Some Ukrainians Helped the Russians. Their Neighbors Sought Revenge.

Andriy Koshelev steered his car into the driveway of his home on Pushkin Street in Bilozerka, a lakeside town in Ukraine’s Kherson region. Leaving the car on, Koshelev got out and walked to the entrance gate. He reached down to loosen the latch. When he pulled it, the gate exploded. Koshelev’s parents, who lived on the same property, rushed outside as acrid smoke filled their driveway and the street. The explosion resounded across town.

Bilozerka was near the front line in occupied territory, and the townspeople knew a shelling when they heard one. This was not that. The explosion came suddenly, without the air-tearing screech that precedes an incoming shell. Stepping out of the ambulance, the medics sensed this, too — they could smell the remnants of a bomb. “The scent of the explosive was so strong that I started sneezing,” one medic told me. They found Koshelev’s car, its engine running and its headlights on. Then they found Koshelev. The blast had hurled him through the gate. He lay beneath its bent bars, shrieking. Among the wreckage were bits of metal shrapnel; he had apparently tripped an explosive wired to the gate.

The medics knew who Andriy Koshelev was. By that night — Oct. 7 of last year — he was infamous in Bilozerka. Before the Russian invasion, Koshelev worked in his parents’ butcher shop. After it, his neighbors say, he became an official in the new government. It was commonly believed that he’d won this sudden career advancement by collaborating, a belief that became even more common when, a week before the explosion, Koshelev appeared in a video celebrating Russia’s announcement that it had annexed Kherson. “We extend enormous gratitude,” he said, “to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the president of the Russian Federation.” The video quickly circulated on social media; the medics had seen it. As they bandaged Koshelev’s legs, loaded him onto a spine board and took him to a hospital, they surmised what had most likely happened: The Ukrainian resistance had gotten to him.

When I arrived in Ukraine, in June of this year, Bilozerka had been liberated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and the Kherson region was now split in two, with its right bank, north of the Dnipro River, once again Ukrainian, and its left bank, south of the river, still occupied. I met Vlada Bahinska and Hryhorii Pelykh, two of the medics who treated Koshelev, at the town’s hospital. The medics reconstructed for me what they believed had happened when Koshelev returned home that day, and they described his condition.

“His thigh bone was shattered,” Pelykh told me. “We found out later a leg was amputated.”

“And he was minus a testicle,” Bahinska added.

“Sliced off with a shard of glass,” Pelykh said. “So accurate.”

They could hardly hide their satisfaction. Really, they made no effort to. Why should they? Koshelev had gotten what he deserved, as far as they were concerned. At least now the man might come to know something of the suffering he’d helped bring upon his neighbors.

Eight months after liberation, that suffering hadn’t stopped. The Kakhovka Dam had just been destroyed, presumably in an effort to slow the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive, and some of Bilozerka’s streets on the shore of the local lake, which the Dnipro feeds, were still flooded. The flooding had pushed back Russian positions on the far bank of the river, but the town was still within enemy tank and artillery range. Ukrainian tanks were stationed in fields around Bilozerka. Talking on the floor of the hospital’s basement, the medics and I listened to the two sides trading fire. The blasts rattled the walls. When it quieted down, we could make out, in the distance, the shelling of Kherson City, where civilians were fleeing the floods.

Ukrainian government prosecutors have opened 17,000 investigations into crimes committed in Kherson, where, during the occupation, civilians were held captive, interrogated, tortured and murdered in a system of ad hoc jails. (The jail system is still operating on Kherson’s occupied left bank.) The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Putin for suspected involvement in the deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. The medics told me they expected such cruelty from Putin and his army. What surprised them, what pained and incensed them, was that the Russians occupied Kherson with the help of ordinary Ukrainians like Andriy Koshelev. The butcher had been joined in his disloyalty, it appeared, by teachers, farmers, shopkeepers, businesspeople, a priest.

