The Economist March 12th 2022 13
BriefingThe war in UkraineK
herson is aboutas far up the Dnieper
from the Black Sea as Bordeaux is up
the Gironde from the Bay of Biscay; its pop
ulation, 280,000, is a bit larger. It is nor
mally a sleepy, provincial place. On Febru
ary 24th, though, when Russian tanks
rolled out of Crimea, 120km to the south
east, it became a vital objective in Russia’s
attempt to take control of a corridor along
Ukraine’s entire coast. When, having en
countered more resistance than they ex
pected, some of those tanks reached the
centre of Kherson on March 1st, Russianstate media heralded the fall of the city as
the campaign’s first “liberation”.
Kherson’s citizens were having none of
it. They waved Ukrainian flags, shouting
and screaming at the Russians to leave.
Some of them stood in the way of tanks.
The city’s mayor and the governor of the
Kherson oblast, both in effect hostages, insisted that they would take orders only
from Kyiv. A week into the occupation they
were sticking to their guns.
Across Ukraine, from Berdyansk on the
Azov Sea to Sumy in the northeast, Rus
sian forces have met resistance when they
advance and obstreperousness when they
think they have gained control. They and
their leaders expected something more
welcoming. The fsb, a successor to the
kgb, told Russia’s president, Vladimir Pu
tin, that it had thoroughly penetrated
Ukraine’s political and military leadership,
and laid the groundwork for a proRussian
regime—a key reason for the Kremlin’s war
optimism. But the fsbgrossly exaggerated
its networks of agents in Ukrainian cities.
Mr Putin can hardly have believed the
taradiddles he peddled about Ukraine’s
drugaddled neoNazi elite perpetrating
genocide and ordinary Ukrainians desper
ate for rescue by their Russian brothers.
Videos of prisoners of war show that at
least some of the rank and file seem to have
bought such stories. But they found no
welcome anywhere. The mood is generally
one of contempt.
In Kherson unabashed proUkrainian
rallies have continued daily. Alexander
Mogilinkov, one of thousands to attend
them, said by phone on March 8th that the
violence of the Russian army had at that
time galvanised people. Protesters are ner
vous, he says, and they face a new threat
they do not understand. But they are even
more fearful of the repression and poverty
that Mr Putin has imposed on the nearby
regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which
have been controlled by Russia since 2014.
Initially flummoxed, on March 9th Rus
sian forces detained over 400 protesters in
what Ukrainian authorities said represent
ed the beginning of a new repressive re
gime. The mayor of Novopskov, a town
near Donbas, told the bbcthat daily prot
ests there stopped when Russian soldiers
shot three protesters and beat another on
March 5th. There have been reports from
elsewhere of tanks being deliberately
rammed into houses, hostage taking and
sexual violence. European intelligence of
ficials say that the fsbhas drafted plans for
public executions to break morale.
In Crimea the intelligence services have
a tried and tested approach for dealing
with opposition. Anton Naumlyuk, a Rus
sian journalist who has reported from the
annexed peninsula since 2016, says it dif
fers little from schemes used by Tsarist po
litical police to sniff out revolutionaries at
the start of the 20th century. “First, they
map networks to understand who the real
opinion leaders are, and they target them.
If people cooperate, fine. If not, they start
to disappear.” Crimea sos, a nongovern
mental organisation, says 36 of 43 men kid
napped in Crimea since 2014 were definiteVINNITSYA
Russians who expected their invasion of Ukraine to be welcomed were quickly
disabused. Now things are turning nastierOccupation? No thanks!
→Alsointhissection
14 The great leap backward