This is the last bus from the last position Ukraine occupies on the road to Kherson – the first and only major city that Russia has taken.
Villagers have standing room only, while elderly people are crammed into a van.
“Grandpa, we’re here,” a resident’s daughter, Viktor, yells from the doorway of the bus, sitting in the van a little stunned. The panic is real; shelling could resume at any moment, a bombardment that residents say has littered the southern Ukrainian village of Posad-Pokrovske with cluster munitions.
As the convoy of two vehicles reaches the pockmarked road towards the city of Mykolaiv, the shells once again cover the horizon with a plume of black smoke. While sitting in the back of the van, Vitali collapses, using his dirty orange work gloves to wipe the tears from his eyes.
“Citizens! They killed all people, these are bastards, these are reptiles, parasites,” he says. “They don’t fight troops, they fight people. You see? Kill everyone. Worse than the fascists.”
Air strikes, grad missiles, cluster munitions – the residents remember two weeks of intense bombing, as evidenced by the fabric of Posad-Pokrovske.
The Ukrainian marines holding Posad-Pokrovske, the last settlement before the Russian positions defending Kherson airport, remain vague about their positions.
But their goal is clear: the airport outside Kherson, used as a Russian base, is already being hit hard by Ukrainian shelling.
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