pro-Russian city. But he also knew that there was no hope of ousting the occupiers with peaceful demonstrations, and that further clashes would lead only to arrests and violence. After three or four days he promised his wife he’d stop going.
In the first month, the Russians only partially occupied Kherson. Faced with demonstrations, they seemed unsure whether to behave like conquerors or saviours. On the one hand, they garrisoned soldiers throughout the region, set up checkpoints, imposed a curfew and went house to house with lists, arresting government officials, intelligence officers, mayors and police officers, along with members of the volunteer territorial-defence units and veterans of the war in the Donbas. Some of these people were released after a day or so, others after several weeks. A number are still missing. There have been persistent rumours in Kherson of underground prisons holding hundreds of detainees.
Yet at the same time, the Ukrainian flag still flew above the city-council building and the mayor went to work each day in his office. He surprised almost everyone with his defiance, insisting that Kherson was a Ukrainian city that remained under Ukrainian civic authority.
At first Russian forces tried to co-opt the volunteer patrols, but the Ukrainians insisted on operating independently. Pavliuk continued to help out whenever he could, never knowing if he’d get hassled by the Russians. Pavliuk told me that soldiers at checkpoints sometimes stole money and mobile phones from him. Several times he found himself face down on the asphalt.
Pavliuk’s patrol created a group on Viber, a messaging app, to share information about the location of checkpoints, tanks and other Russian military positions. Pavliuk passed these reports to another online group with links to Ukrainian intelligence. “We were playing in this dangerous zone,” Pavliuk admitted.
“Ukrainians will probably hate me for saying this, but the Russians are really just ordinary people. If you need something, you can go and ask them”
On March 10th, Pavliuk was driving with Sanitar to pick up humanitarian aid when they saw several Russian military vehicles and a phalanx of infantry heading in the direction of Pavliuk’s dacha on the outskirts of the city, where he and his family had taken refuge since the war had begun two weeks earlier. Pavliuk raced back, rushed his family into the car, half-dressed and without packing, and took them to a friend’s house. Less than a week later, the neighbours near his apartment in the city centre called to tell him that Russians were breaking down his door.
The Pavliuk family decided to move to another address where they could lie low: a hotel housing families displaced from villages on the front line. Inconveniently, this was near the main square. On his first day in hiding Pavliuk went for a walk, pulling his hood down and wrapping a scarf around his beard to mask his features. He was chagrined to be recognised almost immediately. A man from the garage around the corner raised his hand and saluted him with the greeting “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine!”).
In the hotel, Pavliuk’s 16-year-old daughter lifted everyone’s spirits by composing songs on her ukulele and organising a kindergarten for the kids. Soon more than 30 children were under her care and she found a child psychologist to help her. She remembered one small girl who pointed at a Russian tank and asked her mother, “Why is the big elephant trying to kill us?”
Despite the risks, Pavliuk continued to stream videos from the city and raise money online for humanitarian aid. He began his dispatches, “Greetings from Ukrainian Kherson!” and urged his fellow citizens to have “warm hearts but cold minds” – to take care of each other, but to do so carefully. He found it hard to keep away from the protests, even as the numbers dwindled. He would often loiter around the edges, as if he just happened to be taking a walk in the vicinity. “Until 3pm the city would look normal,” he said, “There were cars in the streets, people queuing at shops, children playing in the parks. After 3pm everyone disappeared. By 4pm the city was dead, no one would risk going out. People were scared to encounter Russians.”
One day in mid-March, Sanitar rushed into the hotel in distress. He told Pavliuk he was sorry, that he’d only been trying to help. Pavliuk didn’t know what he was talking about. Sanitar said that he had gone to the Russians and tried to explain that his friend Pavliuk was just a humanitarian volunteer and they should stop looking for him. The tactic had backfired: they had both been invited for questioning.
Pavliuk was both frightened and furious with Sanitar for putting him at risk. When we talked several weeks later in Kyiv, he was still trying to make sense of Sanitar’s actions. He described his friend as naive yet self-aggrandising, the kind of person who always put himself forward. Pavliuk’s daughters thought that Sanitar was ambitious, energetic and intense to the point of becoming overbearing. He liked to be the centre of attention and had a way of speaking that came across as insincere self-deprecation. “He’s the kind of person”, said Pavliuk’s eldest daughter, Angelina, “who needs people to like them.” When Pavliuk confronted Sanitar about the nature of his relations with the Russians, Sanitar just said, “We’re here to help people. We have to be neutral and not take a side.”
