Ordinary Ukrainians are resisting Vladimir Putin’s occupying force in Kherson and elsewhere

THE TANKS that left Crimea on February 24th took five days to get to the centre of Kherson, 120km or so to the north-west. But on March 1st they reached the centre of the city—normally a sleepy, provincial place, similar in population and distance from the sea to Bordeaux, but now a strategically important part of Russia’s attempt to take control of a corridor along Ukraine’s entire coast. Russian state media heralded the fall of the city as the campaign’s first “liberation”.The people of Kherson were having none of it. They met the soldiers waving Ukrainian flags and screamed at them to leave. Some of them stood in the way of tanks, refusing to move when soldiers fired warning shots. The city’s mayor and the governor of the Kherson oblast, both of them in effect hostages, insisted that they would take orders only from Kyiv. A week after the occupation began they were sticking to their guns.