Before their withdrawal last Friday from the city they had occupied for eight months, Russian forces destroyed several energy infrastructures.
If the Ukrainian army has taken over Kherson, built on the right (western) bank of the wide river, the left bank is still under Russian control.
“A week ago, the water supply system was damaged. And since then, we have no electricity and no water, so we take water here for our sanitary needs,” explains Tatiana, who came on foot with her daughter and her little boy.
From their wheeled cart, they take out several large plastic bottles which they are going to fill with water from the river, which is very slightly yellowish.
The concrete pontoon is a bit high. You have to kneel to reach the surface of the river with your hand. The exercise is difficult, especially for the elderly.
To fill the containers, some use a bucket, a funnel, a plastic cup or even a milk jug held by a string.
“It’s already been five days without water and a week without electricity. I knew it could happen. So I stocked up on water,” says Olga Genkulova, 41, who has just finished her chore and loaded her bottles in the trunk of his car.
In the parking lot in front of the pontoon, the comings and goings are incessant.
A man loads a dozen large cylinders into his van. He runs a café-bar and also gives some to neighbours.
For drinking water, the city has made reservoirs available, and you can still find some commercially.
Known for its shipyards, Kherson (280,000 inhabitants before the war) has a river port and another for commerce.
A freighter is moored near the pontoon where the bottles are filled. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, maritime traffic has been stopped on the Dnieper, which flows into the Black Sea.
A little further upstream, on the place of the Eternal Flame, a monument to the dead of the Second World War which overlooks the river, dozens of people are staring at their mobile phones.
Shortly after Moscow’s capture of Kherson in March, the Russians cut off its telephone network.
But near the large monument, which dominates the calm waters of the Dnieper and its entire left bank in front, it is possible to pick up Russian mobile networks. These do not have names but numbers: 2494 and 2596.
Vita Morzhiveska, 55, has the phone to her ear and keeps talking. Beside her, her husband listens to the conversation, which lasts about fifteen minutes. At the other end of the line, their children.
“They are in Crimea”, the peninsula annexed in 2014 by Moscow, explains the woman.
“They left at the beginning of the war, in April… They wanted to come back in August but they didn’t succeed. They were about to cross the Antonov Bridge but the bridge was destroyed. They almost be affected themselves,” she adds.
The Antonov Bridge spans the Dnieper in the northeastern suburbs of the city.
Hit by Ukrainian rockets when it was under Russian control, the latter blew up part of the structure on the right bank with explosives, just before withdrawing completely from the area.
The bridge, the last before the Black Sea, led to the locality of Olechky, 5 kilometers away, still occupied by the Russians.
Monday afternoon, a plume of black smoke was visible towards this city.
Probably the result of Ukrainian artillery fire, regularly heard around Kherson and aimed at Russian positions.
