“I promised I would come back. So it happened, I kept my promise,” said Anastasia Shevlyuga, 30, shortly after getting off the train and reunited with her mother.
A few feet away on the platform, Lyudmila Romanyuk, 66, smiled with a bunch of flowers as she anxiously waited for her granddaughter to arrive. “The parents don’t know she’s coming… we planned it,” she told AFP with a laugh. “We’re finally free,” she exclaimed. “It’s a win for everyone. We’ve been released and my favorite girl is coming here.”
For others, the moment was darker. Svytlana Dosenko fought back tears as she waited for her son, whom she last saw before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24. The wait has been agonizing. “He’s the only one I have left,” he said.
The past few months have been shrouded in grief, humiliation and fear as Russian troops withdrew from the annexed Crimean peninsula and occupied large parts of the Black Sea coast, including Kherson.
Two days after the outbreak of war in February, Dosenko’s husband died of covid after the power cut at the hospital where he was on a ventilator. In the months that followed, he lived among Russian occupiers, who regularly searched for apartments and set up checkpoints in the city.
“It was very confusing and very difficult. My house was searched by Russian soldiers. They broke into the house, looking for weapons,” Dosenko explains. She planned to take the train back to Kiev with her son on Saturday evening. “I just want to see him and say I love him,” he added.
Others showed up not to greet anyone in particular, but simply to enjoy the last sign of Cherson’s return to Ukrainian control.
“I wanted to make sure it was coming,” said Lyudmyla Smeshkova, 60, with her Chihuahua Molly attached to her fur coat.
For railway workers in the region, the arrival of the train was a moment of immense pride. More than 100 workers worked 12-hour shifts in the freezing rain last week to clean and repair nearly 60 kilometers of line with demining teams.
“It’s exciting. After we heard of Kherson’s release, we received orders to repair the 58 different damaged areas on the line,” said Denys Rustyk, 31, a railway worker from the nearby city of Odessa.
Convoys have long been the industrial and economic backbone of Ukraine, and since the beginning of the war, they have provided a lifeline by displacing millions of people from the conflict, while also supplying fighters on the front lines.
The reopening of the line to Kherson will also provide another critical supply artery for a city desperate for relief. When the Russians withdrew more than a week ago, they destroyed vital infrastructure, leaving Kherson without power and water as the harsh winter weather set in.
Since then, humanitarian aid has poured into the trucks and cars driving along the beaten roads connecting Kherson to the neighboring city of Mykolaiv. “For Kherson, this is vital because now they will get equipment and help from the railways,” says Yuri Karlyukin, 53, who has 15 years of experience in the Ukrainian rail system. “The sooner Kherson is on, the sooner the city will come back to life.”
Source: DN