Months on, people there were still expressing their disbelief at the extent of the betrayal. “I was extremely shocked,” a community leader named Sergiy Smutchenko told me. “People born in Ukraine, who spoke Ukrainian, who’d lived in Ukraine all their lives, turned out to be Russian.” He and just about everyone else I spoke with offered some variation of the sentence, “I didn’t know whom to trust.”

Kherson is not unique in this. President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that hundreds of Ukrainians are under investigation for treason or related offenses. The problem stretches further back than this war and his tenure. For years, Russia has been suspected of infiltrating not just the Ukrainian security services but also its regular military branches, its police forces, its politicians and business elite. In 2014, Russia was able to seize Crimea and back an insurgency in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in part because many Ukrainians in those places helped it do so. There is mounting evidence that something comparable took place last year in Kherson: Russian troops overran most of the region in just a few weeks.

As the Ukrainian counteroffensive continues, more towns like Bilozerka will be liberated. In every one of them, the residents will face the same challenge: Having survived the occupation, they now have to survive one another. Accused collaborators will be living next door to Ukrainians who resisted. Some of the accused will, like Andriy Koshelev, be attacked, and some killed — many already have been. Some will be prosecuted under a sweeping new wartime law. But the evidence against many potential cooperators is circumstantial or anecdotal, enough to make them suspect but not to get them investigated. They will stay in their towns, free but despised. When I spoke with a car mechanic named Oleksandr Guz, who was tortured by Russian captors, outside his Bilozerka repair shop, a man drove by in an ancient Lada. Guz looked at the car and, as casually as if he were pointing out one of the local waterfowl, said, “There goes a collaborator.” On his phone, Guz pulled up a picture of the man, a farmer, waving a flag at the Russian Victory Day parade. “He grows strawberries.”

Bordered by crop fields, cattle farms, dairies and the bilo zerka — “White Lake,” which gives the town its name — Bilozerka is a farming-and-fishing community that sits 10 miles west of the regional capital, Kherson City. Before the war, it had roughly 22,000 people. Last February, as the rest of the world eyed Moscow, the members of the Bilozerka community council did not discuss what to do in the event of an invasion. The prospect wasn’t taken seriously, one councilwoman, a pharmacist named Ksenia Mishyna, told me. “Maybe 1 percent of the people thought it would happen,” she said. When Russian columns did begin pouring from Crimea into Kherson’s left bank, the regional government instructed police to flee. Town officials, like Mishyna, received no instructions. “When the war began, we just had to make the best decisions we could,” she said.

The Russians took Kherson City, the first major city to be seized, on March 2. When the citizens there gathered in anti-occupation rallies, the Russians responded with gunfire and arrests. Soon they were detaining politicians, police, veterans, journalists and activists. The mayor was arrested. In Bilozerka, reality sank in. Shop shelves cleared. With their tractors, residents piled up roadblocks of sand, concrete blocks and tires. Bilozerka, like many Ukrainian towns, had created a detachment of Territorial Defense Force reservists. Some of its members joined fighters from nearby towns and went to confront the Russians. Neighbors, including Anhelina Vetrova, a retired librarian, gathered food for them. Vetrova had liked to write sketches of scenes she observed in the library. Now she began a war diary. “We collected vegetables, fruits,” she recorded on March 2. “Our boys with Molotov cocktails going against heavy armored vehicles. Not everyone even had assault rifles.”

Town officials fled. Of her 25 colleagues on the council, Mishyna estimated, only nine remained. To some, this seemed reasonable. Ukrainians with authority were being targeted; there were rumors of torture and worse. But Valentyna Boiko, a public-school teacher in Bilozerka, told me she thought some of them left because they were “pro-Russian.” Her suspicions were warranted. The Bilozerka council included at least one official who had been a member of the Party of Regions, the political machine of Viktor Yanukovych, the president who fled Ukraine for Russia after the Euromaidan protests in 2014, touching off the invasions that year. Others shared Boiko’s suspicions. People pointed out that the Russians had taken Kherson City in days, nearly unopposed. They believed that, in the event of an invasion, Ukrainian troops were supposed to detonate the Antonovskiy Bridge, which crosses the Dnipro River. But the bridge stayed intact. Rumors of a mass betrayal within Kherson officialdom spread.

