For more than eight months of Russian occupation, the southern port city of Kherson was cut off from rail service to the rest of Ukraine. On Saturday, train came back.
KHERSON, Ukraine — As the overnight train left the Mykolaiv station, a now mostly empty building with its windows blown out, Lyudmyla Desiatnykova could hardly believe her stop was next.It was the city where she grew up, where she raised her children and where most of the 52-year-old woman’s extended family still lives. But it was a place she had not seen since July, when her family insisted that she flee the Russian-occupied, war-torn city with her 15-year-old daughter.
Throughout the war, Ukrainian Railways has been a symbol of resilience, ferrying hundreds of thousands of displaced people to safety even as it stations and tracks were sometimes bombed. Last week, in a bold display of optimism, the railroad began selling tickets to five cities, all but one of them still occupied by Russians.
One of those people was Gromovytsia Berdynk, 49, a writer from Kyiv who had never been to Kherson. She planned simply to wander the city for a few hours, meet its residents and tell them “we had been praying for the people of Kherson the entire time.”On Friday, Natalia Polishchuk, 63, stood outside her home on the outskirts of Kherson and gasped when she heard the familiar, long-awaited sound of a train arriving in her neighborhood for the first time in nine months.
She worried that the Russians might return to recapture Kherson. She knew they still controlled much of the surrounding region on the east side of the Dnieper River. On Nov. 11, Desiatnykova suddenly lost all communication with her husband. But a night earlier, she had learned why: the Telegram channel of a local journalist reported that the Russians had fled Kherson, leaving residents with no power, cellphone service or running water. She knew, even before her husband found out, that the city had been liberated.Desiatnykova had been scrolling on her phone the previous week when she saw the news that railroad service would be returning to liberated cities.
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