From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   Looting, Sabotage Marked Last Days of Russia’s Occupation of Kherson   
   By Ian Lovett, Nov. 15, 2022, WSJ   
   KHERSON, Ukraine—Earlier this month, Russian soldiers ripped down power   
   lines, knocked down cellphone towers and looted homes and businesses   
   throughout Kherson, the Ukrainian city they had occupied since the early days   
   of the war.   
      
   On Nov. 10, the Russian forces were gone.   
      
   Knocking out the electricity—along with the heat, water and cell   
   reception—was among the last steps in the Russians’ slow, secret   
   withdrawal from west of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine.   
      
   “They were ripping down the power lines,” said Ludmila Chechekova, a local   
   resident who saw a soldier driving a tractor down a street pulling the wires   
   down in her neighborhood several days before the Russian withdrawal.   
      
   After Ukrainian troops routed the Russians in the country’s northeast in   
   September—when whole battalions were forced to flee suddenly, leaving behind   
   injured troops, sensitive documents and millions of dollars of e   
   uipment—Moscow took pains to    
   avoid a similar mess here.   
      
   Even as troops filled trucks with all the looted goods they could find and   
   drove them away, Russian officials told residents they were preparing to fight   
   for the city.   
      
   Then, they knocked out communications and mined the roads. By Nov. 10, they   
   had left.   
      
   “It was an organized retreat,” said one Ukrainian soldier in the 49th   
   individual rifle battalion who fought in the region in the last three weeks   
   before the withdrawal. As the unit reclaimed one village after another last   
   week in the Bashtanka area,    
   north of Kherson, they found only a handful of Russian soldiers to take   
   captive. Each village was reclaimed without firing a shot. The Russians left   
   weapons behind in one position, a stark contrast to the huge amount of   
   munitions they abandoned during    
   their September retreat from Kharkiv, in the northeast.   
      
   “They’d packed up everything,” the soldier said, adding that the mines   
   on the roads slowed their efforts to chase down the retreating Russians.   
   “They placed stones around the mines so we couldn’t remove them with   
   vehicles. We had to extract    
   them by hand.”   
      
   In Kherson, the retreat began with a buildup of troops. In mid-October,   
   thousands of soldiers who had been called up as part of Russian President   
   Vladimir Putin’s fall mobilization began arriving in the city. Residents   
   said they were easy to pick out:    
   They were so poorly equipped that they were buying boots and other equipment   
   for themselves in local stores, so they wouldn’t have to fight in sneakers.   
   They would show up at the regional hospital, asking doctors to sign paperwork   
   saying they weren’t    
   healthy enough to fight, according to Viktor Shuleshko, a doctor there.   
      
   On Oct. 18, the Russian-installed administration here said it was relocating   
   to the east of the river, claiming that Ukraine would soon start pummeling the   
   city with artillery and that it was no longer safe to remain. Civilians were   
   bombarded with    
   messages urging them to follow: “Emergency evacuation! Ukrainian forces will   
   shell the residential districts!” Though, in fact, little artillery was   
   falling inside the city, tens of thousands, many of them elderly, lined up to   
   board ferries across    
   the river.   
      
   Over the next few days, banks and pension offices were closed. Hundreds of   
   prisoners were released from Kherson’s jails. Those who weren’t released   
   were brought across the river, and police stations where they had been held   
   were abandoned by the end    
   of October. Markets began to run out of basic supplies such as bread and milk.   
   Residents wanted to wait for Ukrainian forces to arrive but worried they might   
   have to endure a siege.   
      
   “There was panic,” said Serhii Gorbanyov, 28. “People ran to the markets   
   to buy supplies. No one knew how long it would take or what would happen.”   
      
   By that time, Ukrainian forces had been hitting Moscow’s supply lines for   
   months. They had disabled bridges, destroyed ammunition dumps and logistics   
   centers, rendering troops west of the river isolated. Holding that territory   
   was becoming untenable,    
   according to military analysts.   
      
   “They’re trading bodies for time,” Ben Hodges, former commander of the   
   U.S. Army in Europe, said at the time of the Kremlin’s plan to flood the   
   southern front with recently mobilized soldiers.   
      
   But as residents lined up to leave Kherson, troops also began disappearing   
   from the city’s streets. The older ones, who appeared to be officers, were   
   the first to leave, residents said. By early November, younger t   
   oops—including some who had been    
   mobilized recently—were less present. Many left with anything they could   
   carry.   
      
   “The last two weeks, they were focused on taking as much as they possibly   
   could,” said Oksana Bugayova, 38, a nurse in a hospital in the central part   
   of the city. Through early November, she said, she watched as Russian troops   
   removed everything from    
   an administrative building next door to the hospital. “They packed tables,   
   chairs, sofas, fans. They took a whole truck full of documents.”   
      
   Though the looting was nothing new—since the first days of the occupation,   
   residents said, Russians had moved into empty houses, broken into garages, and   
   taken anything of value—it reached new levels in November.   
      
   Troops took art from museums. They dug up the bones of 18th-century Russian   
   statesman Grigory Potemkin and hauled them east across the river.   
      
   Electronics stores, garages and storage lockers were emptied of anything   
   valuable.   
      
   Yaroslav Yanushevych, the governor of the Kherson region, said the Russians   
   cut more than a mile of power lines before leaving the west side of the river.   
   They also took all of the fire trucks from Kherson, leaving the city without   
   equipment to respond    
   in case of a fire in a high rise.   
      
   “I saw them taking a column of tractors, ambulances, utility trucks,   
   cranes” toward a pontoon bridge during the first week of November, said   
   Andriy Curdibanov, a local.   
      
      
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