Ukraine’s emergency workers say they are being deliberately targeted

Andriy Orlov, 40, was almost done clearing landmines. He called his wife to tell her he would be coming home soon. May 6th had been a normal work day for Orlov and his colleagues: collecting unexploded shells from around the front-line city of Kherson in southern Ukraine  and taking them to a remote field to sort through. His team sent the reusable shells to the Ukrainian army and detonated the unusable ones.

But that day would be the last time Orlov’s wife would hear his voice. Soon after the call ended, her husband and five of his colleagues were killed, apparently by artillery. An ambulance driver accompanying the team, who was parked some distance away, stepped out of his vehicle to pee. As he did so, he heard someone shout “Drone!”, followed by an explosion.

Karyna Filatova, 23, the team’s paramedic was injured in the blast. She had been standing behind a burnt-out Russian military truck, a remnant of the occupation that ended last November, when she heard three shells land. “I dropped to the floor. Then I felt the wave of the explosion. The cabin of the truck was hit, and shrapnel flew over my head. I kept falling in and out of consciousness,” said Filatova.

The rest of the landmine-clearance unit, who had been working in another part of the city, rushed to the scene, along with police officers, soldiers and staff from the prosecutor’s office. Filatova’s leg had been broken but, powered by adrenaline, she managed to stumble towards them. Then the shelling started again. Everyone dived into a ditch. “If the first round consisted of about three shells, in the second there were 15 to 20,” said Filatova, who passed out and woke up hours later in a hospital in Odessa.

Later, the Ukrainian army told Filatova that her team had been victims of a Russian artillery strike, probably guided by a reconnaissance drone. I spoke to a dozen members of the emergency services in Kherson, who all said that they were being deliberately targeted by Russian forces. Oksana Ulianova, who works for the Kherson regional rescue service, said emergency-services crews in the region are shelled every other day. In January two fire stations in the city were hit.

It was two hours before it was deemed safe to go to the area where Orlov and his colleagues had been working. The artillery had caused the unexploded mines they were collecting to go off. The crew’s bodies had been blown to pieces.

“They were like our brothers. We were at work more than at home, especially when everyone [evacuated the city] and it was just us here,” said Serhiy Syrishtan, head of the landmine-clearance unit. Before the war, its main task had been detonating unexploded bombs from the second world war. “It’s not real for us yet,” said Syrishtan. “It’s just like they’ve gone on a work trip and not come back.”

Kherson’s emergency services have held the city together throughout the eight-month Russian occupation, the daily shelling and the flooding that followed the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in June. Before the war, 280,000 people lived in Kherson. Now, only a fraction remain, as many residents have fled to other parts of Ukraine.

Booms from incoming and outgoing fire echo through the city. Nowhere is safe: residential buildings have been shelled, and in May a strike on a supermarket killed 23 people. The offices of the Kherson regional administration, where residents gathered to cheer the arrival of Ukrainian troops in November, have been gutted by a Russian rocket strike. Windows across the city are boarded up. By far the most dangerous area is the riverbank – once full of children playing and friends enjoying barbecues, it’s now in the sights of Russian snipers.

Between the shelling, life goes on. I visited a fire station in Kherson, and watched the firefighters joke and eat ice cream outside before running back to the concrete building for cover. There are hardly any “normal” house fires in Kherson, they told us, a sign of how few people are left. They are more likely to have to rescue people after a Russian strike.

When Kherson fell under Russian control in March 2022, most members of the city’s emergency services stayed put. They did not want to leave their home town in the lurch. The Russian forces took over the fire station I visited, even holding high-level meetings in its offices. The firefighters we spoke to reckon that the Russians were probably betting that Ukrainian forces would be unwilling to shell the stations.

At the beginning of the occupation, Russian soldiers decided to frighten the Ukrainian firefighters. “They parked their truck with the boot facing us and opened the back,” recalled Konstyantyn Kozak, a senior fireman. “There was a man in his underwear, tied up, his eyes covered with scotch tape. At first, we thought it was one of our colleagues, but later we realised it was just to scare us.” (The man was Ukrainian – the firefighters didn’t know if it was a civilian or a soldier.)

The Russians deliberately jammed the mobile-phone network in Kherson to make it hard for residents to communicate. Civilians, unable to get through on the phone, sometimes used to drive to the station to let the crew know about emergencies. The firefighters refused to take petrol from the Russians for their fire engines, they said, instead using supplies from volunteers.

After Russia had occupied Kherson for six months, the Ukrainian government said it would stop paying the salaries of emergency workers there. At that point, most of the firefighters left, only to return three months later when Ukrainian soldiers liberated the city. A minority of the firefighters decided to go over to the Russian side. “There was one guy, our driver, who was about 30. I saw a video of him later crossing over to the other [Russian-controlled] river bank using our equipment,” said Volodia Rezianov, a firefighter. “I can’t understand why he made that decision.”

On June 20th, a routine call ended in tragedy. A team of firefighters jumped into their armoured vehicle and headed to a road that had been flooded. They had just started to pump out the water when the first shell landed.

“We didn’t know where it landed but we understood it was very close to us,” said Andriy Sidletskiy, 20, who had been working at the fire station for two months. As they were making their way back to their vehicle, they met another team of firefighters. They all decided to hide in an empty building. While they were there, another round of shelling started.

Some of the firefighters started to run towards the vehicle. Sidletskiy got stuck in swampy, knee-deep flood water. He asked one of his colleagues to help pull him out. As he was being extracted, another volley of shells landed. He and a colleague lay face down in the murky water. Then they heard cries. Leaving his shoes behind in the swamp, Sidletskiy and his colleague ran towards the road, where the sound was coming from. “There was so much smoke that it was hard to breathe but I ran and then I saw the lad who was killed. I ran to him, looked him over. I tried to get him to respond but he wasn’t responding at all.” Kyrylo Sydorchyk, the dead fireman, was 25 years old.

“I couldn’t stay next to him because we were in an open space and there was nowhere to hide if they hit again,” said Sidletskiy. He made it to the other side of the street just before a fourth round of shelling began. “They were shooting exactly where we were – that’s not a coincidence. It was exactly at us,” he said.

As the firefighters drink coffee and eat soup together in the station’s staff-room, you wouldn’t know the horrors they have seen. Everyone finds his own way to cope. For some, this is black humour. One fireman joked about the number of times he has dived into nearby flower beds to take cover from exploding shells. “I would rather land on irises than have them placed on me,” he said, alluding to the bouquets laid on coffins.

For others, it is their beauty regime. Despite being on crutches, Filatova, the paramedic who worked with the landmine-clearance team, turned up for our interview with blow-dried hair and carefully applied make-up. She said she has kept up her appearance throughout the war, even washing her hair with river water and using the generator to power her hair-dryer when the water and electricity got cut off. When all the salons closed during the occupation, Filatova managed to obtain tools left behind by a manicurist, and did her nails at home. “It heals you,” she said. ■

Isobel Koshiw is a journalist based in Kyiv