Mobile Crematoria and the Shattered Lives of Parents: Lyudmyla Demyanenko on the Horrors of Occupation and the Kakhovka Dam Explosion
During the Russian occupation, the residents of Kherson endured long months of uncertainty, threats to their lives, shortages of food and medicine, and constant anxiety for their loved ones.
Yet their inner strength and mutual support enabled them to resist in a nonviolent but impactful way, preserving the Ukrainian identity of their city.
Businesswoman and volunteer from the local 2014 Maidan movement, Lyudmyla Demyanenko, couldn’t leave the city when Russian forces captured it, as she had to care for her sick parents.
Lyudmyla shared the challenges of obtaining food and medicine, the efforts to protect military families hunted by the Russians, and how the occupiers destroyed her parents’ lives by blowing up the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant.
A Premonition of War
On the morning of February 24, 2022, the residents of Kherson woke to the distant sounds of explosions—Russian forces had begun a missile attack on Chornobaivka Airport.
Lyudmyla Demyanenko recalls stepping outside at 7 a.m. to see black smoke on the horizon. That’s how she learned that a terrible war had come to her city. Looking back, she admits she didn’t believe until the last moment that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion.
“Once, in early February, a client came to me—I was helping him set up a program on his computer,” Lyudmyla recounts. “He asked me, ‘Lyuda, what do you think, will there be a war?’ And I said, ‘Come on, what war?!’”
Lyudmyla had little time to follow the news. A shipbuilder by training, she had always been active, shifting between numerous professions—working in a factory, on the radio, and eventually starting her own business providing accounting and auditing services. Besides, as an art manager, she organized exhibitions and performances with local artists and traveled to festivals.
The only time Lyudmyla ever fully immersed herself in the news was during the winter of 2013-2014, during the Euromaidan protests. Alongside friends, she delivered essential supplies and food to local protesters.
Eight years after those life-changing events, Lyudmyla couldn’t ignore the pervasive sense of unease in the air. Though her mind tried to deny the inevitable, the anxiety broke through in unexpected questions and prophetic dreams.
One night, Lyudmyla dreamt she was standing on the right bank of the Dnipro River, looking at the road to Hola Prystan and seeing that this road was overgrown with tall poplar trees, leaving only a narrow passage. During the occupation, she realized this dream had been a warning—a premonition of the severed connection to her parents and her childhood home.
"At the time, I occasionally listened to Shenderovich on Echo of Moscow, and once, in the studio, they were discussing a new law about mobile crematoria and mass graves. The information stuck in my memory. This was late October 2021. I remember thinking—what could this possibly mean?" Lyudmyla recalled.
However, just a few months later, those very crematoria were stationed near her home.
Shortages and Provocateurs
In early March 2022, Russian troops entered Kherson. That spring, the people of Kherson astonished the world with their unprecedented courage. Thousands regularly took to the streets with blue-and-yellow flags, chanting slogans like "Kherson is Ukraine" and "Russian soldier—fascist and occupier."
At first, the Russians didn’t interfere with the protesters. The terror began at the end of March, once the occupiers established control over the city and appointed the puppet "governor," Volodymyr Saldo, to head their illegal administration. The occupiers started hunting down members of the resistance and relatives of the Ukrainian military. Those brave enough to express their opposition to the invasion of their homes were abducted and tortured. In the first days of the occupation, this kind of repression had not yet begun.
Lyudmyla Demyanenko did not attend the protests and, unlike many of her acquaintances, did not leave Kherson. She bore the responsibility of caring for her parents, who lived in Hola Prystan.
When the occupation began, she faced the daunting task of providing her parents with medicine and food. Seventy-year-old Liubov Markivna had severe leg problems and rarely left the house, while her father, Petro Yakovych, in his late eighties, had lost his vision. Despite these challenges, the elderly couple refused to evacuate or move to Kherson to live with their daughter, leaving Lyudmyla to find ways to visit them. In the initial phase of the occupation, this was impossible.
