Maxim Edwards

The Mykhailo Boychuk Kyiv State Academy of Decorative and Applied Arts and Design was bombed in a Russian attack on 25 March. When I visited not long afterwards, a group of students were sitting on a grass verge, sketching what remained of their art school. ‘They’re destroying us, but we’re still drawing nevertheless,’ one of the teachers, Volodymyr Pryadka, said with a laugh.

At the single crossroads in Zakharivka, a hundred kilometres north-west of Kyiv, the remains of a rocket are lodged in a tree. Nearly two-thirds of the village’s twenty or so houses were destroyed in the first weeks of the Russian assault last year. Signs on the metal gates of the bombed-out properties say: ‘There is an owner!’

The official newspaper of the regional military administration in Russian-occupied Kherson was called Naddniepryanskaya Pravda, or ‘The Truth over the River Dnieper’. When Ukraine’s army liberated Kherson last November, locals tore down the ‘forever with Russia’ billboards and burned the propaganda sheets in the streets. As with other pro-Moscow propaganda newspapers published across occupied Ukraine, behind this newspaper’s crass triumphalism lie some clues to the contours of Russian military rule and the terror of daily life under it.

As Russia has concentrated its offensive against eastern Ukraine, border crossings in the west have slowly become a two-way street once more. Eighty per cent of the five million Ukrainians who have fled their country say that they would like to come home. On 14 April, Ukraine’s State Border Guard estimated that 870,000 citizens had entered the country since the war began. Following Russia’s ‘strategic deployment’ out of northern Ukraine, two-thirds of Kyivans are back. The low-cost German coach firm FlixBus recently announced it will resume routes to the Ukrainian capital, even while the government issues air raid warnings for the entire country. The mayor of Kyiv, Wladimir Klitschko, has warned of the continued risk of rocket attacks and mines. Today, another rocket attack hit the city’s Shevchenko district.

Last night, the Russian army surrounded Kherson in southern Ukraine, near the mouth of the Dnieper, setting up checkpoints on roads leading into and out of the city. Today, they entered it. Footage proliferating online shows a school destroyed by shelling, damage to residential buildings and soldiers looting local shops. The city of 290,000 people used to be on the way to Crimea. Since Putin annexed the peninsula in 2014, however, Kherson has been the final stop before a militarised border. Ukrainian officials from Crimea relocated there. The ‘border’, they assured me a few years ago, was temporary, one day to be redrawn. Now the Russian military is redrawing it daily.