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Ukrainian farmer Mykhailo Liubchenko, 72, says he'll likely burn the field he stands in front of because unexploded ordnance makes harvesting the grain possibly fatal. Peter Granitz/NPR hide caption

MYKOLAIV OBLAST, Ukraine It only took Mykhailo Liubchenko homemade vodka to salvage some of his business.

Liubchenko, 72, farms wheat and sunflowers on the front lines of the Ukraine war's southern campaign. He says he paid off Russian soldiers with samogon moonshine so they wouldn't torch his fields or steal his equipment in the early weeks of the war in February.

"They were completely drunk," he says. "They didn't steal anything or destroy anything. The next day our Ukrainian forces pushed them back."

Months later, burned Russian tanks and vehicles still line the farm roads that square his several-thousand-acre plots. Red flags sprout above young sunflower shoots, alerting farmhands to unexploded ordnance left behind. A rocket sits perched on a tree trunk, in what looks like it was once a defensive military position.

"I have 1,000 hectares [2,471 acres] of winter wheat and barley, that I don't know how to harvest. I'll probably just light it on fire," he says. "If I let combines and tractors work, drivers could be blown up because there are still some shells."

Destroyed tanks and trucks line the farm roads that bisect Mykhailo Liubchenko's plots. The ground fighting has subsided, but there's almost daily shelling in his region near the front lines of the southern campaign of the war. Peter Granitz/NPR hide caption

Destroyed tanks and trucks line the farm roads that bisect Mykhailo Liubchenko's plots. The ground fighting has subsided, but there's almost daily shelling in his region near the front lines of the southern campaign of the war.

Ukraine is considered a breadbasket of Europe and a major exporter of wheat, corn, sunflower and other food. But Russian warships and Ukrainian mines are blocking shipping lanes through the Black Sea. The United Nations warns the blockade will worsen world hunger, which leaves Ukrainian farmers in the middle of a local and global crisis right as the year's harvest begins.

Attempts by the U.N., Turkey and other parties to negotiate with Russia to let exports ship out of Ukrainian waters have so far failed. Moscow offered to help if the West lifted some of its sanctions and Ukraine cleared its mines around the ports.

Ukraine has been left out of the discussions, but a senior Ukrainian official said it would participate soon and expects the conversations to become more serious in July.

Meanwhile, global food prices have hovered near record highs their rise, even as some commodities, including wheat and corn, have dipped since their peaks.

In another record, up to 323 million people are on the brink of starvation, the Group of Seven global economic leaders warned on Monday, saying that factors including COVID-19 and climate change contributed.

The war in Ukraine "is dramatically aggravating the hunger crisis; it has triggered disruptions of agricultural production, supply chains and trade that have driven world food and fertiliser prices to unprecedented levels for which Russia bears enormous responsibility," the group's statement reads.

European Union officials accuse Russia of using hunger as a weapon, calling its blockade of Ukraine's shipping ports a war crime. EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has warned about "the risk of a great famine in the world, especially in Africa."

Before the war, Ukraine exported 5 million to 6 million tons of food per month with more than 90% of it going through Black Sea ports. But in May, Ukraine exported just 1.8 million tons.

"There was a lot of vessels that were scheduled to arrive in Ukrainian ports that just did a U-turn in the Black Sea," after Russia's invasion, says Mark Nugent, senior dry bulk analyst at Braemar Shipping Services.

Last year, Ukraine exported $27.8 billion worth of agricultural goods. It shipped more than 20 million tons of wheat and other cereal grains 10% of the world total for those commodities. Ukraine is also normally the top producer of sunflower seed, oil and meal, as well as a leading corn exporter.

Ukraine's Agriculture Ministry thinks the maximum amount of exports by land would top out at about 2.2 million tons per month.

These days, about half of Ukraine's food shipments are going to Poland, Romania and Hungary by rail, and much of the rest by trucks. For farmers, it's costlier to ship by road.

"Right now we're preparing our trucks and getting passports for our drivers who don't have them," says Oleksandr Tatarov, a farmer who grows rapeseed, wheat and barley near Bashtanka, Ukraine.

Farmer Oleksandr Tatarov holds some of his rapeseed that he hopes to export for cooking oil. If he cannot sell this year's harvest, he'll store the seeds in silo bags in his field. The night before this photo was taken, Russian shelling destroyed one of his storage facilities. Polina Lytvynova/NPR hide caption

Trucking barley to the ports of Izmail and Reni in southern Ukraine "costs about 50%" of the price Tatarov earns, he tells NPR, as explosions can be heard in the distance.

