By Scott Anderson*
In the chilly gloom of late November we walk through an abandoned park in Kherson, two blocks from the bank of the Dnieper River, across which lurk the Russians. Several acres of this parkland had been untended for two years, with this season’s leaves covering last year’s leaf mold. Fallen branches lie here and there, and the paths are beginning to fade and enwild. The park is in an unoccupied dead zone near the river, deserted now because there are too many drones and occasional artillery shells and no one is quite sure what to expect from the Russians at any given time, so the whole area has been left to nature by order of the Ukrainian Army. If the Russians attack back here across the river again it will be a killing zone in which many Russians will die.
This park is a dark place to be, like a set on the Walking Dead, but surreal because this isn’t a movie set at all. It’s real life in the here and now. There are no zombies, but a pall of dread hangs over the place and every minute spent in it. The Russians invaded through here in 2022 and fought their way back across the river when the Ukrainians stopped them, leaving nothing but ruin behind. Soldiers who live in this netherworld of no-man’s-land day in and day out for months find it hard to make long term plans, surrounded by desolation and ever conscious of a lurking death that can come in an instant without warning. Not even the birds sing here.
Near the center of the park, across a knee-high expanse of what was once a manicured lawn, and partially obscured by a fallen branch, a bright orange “pizza” sign hangs lopsided from a destroyed concession stand that once wrapped around two sides of a concrete patio. The patio is overgrown and the orange sign looks out of place in the subdued hues and bare branches of a cold and grey November day. Across the broken park a line of trenches waits in case they are needed again.
Further along, across the path from a small fortlike structure once meant to represent a kid’s make-believe castle but now with a stoved gate raked by bullet holes and shrapnel, a small collection of what look like steel-tube play structures peek above the wild grass. They are a common sight in eastern Ukraine, a rudimentary, mass-produced outdoor gym Stalin set up in parks in the 1950s, presumably to keep the survivors of his Holodomor in tiptop physical condition. They’ve been ritually maintained here and there over the years by some kind of bureaucratic habit, but since the war began they’ve been rusting away like the other remnants of Soviet communism.
You have to stay on paths in places like this and avoid holes and piles of leaves or garbage because you never know what may be lurking in them. At the same time we keep one eye on the sky and try to stay under the bare branches of the trees whenever we can because drones are just as deadly as mines. Here, in places like this, the sound of something thudding to the ground or the whir of small propellers can mean death because the Russian drone operators play the ‘human safari’ game in Kherson. It’s an awful war, this war we’re losing on the border of western civilization, and there’s a cruelty and barbarism about it that we haven’t seen in living memory. They say the Russians no longer take prisoners.
It’s jarring to see thousands of young men’s faces on gravesites in massive graveyards in every city across Ukraine, with backhoes prepping the ground for more. It’s harder still to see the places they died. Everyone can imagine the thunder and lightning of organized violence, but the haunting hopelessness of ruined normality is one of the faces of war no one really takes note of.