One official who did not flee Bilozerka was Oleksandr Kysil, a police commander. When he learned Kherson City was taken, Kysil stashed his uniform and set to another sort of work. He had been an elite paratrooper in the Soviet Army, fighting in Afghanistan alongside the K.G.B., and he knew that if competent Russian intelligence agents made it to Bilozerka, they would round up any police and soldiers who remained — anyone who could form an armed resistance. The agents would begin their search for these people by seizing personnel records. So Kysil helped gather the records of the Territorial Defense fighters, along with those of local police officers and veterans of the fighting in Donbas. Some of the records he burned. Others he hid in various places, including in a school. “I put them in a corner of the basement and covered them with some old desks,” Kysil told me. He buried his own records in his garden.

Russian columns were spotted outside Bilozerka in the first week of March. At first, they bypassed the town. The tanks, Tiger assault vehicles, armored personnel carriers and freight trucks continued west toward Odesa, and it seemed only a matter of time before the iconic port would be seized. But when Ukrainian forces took a stand outside Mykolaiv, the advance stalled. As more Russians arrived, they settled into Kherson haphazardly. Scenes of lost Russians asking villagers for directions were so common they became a meme. Beneath these scenes was what a Human Rights Watch news report described as “an abyss of fear and wild lawlessness.” Seemingly as unprepared for an orderly occupation as they were for serious opposition, Russian soldiers looted homes and businesses and terrorized civilians. Those who entered Bilozerka displayed no unit insignia on their vehicles or on their uniforms. They didn’t even have discernible faces — they wore balaclavas. It would never become clear if a Russian officer was put in charge of the town. Bilozerkans stayed in their homes in those first days, waiting to see how the invaders behaved.

Unafraid to go outside was the car mechanic Oleksandr Guz. Like Kysil a former paratrooper (though in the Ukrainian Army), Guz and his wife contacted their neighbors and urged them to gather for a protest at 9 a.m. on March 14 at the town’s main landmark, known as the Tank. A tank that commemorated the red Army’s pushing the Nazis from Ukraine, it sat on a plinth in Bilozerka’s central plaza, near the main commercial street and a boulevard that contains the central administration building, a public school, the cultural center and the courthouse. The Russians had already torn the Ukrainian flag from the Tank and replaced it with a Russian one. For townspeople who knew their history, the timing of the protest had a significance now turned on its head: It was on the following day, March 15, that Soviet troops liberated Bilozerka from the Germans in 1944.

Waving Ukrainian flags, the townspeople took to the streets. “Kherson is Ukraine!” they chanted. “Bilozerka is Ukraine!” In a video uploaded to YouTube by a marcher, the crowd encounters a group of Russian soldiers standing in the road. The soldiers’ body language suggests they’re unsure of what to do. A Russian convoy arrives. More soldiers jump down. The crowd taunts them. Pointing their muzzles in the air, soldiers fire off rounds. “They grabbed several men and dragged them somewhere,” Anhelina Vetrova, the retired librarian, recorded in her diary later. “They threw smoke grenades.” After heavy shooting, the townspeople “began to run away in panic.”

Oleksandr Guz never made it to the rally he organized. At 8 a.m., a Tiger came to a stop at his repair shop. Russian soldiers told Guz and his workers to lie on the ground and state their names. When Guz said his, one responded, “We’re looking for you.” A soldier slammed Guz in the head with his rifle butt. A bag was put over his head. He was driven to a roadside cafe, where he was made to strip naked. While disrobing, Guz went to unclasp his crucifix necklace.

“Keep the cross on,” a soldier instructed him.

