'It's not just surviving' Life goes on in cellars of frontline city

Galyna Lutsenko, a crisis psychologist, is moving busily among a group of children in a basement in Kherson, unique in being Ukraine's only leading city almost directly on the frontline with Russian forces - and where people live with the daily threat of attack.

- By Peter Beaumont KHERSON

Her own house in the city, she says, was hit by Russian shelling in 2024, injuring her in the leg and stomach.

This basement is a safe space in a dangerous city. Used as a shelter by local people, other rooms in the complex are hosting yoga, a dance rehearsal and a craft session for a group of older women screen-printing T-shirts bearing the city's name.

The streets above ground explain this subterranean activity. Supermarket and shop windows in this city on the right bank of the Dnipro River are boarded against shrapnel, while other buildings show damage caused by artillery and glide bombs.

Long stretches of the city's streets are being draped in anti-drone nets, including the main approach from the coast - a 20-minute drive away - that is now a net tunnel on three sides.

With Russian forces just across the river, daily life is lived under cover for the 60,000 residents - including 5,000 children - who remain, out of its original 300,000 inhabitants.

"The children are always under pressure," Lutsenko said. "They are always stressed, with some children afraid to come out after the shelling.

"It is important to give them choices to make them feel that it is not just about surviving," she said, "but living and feeling everything around them." And Kherson is a hard place to live.

Overrun by Russian forces at the beginning of the war in 2022, it was the only regional capital of Ukraine to be occupied. Nine months later it was liberated as Russian retreated across the Dnipro after a lightning offensive by Ukraine.

But if people in the city thought the nightmare was over, they were mistaken. Dug in on the far side of the river, Russia launched an escalating number of attacks.

The Russian "drone safari" beginning in May 2024, which killed Kherson's citizens, took place in its streets - which explains the 100km of antidrone nets installed by the authorities.