He says he'll test a truck shipment to those ports, where they could be loaded on barges on the Danube River, but he's heard trucks have waited for weeks to unload.

Almost one-third of Tatarov's nearly 8,600 acres are under occupation or shelling. "We've pulled the curtain on those fields," he says.

The day before he meets NPR, one of his farm garages was hit by a Russian attack. A shell destroyed one of his four food storage facilities.

When the blockade began, Ukraine already had 23.5 million tons of grain and seed in storage, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said in June. That left Ukraine's storage capacity about a third full, excluding the silos that are located in Russian-occupied territories.

Some of the remaining 5,000 tons of wheat Mykhailo Liubchenko harvested last season. A Russian blockade of the Black Sea has prevented him from selling the rest of last year's haul. Peter Granitz/NPR hide caption

Now, the Agriculture Ministry anticipates running out of storage capacity by October, expecting a harvest of grains and seeds to be about 60 million tons half of last year's.

"Part of our storage of facilities are in temporarily occupied territories, part of them were destroyed," Deputy Agriculture Minister Markiyan Dmytrasevych tells NPR. "We understand we'll face a deficit of grain storages. ... The deficit could be 10-15 million tons."

President Biden said the United States would help build temporary facilities in Poland.

Meanwhile, farmers like Tatarov will use massive silo bags to store as much as 200,000 tons of harvested grain and seeds in the fields. Other growers, including Vasily Khmilenko, are searching for bins to rent.

"I've never needed storage before," he says. "The port [in Odesa] is very close to us, so when we harvested, the trucks came straight to the field and took the grain."

Khmilenko says the harvested grain cannot sit in the field uncovered because rain would destroy it. He's negotiating with a company to store his entire yield, which he estimates to be between 400 and 500 tons.

He says he hopes they'll take some grain as payment.

The Ukrainian flag represents a blue sky over yellow farm fields, like grain on the farm of Vasily Khmilenko outside the city of Odesa. Peter Granitz/NPR hide caption

Liubchenko says he has experience demining as a former military colonel. He points out a pile of ordnance he says he removed from his fields. But that was earlier in the season, when the plants were shorter. It would be too dangerous to do that now, he says, because the taller plants obstruct his view of the ground.

He says he'll store as much of his harvest as he can and wait for the blockade to end.

A pile of rockets and shells that Mykhailo Liubchenko says he removed from his field. A former colonel in the Soviet army, Liubchenko says he spent part of his military career demining. He calls today's Russian forces "the barbarians of the 21st century." Peter Granitz/NPR hide caption

For Khmilenko, if he cannot sell this year, he says he'll be out about $70,000. "If we lose this it will be impossible to rebuild. I paid too much in this business to recover it," he says.

Khmilenko's farm is relatively far from the front lines, and he says he's confident Russian forces will not reach his land.

But the threat of shells, and potential fire from them, continues to haunt him. Russia has increased its shelling and missile attacks in the southern region in recent weeks, including attacks on food storage facilities in Mykolaiv and Odesa.

"The most important thing is that we de-blockade our seaport," Dmytrasevych says. "The only way to do that is to defeat the Russians. So we need weapons, weapons and weapons."

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Ukraine's farmers face Russia's blockade and explosives on their lands this harvest - NPR

The city of Kremenchuk is looking for blood. Last week, two Russian missiles blew apart a large shopping and entertainment centre where around a thousand people were spending the afternoon. The exact number of those killed is still not known, but hundreds of people were at the epicentre of the explosion and of some of them, not even fragments are left. The number of wounded is known, though. The survivors were left without arms, without legs. And they need blood.

This tragedy has given a new impetus to blood donation efforts. Blood is needed everywhere in Ukraine wherever Russian missiles and shells explode, wherever wounded soldiers are brought from the frontlines.

In Lviv, they are waiting for blood at the military hospital, which is located on a street named after the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, as well as in the regional hospital on a street named after the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy.

Waves of hatred are sweeping Ukraine and pushing Ukrainians to look for internal enemies. They are out for blood. Plenty of real internal enemies exist. Someone apparently shared the coordinates of Ukrainian military training centres with the Russian military, and barracks were destroyed by missiles.

Someone is spreading pro-Russian propaganda on Ukrainian corridors of the internet. At the same time, more and more distrust, and sometimes even hatred, is being shown towards Russian-speaking authors and intellectuals, who must now show themselves to be three times more patriotic than their Ukrainian-speaking counterparts. And even this does not save them from accusations that it is they who are to blame for the war because they speak, think and write in Russian. It is in their blood.