"At first, it was difficult. Someone gave me the phone number of a man who used a motorboat to ferry people across the river. Through him, I sent medicine and food to my parents—it was less than 20 kilometers to reach them by water. He was taking a risk, of course, but he didn’t even charge me for it," Lyudmyla recounts.
In the first weeks of the occupation, most people tried to avoid going outside unnecessarily. When they did, they made sure not to draw the attention of Russian soldiers and tried to run their errands in the first half of the day.
Besides fear, this period was marked by long lines—Kherson seemed to have been transported back to the late 1980s, with empty shelves and street vendors. People were forced to stand in line for hours for food, while medicines vanished from pharmacies. Communication was almost nonexistent.
At one Nova Poshta office, someone had forgotten to turn off the router, and it provided free Wi-Fi. A crowd of people with smartphones constantly gathered in front of the building—some came to read the news, while others desperately tried to connect with family and friends in other Ukrainian cities.
"Businesses started closing down, and the big stores were practically giving things away—80% off everything. Small shops near residential areas stayed open quietly, as long as the occupiers didn’t know about them," Lyudmyla recalls. "The streets turned chaotic—vodka being sold by the glass, meat unloaded straight from car trunks onto the dirty ground. They even brought in some terrible ice cream from Crimea. Cigarettes appeared too—the same ones we had back in the 80s and 90s when I was a teenager. The local boys used to smoke those. It felt like we’d been thrown back into the past."
In those queues and on public transport, there were always strange individuals—provocateurs. Kherson residents quickly spotted them by their accents, which gave away that they weren’t locals—most likely, they’d been brought in from Crimea. They would loudly start conversations in public spaces, like praising life in the Soviet Union. Lyudmyla recalls that the locals didn’t engage with them at all—they understood immediately what was going on.
The streets were also swarming with Russian soldiers. Among them were some very young ones, barely 20 or 22 years old—likely fresh conscripts who had just signed their contracts. Later, the Kadyrovites arrived—they always moved in groups, as if they were afraid of something. Lyudmyla had to learn firsthand what those mobile crematoria, which she had recently heard about on the radio, were really like.
"At that time, I lived closer to the outskirts of the Tavriiskyi district. Beyond it, there’s a quarry, and further out, a wasteland," she recalls. "Behind the buildings, on that wasteland, there were mobile crematoria where the Russians were burning their 'cargo 200'. It was April, and everything was already occupied. If the wind blew from that direction, we wouldn’t open our windows—there was no way to breathe. Thankfully, it wasn’t hot yet."
However, what Lyudmyla feared most wasn’t the Russian soldiers but the possibility that the hryvnia would go out of circulation. From the very start, she resolved never to touch a single Russian ruble or accept a Russian passport. But she understood that if the hryvnia stopped being used, she would have to leave the city and figure out what to do about her parents. Fortunately, the hryvnia was still accepted almost everywhere. In a small shop nearby, the sellers even kept a payment terminal hidden in the storeroom, allowing customers to use Ukrainian bank cards, even during the occupation.
And so, that spring passed in a haze of long queues, psychological strain, daily household concerns, and quiet resistance. By June, things eased a little—a boat service to Hola Prystan resumed, and for the first time in four months, Lyudmyla was able to visit her parents.
The Crime of Kakhovka
While it was possible to travel from Kherson to Hola Prystan by land, the route required passing through seven checkpoints, so Lyudmyla immediately chose the water route instead.
The boat took about an hour and a half to reach her hometown. At first, some of the boats even flew blue-and-yellow flags, but within days they disappeared—likely because the occupiers noticed them and forced their removal.
The situation with food and medicine in Hola Prystan was much worse than in Kherson, as was the case in many smaller towns in the region. To make matters worse, Lyudmyla's parents were no longer able to go to the store on their own, so the restoration of the boat connection came just in time.
However, the family’s reunion was brief. On November 11, 2022, the Armed Forces of Ukraine liberated Kherson, but they didn’t reach Hola Prystan. As a result, Lyudmyla’s mother, Liubov Markivna, and father, Petro Yakovych, remained under occupation. For the first few weeks, there was no way to contact them at all.
