After Russian forces occupied Kherson, ordinary citizens fought back from the shadows
KHERSON, Ukraine — Tetiana Horobstova, a retired physics teacher born in Russia, did not believe Russians would attack this city founded by Catherine the Great.
"Attack a Russian-speaking city, where people had family and friends in Russia?" she recalls, shaking her head. "No way."
On Feb. 24, 2022, despite warnings from the West that Russia was about to invade Ukraine, Horobstova remembers waking to a beautiful morning and watching the sunrise from her balcony. It turned the sky pink and illuminated green fields bursting with the winter harvest.
"And then I heard the explosions. And then I saw the explosions," she says. "One near the airport, then a second. The third at a gas station that seemed to turn everything red."
She began to cry. She called her friends and family to see if they were OK. Some were packing their bags to flee west. But Horobstova, her husband, Volodymyr, and her youngest daughter, Iryna, refused. Even with their Russian roots, their loyalties were clear.
"We had a Ukrainian flag on our TV, and a poster that says 'Putin Get Out!' " she says. "My poster, by the way."
Their daughter in western Ukraine begged them to flee. But they stayed, along with their youngest daughter, Iryna, who intended to resist.
The Russian army made short work of occupying the city
Kherson was the first major city occupied by Russian forces. With Kherson's deep historical ties to Russia, Moscow did not expect it to be a center of resistance. But the city, like the rest of Ukraine, defied the Kremlin's expectations.
The first days of the invasion in Kherson were chaotic. Serhiy, a soldier from a local