Despite the vehemence of young Ukrainians and Ukraines official demand that other countries boycott Russian culture, older Ukrainians remain conservative and do not want to go that far. They quietly oppose the total boycott of Russian culture. An opera-loving friend of ours shed tears at the thought of not being able to hear Eugene Onegin at the Kyiv opera house ever again.

Russian-speaking Ukrainians are almost used to these constant accusations, just as the country is almost used to war. This does not mean that people are accustomed to rocket explosions in cities, but we have got used to the idea that this war will last a long time.

Experts constantly predict the date of the end of the war. Some of them say September. The president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, says that the war will end before the frosts set in before winter. Other politicians think spring 2023 is more likely.

The relatives of Ukrainian prisoners of war are loudly and very publicly demanding an early exchange of prisoners between Russia and Ukraine, while another process is going on quite quietly and non-publicly: the exchange of the dead.

Bodies are said to be exchanged on a one-to-one basis one dead Ukrainian soldier for one dead Russian soldier. In an attempt to obtain as many bodies as possible, the Russians resort to tricks. They are said to have put the corpses of dead civilians in black bags. As a result, the work with bags begins with a general sorting process. Civilian remains are also processed, but this is a longer and more complicated matter because it is not known where the Russians brought these remains from. They are kept for some time in the refrigerator of the morgue, and then they are transferred to other regional morgues for further identification and the search for relatives.

I dont know where this exchange takes place, but it is somewhere near the frontline. A refrigerated truck with the number 200 on the windscreen regularly arrives at the regional morgue on Oranzhereinaya Street near the botanical garden in Kyiv. 200 this is how the dead are designated in military terminology. Accompanying soldiers bring black bags with the remains of the dead into the morgue. Pathologists work with these remains.

The main task is to try to find out the soldiers data in order to transfer the remains to relatives for burial. If the deceased had tattoos, this is much easier to do. But the black bags do not always contain the whole body of a soldier. Often there are only bones and a skull, sometimes fragments of a body. Relatives of the missing donate their DNA to make it easier and faster to find their dead loved ones.

The DNA database of Ukrainians whose relatives have gone missing in the war is constantly growing. Anyone near the centre of the explosion in Kremenchuk last Monday disappeared completely; nothing remains. No traces or fragments. He or she has gone missing forever. We dont know exactly how many they are. DNA wont help.

While residents of the city donated blood for the wounded, local authorities declared three days of mourning for the dead. During the time of mourning, entertainment events, concerts and circus performances are usually not held, but I cannot imagine inhabitants of Kremenchuk planning to have fun for a long time afterwards. One of the most popular entertainments for Ukrainians, even now, is fishing. Fishing is not prohibited during mourning. Periods of mourning could be declared in dozens of cities and towns in Ukraine after the shelling and massacres of Ukrainian citizens by the Russian army.

But it seems strange to go into mourning in the middle of a war. After all, usually after the end of the mourning period life should return to normal. Comedies can be shown on TV again, theatres and circuses can open their doors. Now there is only one TV news channel in Ukraine, which unites all previously existing TV news channels.

It is possible to go to the theatre in some cities, but there is no guarantee that the siren announcing an air raid will not interrupt the performance. It would, of course, be better if some strong, dramatic performance interrupted the war. Or even stopped it altogether. But alas, the drama of a real war remains unstoppable. The director and producer of the war, Vladimir Putin, wants to shed as much Ukrainian blood as possible.

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In Ukraine, this summer means blood and sirens but fishing and the theatre go on - The Guardian

July 4 (Reuters) - Ukraine is holding talks with Turkey and the United Nations to secure guarantees for grain exports from Ukrainian ports, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday.

"Talks are in fact going on now with Turkey and the U.N. (and) our representatives who are responsible for the security of the grain that leaves our ports," Zelenskiy told a news conference alongside Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson.

"This is a very important thing that someone guarantees the security of ships for this or that country - apart from Russia, which we do not trust. We therefore need security for those ships which will come here to load foodstuffs."

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Zelenskiy said Ukraine was working "directly" with U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres on the issue and that the organization was "playing a leading role, not as a moderator."

News reports have suggested in recent weeks that such talks would soon be taking place in Turkey.

Ukraine, one of the world's leading grain exporters, accuses Russia of blocking the movement of its ships, and Zelenskiy said 22 million tonnes of grain was stuck at the moment with a further harvest of about 60 million tonnes expected in the autumn.

