Two weeks after the city was liberated, it is still hazardous

utumn to winter, blue skies to grey. It is two weeks since Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, stood on Freedom Square in Kherson and declared the city liberated; the jubilation has gone. Kherson is now under bombardment from Russians on the east side of the Dnieper river.

The shelling is constant and indiscriminate. Serving no strategic purpose, it seems only to be punitive. Residential areas are being pummelled with notoriously inaccurate Grads, a type of Soviet multiple-rocket launcher. On November 24th ten people were killed. Three days later, on the 27th, there was a new daily high of 54 shelling incidents, according to British military estimates. In a café in the centre of town that morning, customers listened to the incoming and outgoing bang and boom of the artillery duel without much reaction. After nine months of occupation, people in Kherson have become almost inured to fear. One man took a matchbox from his pocket and showed a flechette he had picked up, a viciously sharp projectile scattered by a cluster bomb that had landed near the city library the day before.