The pair debated what to do. Pavliuk decided to co-operate as he had nothing to hide. Sanitar said Russian officers had assured him that Pavliuk wouldn’t be mistreated. When they presented themselves for questioning, they were searched and hooded in dirty balaclavas. The precautions seemed ridiculous to Pavliuk, since they’d been led only ten metres down a corridor. “I was not frightened,” he said. “I was curious as to what would happen.”
Pavliuk found himself being questioned by three Russians: “One kind, one aggressive and one serious”. They wore civilian clothes, two had balaclavas over their heads and they insisted that he speak in Russian. The aggressive one shouted, the kind one told him not to worry, the serious one probed him for information about dates and demonstrations.
In answer to their questions, Pavliuk denied organising the protests and told them how he’d tried to inform their superiors about the peaceable intent of the first one. When they noted that his Facebook page had a profile picture of a cartoon hedgehog throwing a Molotov cocktail at a Russian tank, Pavliuk promised to change it. They asked him where the director of the theatre was hiding. Pavliuk lied and said he didn’t know. Having assured his interrogators that he was not working for Ukrainian intelligence, he was allowed to go.
He was taken at gunpoint, questioned all day and dumped that evening on a roadside far from home
Over the following weeks, Pavliuk was called in twice more for questioning. He remained indignant yet calm. The Russians interrogating him were, by turns, menacing and gently reproachful. Some tried to tell him they had come to save Ukraine, some insulted him; one lectured him about the Masons’ control of the world, another treated him to a long-winded tirade about how Ukrainians had poisoned Russia with coronavirus. They continued to prod him about any connections to Ukrainian intelligence and whether the protesters were foreign agitators. One officer just wanted to discuss theatre and ended the interrogation by saying, “It was a pleasure to talk to you.”
Each time, Pavliuk was released after several hours. Now he laughs at himself as he remembers “trying to play the hero”. And he laughs at the Russian officers who “thought people would be frightened of them”.
The protests in Kherson were met with increasing violence and Russian troops fired tear gas to disperse them. Collaborators and provocateurs seemed to be everywhere. One man approached Pavliuk on the square and asked him if he wanted to join the effort to “overthrow” the occupiers.
Russian forces have continued to tighten control over the region. The mayor was removed from office on April 26th for “not co-operating”. He was replaced by Oleksandr Kobets, a retired intelligence officer who served in the kgb during the Soviet era and had lived in Kyiv for the past decade. At the beginning of May, a Russian politician who is a close ally of Vladimir Putin visited Kherson: “Russia is here for ever. There should be no doubt about that.” On May 1st there was an announcement that the rouble would be introduced as legal currency in the region. Residents have also been told that they’ll be eligible to apply for Russian passports. There has been a constant drum beat of rumour that the Russian authorities will hold a referendum over whether Kherson should become an autonomous republic, as happened in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014.
Many of these announcements seem to have originated with a man called Kirill Stremousov, a pro-Russian Ukrainian with a chequered history of violent provocation, whom the Russians appointed as head of the Committee for the Salvation of Peace and Order, the Russian-backed civilian administration, as well as deputy head of the Kherson region military authority. The Ukrainian government has accused Stremousov of treason and opened criminal proceedings against him. In mid-May, when Stremousov announced that the regional government was going to petition for annexation by Russia, leaflets appeared calling for his head.
Posturing over annexation seems hollow as the Russian hold on the city remains uncertain. Battles continue to rage along the front line 40km away, though it’s hard to work out which side has the upper hand. So far, Russian forces have shown little enthusiasm for taking over the payment of regional-government salaries and pensions; the Ukrainian hryvnia remains legal tender in Kherson. Internet and mobile-phone services are intermittent but the Ukrainian banking system, which relies on these networks, still functions.
The Russian side has not, it seems, found willing collaborators. Mayors who have agreed to serve under the occupation are widely derided as Gauleiters, a title given to Nazi governors. Others have refused to co-operate. At the end of April, Russian troops arrested a former mayor of Kherson and subjected him to an “interview” on tv. In the footage he was grey faced and clearly speaking under duress. He still refused to concede that he was a fascist sympathiser.