Russia denies it is blocking any movement of grain and says Ukraine is to blame for the lack of movement, partly because of what it says are mining operations in its ports.

Ukraine has also accused Russia of stealing grain from its warehouses and taking it out of the country - either to Russian-occupied areas, Russia itself or other countries.

A Turkish official on Monday said Turkey had halted a Russian-flagged cargo ship off its Black Sea coast and was investigating a Ukrainian claim that it was carrying stolen grain.

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Reporting by Ronald PopeskiEditing by Bill Berkrot

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Zelenskiy says Ukraine is in talks with Turkey, UN on grain exports - Reuters

SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. In a room dimly lit by television screens, dozens of airmen tapped away at computers and worked the phones. Some were keeping watch over a high-priority mission to move a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter from a base in Arizona to a destination near Ukraines border.

Earlier that day, a civilian colleague had checked a spreadsheet and found a C-17 transport plane in Washington state that was available to pick up the helicopter and begin a daylong trip.

It was up to the airmen to give the planes crew its orders, make sure the plane took off and landed on time and handle any problems along the way.

The C-17 would fly from McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson, where the helicopter was parked in a repository for retired military airplanes known as the boneyard.

So its two and a half hours from McChord to Davis-Monthan, said Col. Bob Buente, reviewing the first leg of the journey. Then four hours to load, then theyll take off about 7:30 tonight. Then five hours to Bangor, then well put them to bed because of the size of the next leg.

From Bangor, Maine, the cargo flight call sign: Reach 140 would leave for Europe, the colonel said.

Since the war in Ukraine began four months ago, the Biden administration has contributed billions of dollars in military aid to the Ukrainian government, including American-made machine guns, howitzers and artillery rocket launchers, as well as Russian-designed weaponry that the countrys military still uses, like the Mi-17 helicopter.

The Pentagon has drawn many of the items from its own inventory. But how they reach Ukraine often involves behind-the-scenes coordination by teams at a military base in Illinois, about 25 miles east of St. Louis.

There at Scott Air Force Base, where a half-dozen retired transport planes are on display just outside the main gate, several thousand logisticians from each branch of the armed forces work at the United States Transportation Command or Transcom. In military parlance, it is a combatant command, equal to better-known units that are responsible for parts of the globe like Central Command and Indo-Pacific Command and takes its orders directly from the secretary of defense.

Transcom has worked out the flow of every shipment of military aid from the United States to Ukraine, which began in August and kicked into high gear after the Russian invasion.

The process begins when the government in Kyiv sends a request to a call center on an American base in Stuttgart, Germany, where a coalition of more than 40 nations coordinates the aid. Some of the orders are filled by a U.S. partner or ally, and the rest are handled by the United States routed through U.S. European Command, which is also in Stuttgart, to Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who discuss them in weekly meetings with the service chiefs and combatant commanders.

If the desired items are available, and the combatant commanders decide that giving them to Ukraine will not unduly harm their own war plans, General Milley makes a recommendation to Mr. Austin, who in turn makes a recommendation to President Biden. If the president signs off, Transcom figures out how to move the aid to an airfield or port near Ukraine.

The order to move the Russian helicopter zipped across the base in Illinois from Transcoms headquarters to a one-story brick building housing the 618th Air Operations Center, where red-lit clocks offered the local time at major military aviation bases in California, Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, Qatar and Germany.

Colonel Buente runs the day-to-day operations at the 618th Air Operations Center, where about 850 active-duty airmen, reservists and civilians spend their days planning missions like the helicopters trip, he said. Making sure those plans are carried out falls to a smaller group working in shifts of 60 people, 24 hours a day, every day of the year that follows the stream of missions posted on a constantly updated screen centered on the back wall all the way to completion.

It is the same center that orchestrated the mass evacuation of Americans and Afghans from Afghanistans capital in August. On the busiest day then, 21,000 passengers were flown out of the Kabul airport, with planes taking off or landing every 90 minutes, officials said.

That was a busy time for Transcom, which on an average day not only plans and coordinates about 450 cargo flights but also oversees about 20 cargo ships, along with a network of transcontinental railroads and more than a thousand trucks all of which routinely carry war matriel.

July 4, 2022, 7:36 p.m. ET

The flights also transport humanitarian assistance and other supplies when needed, including shipments of baby formula in May to alleviate a shortage in the United States.

Commanding all of it is Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost of the Air Force, who is just the second female officer to lead one of the Pentagons 11 combatant commands.

For the aid shipments to Ukraine, the planning begins long before the White House announces a new aid package, she said.

