Michael Andersen: Talking to Ukrainians under the rain of Russian bombs

Michael Andersen, Danish journalist and media expert

Source: Andersen on Substack

Far away from the futile Trump-Putin noise (will he? won’t he? why didn’t he?), Ukrainians are being targeted and killed every day. I talked to friends and acquaintances in Kherson, a frontline city.

This following is based on messages from a handful of my friends and acquaintances in Kherson. The following is what they told me after their city on Friday once again had been brutally and cynically targeted by Russia.

When I opened my social media on Friday morning, many people from Kherson were sharing this horrific video. It gives you an idea of what it is like to live in a frontline city in Ukraine, in October 2025, three years and 8 months after the Russian invasion started.

The city of Kherson, in the south-west corner of Ukraine, and its 300,000 inhabitants was occupied by Russia in the first week of the invasion, in March 2022.

Nine months later, in November 2022, the strategically important city was liberated by Ukrainian forces. But most of the region of Kherson — located on the south/east bank of the river Dnipro – is, as you can see on the map, still occupied by Russian forces. And from there, across the river Dnipro, the Russians pummel Kherson. Every day and every night.

For the past three years, the Russian army has basically used Kherson as a training and testing ground for its warfare. Hundreds have been killed and injured by Russian drones, missiles and shelling from the east/southern banks of the Dnipro river.

Today, four out of five inhabitants of Kherson have fled.

The following are the messages I received from friends and acquaintances in Kherson, unedited, their own words. I have only added explanatory information.

(And just to be clear, they write to me in Russian as a courtesy, because my Russian is — so far! — much better than my Ukrainian).

“To say that we are doing well would be an exaggeration,” my friend Elena writes to me Friday morning, from inside Kherson, she lives in the very center of the city, “but we are alive. And that is already something.”

For security reasons, I am not using her real name. There have been many examples of Russian spies and collaborators inside Kherson, both during and after the city was occupied by Russia.

Living in constant terror

Another long-term friend, Natalia (not her real name) tells me: “I was in Kherson yesterday to see my father, it would have been better if I hadn’t gone. As I was leaving, the nightmare started.”

“They terrorize us more and more, day by day.”

“Four shaheds [drones] landed close to us, in the village on the outskirts of Kherson where my father is staying, they landed directly on a nine-storey block of flats.”

“The Russian can see us just from the other side of the river, and a minute later they hit you — and they are specifically targeting residential areas, kindergartens, hospitals.”

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