When the barrage began, Dmytro Pletenchuk was outside Kherson railway station. A shell set fire to a train evacuating civilians. Another plunged into the square. Pletenchuk, a major in the Ukrainian navy and press officer for Kherson’s defence forces, ran to his car to get his flak jacket. He came back to a scene of carnage: a body covered in blankets; a dazed man slumped on the pavement, his foot bleeding; glass everywhere and debris.
Pletenchuk took photographs. “I’m a professional. I must work. I can’t cry,” he said. The same morning, the Russians bombed a petrol station, a private building and a supermarket, in one of the worst attacks since the invasion. “I saw four dead people lying in the aisle. Red Cross workers rescued a young boy. You could see the bone in his leg,” Pletenchuk said.
The devastating artillery bombardment on 3 May killed 24 people and injured 45, two of them children. Pletenchuk took out his mobile phone and showed the Guardian some of the images he recorded on this ghastly day, sent to news outlets around the world and published by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, on his official Telegram channel, with nearly 1 million subscribers.
Zelenskiy described the attack as the work of an “evil state” and wrote: “The world needs to see and know this.” He added: “A railway station and a crossing, a house, a hardware store, a grocery supermarket, a gas station – do you know what unites these places? The bloody trail that Russia leaves with its shells, killing civilians in Kherson and Kherson region. My condolences to the families and friends of the victims. We will never forgive the culprits.”
The photos are harrowing. Shrapnel has clawed part of the skull from a shopper; the mangled body of a woman lies amid vegetables and a fallen-over trolley. Plentenchuk shot video as well. One clip includes lurid vermillon puddles and a rivulet of blood running outside the store. “With Grad missiles it’s always the head and legs. I don’t know why,” he reflected grimly. “That day I just saw brains on the ground.”
Civilians living on Ukraine’s frontline are regularly exposed to similar horror. With no end to the war in sight, there is a growing psychological and emotional toll. Pletenchuck said he had bad dreams. In one, he relived Russia’s devastating missile attack last year on the regional administration building in Mykolaiv where he worked, which killed 37 of his colleagues. “I wake up in the part of the dream when the explosion happens,” he said.
Other nightmares feature his eight-year-old daughter, Regina. “I dream the Russians capture us, something like that. Or that there is an attack and I don’t have ammunition and can’t find my gear.” Pletenchuk said he and his wife, a journalist also based in Kherson, took sleeping tablets. “I can’t sleep really,” he admitted. “You hear the sound of explosions at night across the city. It’s incoming, and outgoing from our side.”
One of the victims photographed by Pletenchuk under a white sheet was 73-year-old Viktor Kuksenko. He had gone to the railway station to collect a relative. His widow, Lyudmyla, said their last conversation was at 1.46pm. When he didn’t return, she went to the station to investigate. Two police officers told her there had been a major incident, with multiple casualties, and advised her to go home.
Soon afterwards, her phone rang. “There was a call from my husband’s number. The voice was a woman’s. I said: ‘Is he alive or dead?’ She answered: ‘Dead.’ She told me to drop by at the morgue the next day. I was in shock. When I arrived, they wouldn’t let me see his body. They said his head was bashed in.” She added: “He was my first love. I was 13 when we met. He was 15. A good, kind, gentle person. We were together for 52 years.”
Lyudmyla said she and her husband had survived last year’s occupation of Kherson, which ended in November when Russian troops retreated across the Dnipro River. Ever since, the city has been a target. “We didn’t leave because there is a lot of looting. We were worried that someone might steal the little we have. My pension is tiny. I’ve always economised. What am I supposed to do now?” she said.
According to the regional administration, Russian forces hit Kherson and the surrounding district with 200-600 munitions a day. They use multiple rocket launcher systems, mortars, tank rounds and quadcopter drones that drop small grenades, usually on civilian objects. Serhiy Melashych, a city council worker, said he came under attack two weeks ago when he visited Ostriv, an island district close to the river. He had been delivering humanitarian aid.
“A mortar flew over my head. I hid behind a fence,” he said, showing a photo he took of a small flechette that had embedded itself in one of the tyres on his car. “I have a nightmare where the rocket flies towards me,” he added. “Before the war, if I saw blood I would be shocked. Now I’m not. If you see these attacks often they become a kind of normal. You live with it.”
Melashych acknowledged that the war was “emotionally very difficult” for everybody. “I cope in different ways. Sometimes I go and see my family who live in a safe area. I asked them for a cat to keep me company but they joked it would be too dangerous for the cat. Other times I drink a glass of whisky. I tell myself there are worse places to be in Ukraine. At the end of the day I can sleep because I’m very tired.”
About 50,000 people live in Kherson, from a pre-invasion population of 300,000. Some returned after liberation; others exited last week after the supermarket and railway attack. Olena Velikho, 85, stopping off at a cafe for a bowl of soup, said she was staying put. “I’m a child of the second world war. It doesn’t scare me,” she said.
Pletenchuk said the fact that some parents with children refused to leave was a problem. “There are no safe places in Kherson,” he pointed out. The situation would improve only once Ukraine’s armed forces had evicted the Russians from the left bank of Kherson province and other occupied areas, he said. Ultimately Russia itself had to be destroyed, to prevent Moscow from launching another war in the future, he suggested.
Since the invasion, the press officer has taken thousands of photographs of ruined buildings, murdered civilians and the twisted remnants of enemy missiles. Pletenchuk said he was considering exhibiting some of them once the fighting was over – as a way of processing the horror that Ukraine had collectively endured, and of reminding future generations of Russian war crimes. “It’s a very big archive,” he said.
He was confident that Ukraine would eventually be able to move on from its current cycle of trauma and grief. “People feel optimistic. We all believe in our victory and we understand Russia can’t win. They don’t know what they are doing in our country. They come to Ukraine and die, like slaves. They don’t have our motivation. We know exactly why we are fighting.”