We cannot wait until the president signs or the secretary gives an order before we do the necessary planning, General Van Ovost said in an interview in her office, where a photo of Amelia Earhart hung on the wall. Were watching it evolve, the general said of the discussions about aid, and we create plans that are sitting at the ready.

Mr. Biden authorized the first U.S. military equipment and weapons for Ukraine a $60 million package on Aug. 27. At the time, it took about a month to get the items onto a plane after they were approved, according to General Van Ovost, a test pilot who flew cargo planes.

The White House has announced 13 subsequent aid packages for Ukraine, and the planning process has advanced enough that it now takes less than a day from the president approving a shipment to having the first items loaded onto a plane, she said. Three of the packages in the wars first 29 days totaled $1.35 billion. As of Friday, the United States has committed $6.9 billion in military aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded.

Transcoms operations center decides whether to send aid via cargo plane or by ship based on how quickly European Command needs it to arrive. Though military cargo planes like C-17s offer the fastest delivery option, they incur the highest costs. About half of Transcoms airfreight is handled by a fleet of contracted, commercially owned aircraft, including 747s, each of which can carry double the weight a C-17 can.

Whenever possible, though, military planners send goods on cargo ships, a less expensive option.

Weve activated two vessels and used multiple liner service vessels to deliver cargo bound for Ukraine, said Scott Ross, a spokesman for the command. The vessels and more than 220 flights had delivered just over 19,000 tons of military aid to Ukraine since August, he said.

On one of the large screens in Colonel Buentes operations center, about a dozen missions were listed in order of importance. At the top were two 1A1 missions supporting some of the commands most important customers: the president, vice president, the secretaries of state and defense as well as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Immediately below those missions was Reach 140, the C-17 flying to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Thousands of aircraft have baked there in the sun, including 13 Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters that the United States had bought for Afghanistan before Kabul fell to the Taliban.

In recent months, 12 of the helicopters were shipped to countries near Ukraine, returned to flying condition and handed over to Ukrainian pilots for the fight with Russia.

As the airmen tracked the C-17, a handful of soldiers and civilians in a small Army-run section of Transcom monitored a separate mission: four cargo trains moving across the United States as well as several cargo ships, some of which were owned by the Navy.

One of the Navy vessels was heading from Norfolk, Va., to a military port in North Carolina, where it would be loaded with ammunition for M142 HIMARS rocket launchers long desired by the Ukrainian military. The rockets, packed in bundles of six and loaded into 20-foot shipping containers, were also en route to the port. Cranes would soon lift the metal boxes off tractor-trailers and rail cars, stack them aboard the ship and lock them into place for a journey at sea lasting about two weeks.

Most of the Pentagons military aid sent to Ukraine on ships goes to two German ports one on the North Sea and the other on the Baltic.

To keep potential adversaries from closing off routes for Ukraine military aid, Army planners can set up operations at any one of dozens of ports on the two seas. Russian warships have largely shut down the most direct routes for resupply missions Ukrainian ports in the Black Sea.

At the 618th, where presidents and secretaries of defense can reassign planes in a heartbeat for emergencies around the world, a screen that usually displays a classified map of global threats to military air and sea shipments was blacked out for security reasons while a reporter was in the room.

And three of the televisions were set to cable news because, as Colonel Buente explained, we usually end up reacting to breaking news.

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How a Military Base in Illinois Helps Keep Weapons Flowing to Ukraine - The New York Times

IN THE EARLY days of the war in Ukraine, a rapid Russian advance plunged Kherson province into darkness. What little is known about life there comes from refugees who dare to escape, reaching relative safety in front-line towns like Zelenodolsk. They come any way they can: by foot, bike, boat, in wheelchairs. One woman was dragged by her son on a carpet. At one point, nearly 1,000 a day were arriving. Destroyed bridges and increased risks mean the daily count has dwindled to single digits. But a vast yard of abandoned bicycles, wheelchairs and baskets on the edge of Zelenodolsk stands as a memorial to the lives left behindtemporarily, so those who have fled hope.

The most recent arrivals talk of intense fighting as Ukraine readies itself to counter-attack from the west, near Mykolaiv, and the north, from towns like Zelenodolsk. Vlad Milin, 31, and Olha Shelemba, 26, said that shelling had become so relentless in their village, Dovhove, they decided to risk everything and travel with their five young children in a boat, then navigate country fields and mined roads to safety. There was little point in watching the battle unfold further, they said. Neither side is going to give up.