"October 20 was the last time I saw my parents. Just before that, Saldo had announced an evacuation, spreading fear among people, claiming that the Armed Forces of Ukraine would arrive and that there would be street battles and shelling in the city. I had already packed two large bags for my parents with medicine and food," Lyudmyla recalls.
"So, on the 20th, I grabbed the bags and went to the river port. The scene was utter chaos—no one knew where the boats were, which ones were going where, whether to Oleshky or Hola Prystan. Soldiers with automatic weapons and police were everywhere, inspecting every bag with dogs…”
"Eventually, I managed to find a boat heading to Hola Prystan and, by some miracle, got on it. The wind was strong, the boat was rocking, and people were extremely anxious. One woman was shouting, 'Where are the life vests?!' while another was questioning the crew, asking why they were taking so many people on board. These were all not locals—people who had come to Kherson after the occupation and were now trying to escape."
The first weeks after Kherson’s liberation were difficult, despite the joy and relief. Before retreating, the occupiers managed to cause significant damage: they mined many buildings, damaged power lines, filled sewage collectors with concrete, and blew up telecommunications towers.
Just as Ukrainian utility workers restored electricity and repaired the sewage system, the Russians began heavy shelling. They destroyed the boiler houses, leaving the city without heating.
At that time, Lyudmyla briefly left for Odesa but soon returned home. She recalls how, in the spring of 2023, there was immense hope that the Armed Forces of Ukraine would soon liberate the rest of the region and bring the left bank of the Dnipro back under Ukrainian control. Instead, she and all Kherson residents with loved ones still in the occupied territories faced an enormous ordeal—the Russian destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant.
At that time, almost no young people were left in Hola Prystan; the town was mostly home to elderly residents who, like Lyudmyla’s parents, flatly refused to relocate. The water arrived in the town alarmingly fast—around three in the morning, the Russians blew up the dam, and by the following night, dirty floodwaters had engulfed Hola Prystan.
The occupiers made no effort to organize an evacuation—on the contrary, they confiscated boats from the locals. Waking up in the middle of the night to find their home flooding, Liubov Markivna and Petro Yakovych had only minutes to react. According to her father, Lyudmyla learned that her mother sent him, blind, up to the roof first, and he managed to take one of their cats with him. Liubov Markivna herself didn’t have time to make it to safety. After that night, none of their acquaintances ever saw her again. Most likely, she perished in the floodwaters.
"There’s a small hope that we’ll find her, but under such a stressful situation, a person might lose their memory. She could have been taken to a care home in Crimea or somewhere else," Lyudmyla says.
Meanwhile, the water continued to rise. The blind Petro Yakovych spent long hours on the roof, like many other residents of Hola Prystan. By day, the heat became unbearable, and people were forced to drink the dirty floodwater flowing beneath their roofs. Local residents rescued Petro Yakovych using a motorboat and took him to a hospital in Lazurne, a village in the Skadovsk district. For a long time, Lyudmyla had no information about her parents’ fate. Then, suddenly, she received an unexpected call with strange news—Petro Yakovych had been taken to Moscow for treatment.
"There were local volunteers who secretly visited the victims but asked not to be named. They came to see my father at the hospital, offering psychological support, bringing some clothes and treats. Then, suddenly, one of them calls me and says, 'Your dad has been taken to Moscow,'" Lyudmyla recalls.
Before this, some officials had visited the hospital along with a priest from the Moscow Patriarchate. Shortly after, a local publication wrote about how the Russian authorities were supposedly caring for flood victims. It became clear they had decided to use the elderly man for propaganda purposes. He and another elderly patient, his roommate at the hospital, were taken through Crimea to Moscow. Only when he reached Moscow was Lyudmyla able to contact her father. He was told he would receive treatment and that they might even restore his vision. But in reality, there was no treatment—he was simply staying in the hospital.
