Kherson's newly liberated residents wonder: Who collaborated with the Russians?
KHERSON, Ukraine — First came rejoicing. Now comes the reckoning.
The southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, the only provincial capital captured by Russia since it invaded in February, is back in Ukrainian hands, though Moscow's forces are still close enough to remain a menace.
The outburst of joy over the reclamation of Kherson — one of the most significant Ukrainian victories of the nearly 9-month-old war — is tempered by punishing hardships that still haunt the city: hunger and shortages of medicine as well as scant electricity, running water and communications.
Criminal and forensics investigators are rushing to document evidence of executions and torture, digging up bodies and coaxing traumatized witnesses to come forward. Already, case files are open on hundreds of suspected war crimes. Victims of torture haltingly recount their ordeals. De-mining teams are fanned out across the city and plying muddy fields in outlying former front-line villages, where wrecked military and civilian vehicles line battered roads.
And in what might be the most insidious iteration of pain, Kherson's people must now come to terms with the fact that some of their neighbors cooperated with the occupiers.
"I was so very disappointed," one local man said of learning that a professor from his old university, a onetime mentor, had