They punched Guz until he fell to the floor.

“You shouldn’t have done this,” a man said.

They went on beating him. By the time Guz’s wife was brought to the cafe, he could barely move. Ribs and a wrist were broken. He was at home recovering, two weeks later, when the Russians arrived. This time, the bag was removed from his head in a room he didn’t recognize. His wrists were tied to a pipe running along the ceiling. A soldier kicked him in the genitals. The Russians located Guz’s broken ribs and pummeled them. When they were done, a soldier pointed his camera phone at Guz and instructed him to say he’d been beaten by Ukrainian soldiers. Guz complied.

The torture of Oleksandr Guz sowed terror in the town, but for a time after it, the Russians softened their approach. “They tried to be friendly at first,” says Andriy Piskun, a journalist who went between his home in Kherson City and his mother’s in Bilozerka during the occupation. “They wanted to be liked by the locals, to show that they’d come to Ukraine in peace.” They also wanted to co-opt the locals. An agent of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., recruited townspeople to an occupation regime Russia was assembling. In the neighboring village, Russians approached young men on the street, offering them money and help, trying to enlist them to their cause. Piskun told me that, in Bilozerka, “everything was much more terrifying than in Kherson City.” Kherson City was much larger, and the Russians were confined mostly to the city center; if he avoided the center, he could avoid them. But in Bilozerka, “The Russians were everywhere.” Ukrainians took to calling them orcs, the mindless warriors from “The Lord of the Rings.”

With the town cut off from free Ukraine, food, vital supplies and money became scarce. Bilozerka’s sole supermarket was closed, along with the banks and the post offices, a crucial lifeline for retirees who still collected their government pension payments in cash. When Russian-made goods started arriving from Crimea, the occupying troops distributed humanitarian aid. Some Bilozerkans accepted it. Others refused. They aided one another instead. Farmers gave away grain and meat; fishermen freely distributed their catch. Neighbors shared the vegetables from their gardens; they baked bread and handed it out. Over half the townspeople were pensioners, many with chronic medical conditions. Ksenia Mishyna closed her pharmacy in Kherson City and devoted herself to getting drugs to locals. Online she made connections with suppliers in free Ukraine, and she convinced checkpoint guards to allow her to travel with the medicine. Mishyna and a network of local volunteers delivered the medicines around town. A Telegram channel, Bilozerka Chat, was created to facilitate the mutual aid.

In mid-April, as life quieted somewhat, the retired librarian Anhelina Vetrova and her husband reopened a grocery shop they owned in town. Vetrova noticed at once that, despite the deprivations, her neighbors were eating better than the occupiers. Russian military supply chains were notoriously lacking, and soldiers had to resort to buying foodstuffs from her. She wondered if it was treachery to sell to them. But they were armed. What choice did she have? And she had to concede they were polite. “So polite,” Vetrova told me, “I wanted to vomit.”

The store gave Vetrova and her Ukrainian customers a chance to study the occupiers. Alina Dibrova, a teacher, discerned a caste system. The National Guard troops, who commandeered the main public school, where they erected machine-gun nests and posted snipers on the roof, were in the main ethnic Russians. They were clean-cut and well equipped. Their uniforms were new, and their weaponry was formidable. The same was true of agents with the F.S.B. and the OMON, an intelligence and counterinsurgency agency, who took over the central administration building and courthouse. There were also many Asian and Caucasian minorities, who have done much of the frontline fighting in Ukraine, and they were often worse-equipped, wearing sneakers and older uniforms. The worst show was put on by militiamen from Donbas. “They were closer to looking like homeless people,” Andriy Dibrova, Alina’s husband and a local sports coach, told me. “Some of them were wearing Soviet-style clothing and helmets.” If the Russian soldiers were sometimes alarmingly young, the Donbas militiamen looked much too old and out of shape to be at war, and while the Russians were at first cordial, the militiamen made a point of being detestable. “They had such anger against us,” the retiree Tetiana Nechai says. “They would say: ‘I lost my home, and here I am with the Russians, because it was Ukrainian troops who did that to me. We will destroy everything here.”’ Even the Russians loathed them.