"I was planning to go there and bring him back myself, but my loved ones talked me out of it," Lyudmyla says. "I also understood that it was unrealistic—during a war, for me, a Ukrainian citizen, to travel to Moscow.
So, I decided to ask for help from an old friend who had been living in the Russian capital for many years. She managed to contact the secretary of the hospital’s chief doctor and asked about my father and his roommate, a fellow countryman, to be discharged together. Finally, they were sent back to Lazurne, where he was 'threatened' with being placed in a retirement home because there was no point in keeping him at the Lazurne hospital anymore. That’s when he decided to evacuate.
Then, instead of a simple 20-kilometer journey by river, my father traveled for a week, covering almost 2,000 kilometers. He went through Crimea to Voronezh and Smolensk, then took a train to Belarus. From Brest, he was picked up by an ambulance, crossed the border, and finally returned to Ukraine through a checkpoint in the Volyn region. I met him in Kovel."
It took three months to bring Petro Yakovych back to Ukraine. He now lives with Lyudmyla in Kherson. The house in Hola Prystan remained underwater for six months, and its current condition is unknown, as there are no neighbors left on the street.
The exact number of those killed or missing as a result of the Kakhovka Dam explosion is still unclear.
The Secret to Resilience
Now, reflecting on the terrifying months of occupation, the relentless shelling, the uncertainty, and the Kakhovka tragedy, Lyudmyla says that Kherson endured thanks to the unity of its residents and their constant mutual support, which showed itself in both heroic acts and the smallest gestures.
For example, people went out of their way to help one another, even with something as simple as sharing food, and Lyudmyla herself experienced this solidarity many times. Once, she went to the market to buy beets for borscht but couldn’t find them anywhere:
"I got to the market and waited in a massive line for hours. When my turn finally came, I realized there weren’t any beets left among the vegetables. The vendor looked at me and asked, 'So, you stood in the freezing cold for three hours just for beets?' Then she turned to her husband and said, 'Go check in the car—there should be some shriveled ones in the trunk.' He brought back a bag of wrinkled beets. They weren’t perfect, but they were fine for borscht. She wouldn’t even take any money for them."
Another time, Lyudmyla herself helped a young man find a pumpkin at the market so he could make porridge for his small child—there were significant problems with baby food in the early days of the occupation.
The boatman who ferried people and supplies across the Dnipro refused to take money from locals who had fallen on hard times. The volunteers who cared for those affected by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam—and who still remain in the occupied part of the Kherson region—did the same.
There were also people who helped the families of servicemen escape the occupation—it was impossible for them to stay, as they were being hunted. They evacuated women and children to the Kinburn Spit, where they were sheltered in a boarding house until a boat from Ochakiv could pick them up under cover of night.
"That’s how my friend managed to leave. They left without any belongings—they got a call 30 minutes beforehand and were told not to bring much, just to pack a few things in bags," Lyudmyla recalls. "From Kherson to the last populated point on the planned route, they traveled in a regular car, pretending they were going to a dacha. After that, they had to ride on a tractor with a trailer to reach the Kinburn Spit—no other vehicle could make it there. When my friend, her daughter, and her mother were finally safe, she received a call from her neighbors some time later. They told her that Russian soldiers had come by, asking about her—someone had tipped them off that her husband and son were in the Armed Forces of Ukraine."
In Kherson, Lyudmyla says, as everywhere, there were traitors and collaborators. However, two-thirds of the city's residents were always pro-Ukraine, and this is what helped Kherson preserve its identity even under occupation. Others, those who either supported Russia or passively adapted to any authority, left the city and will never return.
During the dark times of Russian rule in Kherson, Lyudmyla found strength in the philosophy of Stoicism. When internet access was restored during the occupation, she watched lectures by Ukrainian philosophers on YouTube. The ethics of calm heroism, endurance, and readiness for life’s twists and turns continue to sustain her even now, as the city endures constant shelling. This philosophy inspires her to hold on to hope for a better future.
"I believe the left bank will be liberated!" Lyudmyla says with conviction.