On May 9th, celebrated in Russia as Victory Day to commemorate the defeat of the Nazis, Russians in Kherson organised a rally of a couple of thousand people. They waved red Soviet flags against a bright blue sky. But the event took place at 8.30am and was over before most residents had properly begun their day.
Kherson is outwardly calm but remains tense. Those residents who talked to us over Zoom or by telephone sounded strained and awkward. Conversations were terse and coded. The internet is now connected via Crimea and people assume that the Russian authorities can listen in. Several teachers in Kherson told us that they had ended the school year early, partly to avoid pressure to teach in Russian from Russian textbooks. Some teachers have been told that they’d be sent to Crimea to be re-educated, though no one is aware of anyone actually going.
Kherson has been cut off from the rest of Ukraine for three months. Russia stopped transmitting Ukrainian tv in the first days of occupation. People with satellite dishes can still watch foreign and Ukrainian news, but many older people now watch only Russian propaganda. One woman told us that her mother had already begun to repeat the Russian narrative that Ukraine is run by Nazis and Russian-speaking peoples are being oppressed.
Many professionals have left. Businesses remain closed, lots of people are unemployed and increasingly running out of money. Some travel to nearby Crimea, which was illegitimately annexed by Russia in 2014, to buy goods to bring back and sell. They may be derided as black-marketers but at the moment it’s the only way to get most goods – particularly cigarettes and petrol – into Kherson.
It is unclear how many people have fled Kherson. Estimates from those on the ground suggest that a third may have done so. There are only two routes out. One is to the south, through Crimea, then onto Russia and across the Caucasus mountains to Georgia. The other requires crossing the front line to reach Mykolaiv, which is often blocked for days due to continual fighting and closed checkpoints.
Sanitar established contact with Russian soldiers through his service with the volunteer patrols. “The first time I went to the Russians it was so that Serhiy would not be touched,” he said. “Then I began to establish communication with them. They repeatedly proved to me that they want order in the city.” Pavliuk thought that the recognition might have gone to Sanitar’s head. He started saying things such as “I am the law”.
In late April, Russian forces abolished the volunteer patrols and replaced them with military police. Sanitar asked the Russians to create a green corridor to Mykolaiv, across the front line, to allow him to bring in medical supplies. They refused and said he could get what he needed in Crimea. Sanitar told us that he had been to Crimea three times to buy medicine. There were long queues in both directions at the border crossing. As a humanitarian volunteer, he had a special pass and didn’t have to wait. “Ukrainians will probably hate me for saying this,” he said, “but the Russians are really just ordinary people. If you need something, you can go and ask them. They won’t do anything against you.”
“Don’t call us traitors if we are forced to work here for roubles...We will need to live somehow”
On April 6th, Pavliuk went for one of his “walks” around the main square during a small demonstration. While out, he received a call from Sanitar who asked him urgently, “Where are you?” One of Sanitar’s Russian contacts had called to say that Pavliuk should leave the square immediately or he’d be arrested. “It was clear that I was being monitored,” said Pavliuk, “and the hope that I had been forgotten was gone.”
Russian repression mounted during April. A friend of Pavliuk’s, who was the director of the theatre and a deputy in the Kherson regional parliament, was taken at gunpoint from his apartment one morning, questioned all day and dumped that evening on a roadside far from his home. One of Pavliuk’s colleagues in the municipal patrol was arrested for trying to buy drones. He was held for a month before being released. Another member of the patrol spent three days in detention and was subjected to a mock execution before being freed.
We talked to Sanitar in Kherson over Zoom. He insisted that we use his real name if we wrote about him. “I don’t have anything to hide from the sbu [Ukrainian intelligence], the fsb [Russian intelligence], the fbi, the cia or the Somali pirates. I am a very honest person and I always do the right thing,” he said. He had stopped looking at the news online because he found it hard to know what to believe. Instead, he calls friends in different cities around Ukraine to understand what is going on. “The Russians in Kherson have their position,” he said. “Ukrainians have our positions. In this situation you don’t know if you’ll wake up tomorrow under Russian occupation or to a completely burnt-out piece of land or Ukrainian control.”