Children had become accustomed to remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic, and with the schools closed, they returned to their online classrooms. In her language class, Valentyna Boiko gave her students essay assignments that she hoped would take their minds off the war. She had them write about “nature, the environment, animals,” she says. But of course, they couldn’t ignore the war. While they wrote, they could look up to see Russian surveillance drones hovering above their homes, or listen to rockets crashing down around them. After a shelling, Vetrova wrote, “The house was shaking, as were the doors and windows.” When the shock passed, “I immediately checked the local group chat,” and “I froze after reading about the death of Dasha, a girl I know. She came to our shop twice that day.”

Though Kyiv was still paying government workers and keeping up with pension payments to retirees, the Russians offered additional salaries and pensions, in rubles. Russian mobile and internet service were introduced. To get them, townspeople had to buy new Russian sim cards, so they learned to use virtual private networks. They didn’t use their phones in public, knowing it was the fastest way to be stopped and searched. On Bilozerka Chat, neighbors alerted one another to the location of Russian patrols, adding a warning that would become a kind of silent air-raid siren: “Erase your phones.” At home, they buried their phones in jars or bags in their gardens, along with their laptops, their official documents — anything the Russians could use to learn about them. Ukrainian TV channels disappeared, replaced by Russian ones.

When Ukrainian newspapers were replaced by Russian ones, Vetrova wrote in her diary, “I wanted to shout: ‘People, come to your senses! Don’t read this Russian propaganda!’” She was cheered when the shops around hers reopened, because “small stores became the place of daily new information, discussion, the place of common hopes and expectations for the inhabitants of the town,” she wrote. One man came into the shop and, “as he was getting ready to leave, looked around (there was no one there) and confidently told me: ‘Glory to Ukraine!’”

Tetiana Nechai opened a small grocery of her own. Her first pair of Russian customers “looked 16 years old,” she says. When they lowered their rifles, the muzzles nearly touched the floor. “My God, you’re children,” she said to them. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re not going to kill anyone,” one said.

“I don’t know if you’re going to kill anyone, but you’ve come in with machine guns,” she said. “What would you like?”

“Apples,” they said.

“I felt so sorry for those two,” she told me. “They were kids who wanted apples. How could I refuse?”

Nechai saw that the Russians patiently waited in line and never tried to shortchange her. Some were even talkative, though they wouldn’t speak about the war. Mostly they wanted to discuss how good Ukrainian fruit was. “They praised the strawberries so much, you’d think they’d never had a strawberry,” she says. “I told them that we would be getting cherries later in the season. They didn’t know what a cherry was.” She did have one Russian customer willing to discuss the war. He told Nechai he’d come to fight not Ukraine but NATO. The country was crawling with NATO troops, he assured her.

One day, a more imposing Russian came in. Nechai took a chance. “Do you understand that everything has changed dramatically since you arrived?” she said to him. The war had split her family. Nechai’s daughter-in-law is Russian. Her daughter-in-law’s parents used to visit Ukraine every year. They were intelligent people, a teacher and a university lecturer. But Russian propaganda had sapped them of all reason. They cut off contact with her. They begged their daughter to return to Russia before she was killed by Ukrainian fascists. Nechai’s granddaughter adored her grandfather in Russia. Now he refused to talk to her. The girl was heartbroken. She had fled Bilozerka with her mother and Nechai’s son. Nechai told the Russian all this. He heard her out with interest. She told him she wanted him to return to his family alive.

“You are a stranger here, I don’t know anything about you,” she said to him. “Where in Russia are you from?”

“Russia,” he said.

“You see, you can’t even tell me what city you’re from,” she said to him, or “what kind of family you have.”

“You know, I’m just a soldier,” he told her. “Let the politicians decide. It’s not up to me.”

