There, instead of organizing resistance, the leadership of the SBU intelligence service flung open the gates and welcomed the enemy. Some senior officials secretly worked for Moscow, providing information about Ukrainian defenses and minefields on the way from Crimea. The SBU head of Crimean affairs, Oleh Kulinich, who spent much of his time in Kherson, and the head of the Kherson SBU counterterrorism unit were later detained by Ukraine and charged with treason. Zelensky also later stripped the SBU’s Kherson regional head, General Serhiy Krivoruchko, of rank and branded him a traitor.
Kherson turned out to be Ukraine’s vulnerable underbelly. Twelve days before the Russian invasion, Zelensky himself visited an exercise involving 1,300 troops in the town of Kalanchak, along the highway to the regional capital from Crimea. “We’re not afraid of anyone, there is no panic, everything is under control,” he told journalists after watching security forces perform a helicopter assault. “It’s important that we are prepared, and we are.”
But on the first day of the invasion, the Kherson governor, the regional head of police, and top security commanders all fled the region. There was no resistance in Kalanchak, and a Ukrainian artillery unit that was supposed to prevent Russian advances along a narrow isthmus from Crimea withdrew. There were no trenches, no fortifications made ahead of time. The Ukrainian Army’s 59th Motor Rifle Brigade, responsible for this part of the front, was busy with exercises on the eve of the invasion and hadn’t been ordered to deploy. In the first hours of the offensive, it was practically helpless against Russian airstrikes, and found itself outflanked by Russian VDV paratroopers from the rear.
Soldiers from the 59th Brigade, the 80th Air Assault Brigade, and other decimated Ukrainian units pulled back from the southern steppe, fighting their way out of encirclement and leaving behind burning tanks and BMPs. Unable to reach superior headquarters in Kyiv, their commanders decided that trying to defend Kherson was pointless. Instead, they headed thirty miles north to the next regional capital, Mykolaiv, hoping to halt the Russian onslaught there. The nearly mile-long Antonovsky Bridge over the Dnipro, the only direct route into the city of Kherson from the south and the gateway to the rest of the Ukrainian coast, was left intact by retreating forces. This was one of Ukraine’s biggest blunders in the entire war.
“The Russian tanks and vehicles showed up here like they were traveling on a red carpet, and were near Kherson in just a few hours,” said Volodymyr Mykolaenko, who served as mayor of Kherson from 2014 to 2020. “Kherson has been sold out.” When Mykolaenko went to Kherson’s military headquarters on the first morning of the war, the commandant wouldn’t receive him. By lunchtime, almost all the officials were already gone.
Mykolaenko’s predecessor as mayor, businessman Volodymyr Saldo, didn’t leave Kherson that day. Recruited by the Russians before the war, he was preparing for an important role under the new regime.
Ukraine’s TURKISH-MADE Bayraktar TB2 drones managed to destroy the initial Russian column headed toward the Antonovsky Bridge into Kherson, halting the advance for a day. But when the Russians regrouped and managed to cross, only about a hundred untrained volunteers, plus a handful of stragglers from the regular military, were left to defend the city. Armed only with Kalashnikov rifles, some twenty hand grenades, Molotov cocktails, and two ancient Mukha RPGs, they were no match for the invaders.
The volunteers prepared an ambush for the Russians, lying in wait under lilac bushes and acacia trees in Kherson’s Buzki Park, along the Mykolaiv Highway. Plastic bags with Molotov cocktails—bottles of incendiary liquid named after the Soviet foreign minister during World War II—were prepositioned under the trees throughout the park. These men had no uniforms and wore jeans and tracksuits, with blue-and-yellow ribbons to identify each other. A local journalist and activist, Kostyantyn Ryzhenko, urged them to go home. Any attempt to attack the Russian military without proper weapons was doomed, he warned. The volunteers didn’t listen.