Sanitar did not say anything that led us to think he was pro-Russian. But the even-handedness of his remarks might be construed as such by Ukrainian partisans. Sanitar worried that, if the Ukrainians mounted a counter-offensive, Kherson could become another Mariupol. “People here just want to live and find a diplomatic solution to the problem,” he said. Then he conceded, “Maybe this is just my personal wish.”
In a Facebook post in late May, Sanitar railed at the Ukrainian government for corruption, abandoning Kherson and extending martial law. He lamented the death of a friend who had been killed by the Ukrainian army. He was tired of waiting to be liberated. “Don’t call us traitors if we are forced to work here for roubles...We will need to live somehow.” He recognised that he had become a divisive figure: some thanked him for his efforts to distribute aid, others denounced him as a collaborator. “Those here understand what I’m doing. I help. I can solve any issue. They can count on me. Those who are not here do not understand me and start to hate me.”
When we first talked to Sanitar in early May he thought a referendum about joining Russia was unlikely: the administrative infrastructure was inadequate and most residents would boycott it. More recently he said that people in Kherson might come to accept the reality of the occupation and acquiesce. He had been pleasantly surprised by his visit to Crimea. “I was fed with information for eight years that everything is bad in the Crimea. But everything is ok there. They took part in the referendum themselves, because they wanted to join Russia, because God is their judge. It will be the same with Kherson.”
In mid-April, Pavliuk and his family talked about leaving. But the road to Mykolaiv was dangerous. At checkpoints Russian troops were looking for people with Ukrainian nationalist tattoos and scrolling through phones searching for incriminating messages. They often turned people back for no reason. On occasion they also let some people flee, believing, perhaps, that it was better to be rid of pro-Ukrainian activists.
The family decided to go on April 18th. It was cold and raining when they set off at 5am. Pavliuk’s wife, Tatiana, drove and Pavliuk sat in the passenger seat of their small Nissan with his two-year-old daughter on his lap. His three other daughters and son sat in the back seat. Dmytro, the fiancé of the Pavliuk’s eldest, Angelina, was in the car ahead. The route took them through wrecked villages on dirt roads, past burnt-out cars and obliterated houses. Tatiana, wary of minefields, was careful to drive in the grooves created by other cars. The journey, which normally takes 40 minutes, lasted six hours.
“After you have got used to continual explosions, it’s the quiet that kills you”
The Russian troops at the checkpoints looked dirty and tired. Some were very young, and had no armour or helmets. The soldiers kept their eyes fixed to the ground. Pavliuk was on a list of activists and Dmytro was carrying a usb stick full of photographs of Russian military vehicles he had taken in the first days of the war. The bad weather worked to their advantage. It seemed to make the Russians so miserable that they just waved the cars through.
The family marvelled at the contrast when they reached the Ukrainian lines. “How beautiful the Ukrainian soldiers looked!” said Angelina. “You could see such a big difference between the two armies. The Ukrainians were well equipped and wore clean uniforms and looked us right in the eye. They told us, ‘Everything is going to be ok.’”
Two weeks after Pavliuk left Kherson, I met him and his family in a house they were borrowing on the outskirts of Kyiv. It was a warm spring day and we sat on the terrace. The Pavliuks were still trying to make sense of their experiences under occupation and the strangeness of the relative peace in Kyiv. “After you have got used to continual explosions,” said Angelina, “it’s the quiet that kills you.” Her sister missed the refugee children she had taken care of in Kherson: “I was so busy and useful. Now we are stuck doing nothing.”
Pavliuk had kept in touch with Sanitar, but found him increasingly difficult to talk to. “I think he got adrenaline during the war,” he said. “He was an important person in the patrol, a decision-maker, and when the patrols ended he lost this feeling.” Pavliuk believed that Sanitar’s continued dealings with the Russians satisfied his need to be in the spotlight.
As we talked, Vlada, Pavliuk’s six-year-old daughter who has dip-dyed red hair and green eyes, skipped around the garden. She held the ragged flag that Pavliuk had found in a puddle at the start of the occupation and fluttered it like a cape. Then she laid it over a pile of cushions to make a bed and fell asleep.
“This flag”, Pavliuk told me, almost disbelieving, “was always with me, through every demonstration.”■
Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. You can read her previous dispatches from Ukraine for 1843 magazine, and the rest of our coverage, here. Marta Rodionova has worked as a television journalist and creative producer
