01/25/2025
In the chilly gloom of late November 2024 we’re walking through an abandoned park in Kherson, two blocks from the bank of the Dnieper River, across which lurk the Russians. Several acres of this parkland have been untended for almost three years, with this season’s leaves covering last year’s leaf mold. Fallen branches lie here and there, and the paths are beginning to fade and enwild. The park is in an unoccupied dead zone near the river, deserted now because there are too many drones and occasional artillery blasts and no one is quite sure what to expect from the Russians at any given time, so the whole area has been left to nature by order of the Ukrainian Army. If the Russians attack back here across the river again it will be a killing zone in which many Russians will die.
This park is a dark place to be, like a scene from the Walking Dead, but surreal because this is not a movie set. It’s real life, here and now. We can see no zombies, but a pall of dread hangs over the place and every minute spent in it. No one else is in sight. No one comes here anymore. It’s a silent place, but not the gentle quiet of nature. Rather it’s a dead stillness, as if the place is holding its breath and waiting. Closer to the river, crows and ravens flap raucously in the trees, but here in this ruinous park not even the birds sing.
You have to stay on paths in places like this and avoid holes and piles of leaves or garbage because you never know what may be lurking in them. At the same time, we keep one eye on the sky and try to stay under the bare branches of the trees whenever we can because drones can be just as deadly as mines. We know both sides are watching us, because 21st century battlefields are the most surveilled in the history of warfare and we know there are observation drones above us somewhere and satellites above them. We’re not bothered by Ukrainian drones but hopefully observation platforms are the only Russian drones out today.
Here, in places like this, the sound of something thudding to the ground or the whir of small propellers can mean instant death because the Russian drone operators play the ‘human safari’ game in Kherson. It’s an awful war, this war we’re losing on the eastern border of western civilization, and there’s a cruelty and barbarism about it that we haven’t seen in living memory. They say the Russians no longer take prisoners.
Near the center of the park, across a knee-high expanse of what was once a manicured lawn, and partially obscured by a fallen branch, a bright orange “pizza” sign hangs lopsided from a wrecked concession stand that once wrapped around two sides of a concrete patio. The patio is overgrown, and the orange sign looks out of place in the subdued hues and bare branches of a cold and grey November day. Across the broken park a line of trenches waits in case they are needed again.
Further along squats a small fortlike structure once meant to be a kids’ make-believe castle but now with a smashed gate raked by bullet holes and shrapnel and strewn with shredded clothing we don’t look at too closely. On the other side of the path what look like antique steel-tube play structures rise from the wilding grass. These things are a common sight in eastern Ukraine, rudimentary, mass-produced outdoor gyms Stalin set up in Donbas parks in the 1950s, presumably to keep the survivors of his Holodomor in tiptop physical condition. They’ve been ritually maintained here and there over the years by some kind of bureaucratic habit, but since the war began they’ve been rusting away like the other remnants of soviet communism.
The Russians invaded through this park in 2022 and retreated back across the river when the Ukrainians stopped them, leaving nothing but haunted wreckage behind. Soldiers who live in this netherworld day in and day out for months find it hard to make long term plans, surrounded by desolation and ever conscious of a lurking death that can come in an instant without warning. During World War I they used to call trench warfare “months of boredom punctuated by moments of extreme terror," but a century later in this three-dimensional battlespace even the boredom is ghastly. Death is always watching.
It’s jarring to see thousands of young men’s faces on fresh gravesites in massive graveyards in every city across Ukraine, with backhoes prepping the ground for more. It’s harder still to see the places they died. Everyone can imagine the thunder and lightning of organized violence, but the haunting hopelessness of ruined normality is one of the faces of war no one really takes note of. Not even the birds sing here anymore.