The next day, a column of Russian BMP and BTR fighting vehicles rolled into Kherson, flying huge Russian flags, and headed toward Buzki Park. The Russians never got close enough for the Molotov cocktails to be useful. Their heavy machine guns started firing into the park from hundreds of yards away, tearing through trees and bodies. After one Ukrainian Mukha managed to hit and damage a Russian fighting vehicle, a Russian tank joined the fray. It was carnage. “For the Russians, this battle was like shooting in a shooting gallery,” said one of the few survivors, Stanislav Vazanov. Like many other volunteer fighters in Buzki Park, he had never fired a weapon before.
The surviving Ukrainians fled under fire, some hiding for months and others, like Vazanov, making their way to Mykolaiv. Dozens of bulletriddled bodies, several missing limbs or heads, lay on the snow for days, eaten by dogs. Russian commanders decided to make some money and demanded cash from families that wanted to retrieve their relatives’ corpses. Having easily secured Kherson, the Russians pushed farther north, toward Mykolaiv and, beyond it, Odesa and Kryvyi Rih.
Home to 630,000 people, Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih stretches some eighty miles from one end to the other. Snaking between ore mines, steel plants, parks, and gritty residential neighborhoods, it straddles the main routes toward central Ukraine. Losing it would have been catastrophic.
The Russians had reasons to count on cooperation by Mayor Oleksandr Vilkul. A deputy prime minister under Yanukovych, and the son of the city’s previous Russia-friendly mayor, Vilkul was long associated with deeper ties with Moscow. In 2019, he ran on behalf of the pro-Russian opposition in the presidential elections, against Zelensky and Poroshenko, garnering 4 percent in the first round.
The Russians and their proxies reached out to him as soon as the war began. The first, private, call was from Vitaliy Zakharchenko, Yanukovych’s minister of interior, who had fled to Russia alongside the deposed president in 2014. The second message came publicly from Oleg Tsaryov, a former parliament member from the region, who also escaped to Moscow in 2014. “Our troops are already near Kryvyi Rih,” Tsaryov wrote on his social media, praising what he described as Vilkul’s traditionally proRussian position. “Collaboration with the Army of the Russian Federation means saving the city and the lives of its inhabitants.”
But Vilkul had other plans. Like many other elected community leaders with pro-Russian sympathies before the war, he didn’t waver about his loyalty when the invasion threatened his hometown. “Fuck yourself, traitor, along with your owners,” he replied publicly to Tsaryov. Growing a beard and donning a uniform with a black skullcap that made him look like an Afghan mujahedeen commander, Vilkul used the municipality’s extensive resources to defend Kryvyi Rih as Russian columns sped toward the city from the south.
“There was no army here at all when the war began,” he recalled a few weeks later. “We had one battalion of territorial defense, in the process of formation, six hundred troops of the National Guard, and two mortars. That’s all.”
On the second day of the war, a Russian Il-76 transport plane and two fighter jets flew low over the Kryvyi Rih airport, attempting to land airborne troops. But Vilkul’s municipality had already blocked the landing strip with dump trucks.
On February 26, the Russian column of some 300 tanks, armored BTRs and BMPs, Ural troop transporters, and artillery approached Kryvyi Rih from the southwest. Vilkul ordered a fleet of heavy Belaz mining trucks, their tires shot out, to block the highway. Warm weather had melted the snow and turned the ground muddy. “We were lucky that the Russians couldn’t travel on dirt roads then, only on asphalt,” Vilkul told me.
Spotters in the town of Bashtanka along the way allowed Ukrainian assault helicopters to strike the Russian column, inflicting considerable damage. Hours later, when the lead vehicles of the column got stuck in front of the Belaz barricades, just a few hundred yards from the entrance to Kryvyi Rih, Ukrainian helicopter gunships hit it again. Unprepared for such resistance, the Russians, running low on fuel and ammunition, turned back. They abandoned valuable equipment, including Grad multiple-launch rocket systems. Vilkul quickly found some retired officers trained in how to use Grads, and the launchers were turned around to attack their former owners. Municipal digging crews erected ever stronger fortifications around the city. After that initial failure, the Russians were never able to approach Kryvyi Rih again.