Kherson, a gateway to Crimea, is the only regional capital that Russia has managed to capture since the war began on February 24th. Just as important to Russias southern strategy is its occupation of neighbouring Kakhovka, on the left bank of the Dnipro, where a dam provides the annexed peninsulas water. The whole region is an agricultural powerhouse, providing tomatoes, watermelons, sunflowers and soyabeans. For these reasons and more, Ukraine is prioritising efforts to retake it. The countrys forces can already boast tactical successes. A military-intelligence officer says that forward units are now within sniper range (a kilometre or so) of Chornobaivka, an outer suburb of Kherson. The next week or two will be even more interesting, he promises.

Whatever is under way does not yet appear to be a full-fledged counter-offensive. Ukraine remains focussed on halting Russias steady advance in the easton July 2nd, its troops retreated from Lysychansk in Luhansk provinceand its southern grouping does not enjoy the three-to-one advantage strategists recommend for a successful offensive. Soldiers complain of a critical shortage of ammunition and infantry. There is a tendency by our bosses to overstate success on the battlefield, says Banderas, the nom de guerre of a Ukrainian reconnaissance commander. That could change only if more Western rocket systems are used in the southern theatre, he added. Currently only a handful of M777 howitzers are deployed there.

Where the Ukrainians are pushing, the Russians are fighting back hard. Serhiy, a Ukrainian territorial-defence soldier working behind Russian lines in Vysokopillya, just across from Zelenodolsk, says the enemy has built reinforced bunkers under the ground. When they try to push the Russians out, they return in greater numbers. Their ten becomes a hundred, he says. One village base has four air-defence units defending it. Ukraines task has been hindered, the soldier complains, by locals who did not flee the occupation and are being used by Russian troops as human shields: We cant shoot at our own people.

A handful of locals are collaborating with the enemy, he says. Girls as young as 15 have been recruited by the Russians. In early June, Serhiys company discovered a 40-year-old artillery spotter during a random search. The mans near-clean mobile phone gave him away. The phone had just one computer-game app installed. Closer inspection revealed the game was, in fact, a tool to record co-ordinates and receive cryptocurrency payments. The bastard had mapped out our hardware movements over the last month, he says.

The exposed lowlands of Kherson mean that any Ukrainian advance there feels the full force of Russian artillery. There is already talk of serious losses in the areas immediately south of Zelenodolsk. An attempt to cross the Inhulets river at the village of Davydiv Brid in Mayessential for a second-prong attack on Kakhovkawas particularly costly. They were baited into the line of fire, says Victoria, a farmer who lived in Davydiv Brid until it became impossible in mid-May. A lot of our men lost their lives.

The 38-year-old fidgets as she recounts her own escape. The cue to leave came when Grad rockets landed in the farmyard. She jumped in a car and joined a convoy of a hundred vehicles that had been waiting to pass over the bridge, which has since been destroyed. Russian soldiers gave the go-ahead to cross, but as the convoy approached Ukrainian positions on the other side, it was shelled. To this day, it is unclear who fired. Ukrainian authorities say between 20 and 50 people died. Their bodies have not been recovered.

Lucky to be alive, Victoria has not moved far from danger. She is again living near the front line in Zelenodolsk, housed there by local volunteers. Like many of Khersons mostly poor refugees, she has no money for anything else. She left everything behind in the village: her house, her cows, her chickens.

But she insists that not all the Russian soldiers were villains, and she even felt sorry for the youngest ones. Some were fellow Ukrainians, conscripted after going out to buy bread in occupied Luhansk, in the east. Those boys paid for everything they took from the village shop, she saysfirst in hryvnia, later in roublesand even said thank you in Ukrainian. But when Russian positions came under serious attack, the Luhansk units were fortified with angrier colleagues from Russia itself.

The shifting attitudes in Davydiv Brid offer a warning of what may happen in Kherson if Ukraines counter-offensive gathers pace. Anton, the pseudonym of a former official who fled to Krivyi Rih in late May after being asked to head a collaborationist authority, says Russia has generally tried not to upset locals too much. This was a conscious decision to co-opt the population, he said. But if that changes and the occupiers are forced out of Kherson, there is little to hold them back. Things will turn nasty, and quickly. The Russians will be angry as hell, and lash out, but the partisan resistance will be just as fierce, he said. The locals will simply tear the Russians apart.

Clarification (July 4th 2022): The sentence about the location of Ukraines forward units has been edited for clarity since publication, to avoid any possible misreadings.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis.

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Ukraine prepares a counter-offensive to retake Kherson province - The Economist