The war was not going according to plan for Russia. Kherson City turned out to be the only regional capital it would take. From Kyiv to Kharkiv, its troops were being beaten back by Ukrainian forces. Tens of thousands of Russians had already been killed or wounded. Outside Mykolaiv, where the Russian westward advance had been decisively stopped, Russian corpses were piling up, and as spring turned to summer in Bilozerka, the cracks in the ranks began to show. Even the national guardsmen, usually so disciplined, were now drinking in public. Bilozerkans did their shopping early so they could get inside before the nighttime drunken fights between the Russians and the Donbas militiamen.

The ingratiation ended. The Russians spray-painted “orcs” on their vehicles. Now they didn’t just search homes but raided and tossed them, looking for weapons and anything that suggested Ukrainian patriotism. Increasingly, F.S.B. and OMON agents accompanied the soldiers, asking the same questions: “Who do you know in the Territorial Defense? Who is working against us?” If they refused to talk, local men were beaten in their homes, in their driveways, in their gardens, in front of their wives, their children. They were pistol-whipped, cut with knives, shocked with stun guns, made to kneel for mock executions.

The townspeople noticed that, despite their efforts to hide their phones and computers and documents, the Russians seemed to know more about them with every new round of searches. They had long suspected there were local informers about. When Russians came to the home of the teacher Valentyna Boiko, they already knew her son was in the navy. “There was no point in hiding it,” she told me. “They knew everything about everyone.” Taken from their house, he was kept for two days, for part of that time in a pit in the earth. He returned to his mother with broken ribs and a gashed face, his body covered in bruises.

The Russians may have learned about him because they had discovered the personnel records that Oleksandr Kysil, the police commander, hid when the invasion began. Kysil had a contact who kept an eye on the school where he stashed them. The contact reported to Kysil that when the Russians first searched it, they left empty-handed. “The second time, they removed the desks and found the records,” Kysil told me. “Someone must have snitched.”

Kysil couldn’t be certain who snitched, but he had a good idea of where to start looking. Volodymyr Saldo, whom the Russians had installed as the head of Kherson’s occupation regime, had been a fixture of Kherson politics for 20 years. After serving as mayor of Kherson City, Saldo was a member of Parliament, where he represented the pro-Russian Party of Regions. When that party was disbanded, Saldo formed his own, the Party of Saldo, and when the war began, he joined the openly collaborationist Salvation Committee for Peace and Order. In May, Saldo appeared on the state news channel Russia24 to say that “Life is slowly getting back on track and taking on a peaceful character.” From Bilozerka’s central administration building was hung a banner reading “With Russia Forever.”

Saldo appointed new administrations in towns across occupied Kherson. May 9 is Victory Day in Russia, when the nation celebrates the defeat of Germany in World War II. Commemorating it in Moscow, Putin likened the Ukraine war to Russia’s Great Patriotic War against Germany. (He added that it was also a “pre-emptive attack” against NATO and America.) Saldo organized celebrations across Kherson. Troops gathered in the streets. It wasn’t a startling sight: Ukraine had celebrated Victory Day until 2016. What was startling was that the occupiers were joined by Ukrainians. A lot of Ukrainians. There had always been a few people around town, mostly pensioners, who were openly pro-Russian. Their neighbors dismissed it as so much pitiable Soviet nostalgia. But on Victory Day, Ukrainians of all ages turned out. A student told me she was shocked to see classmates of hers running to the Tank, waving Russian flags. Friends said to her, “Maybe it would be better if the Russians just took over.”

Russian camera crews were on hand to shoot propaganda segments. The subject of one was a woman named Iryna Kozlyonkova, a former teacher and member of the Bilozerka council, where she’d directed the education department. She’d been a member of the Party of Regions and then the Party of Saldo. Saldo made her head of Bilozerka’s new government. Kozlyonkova approached townspeople, offering them jobs in her regime. They did not have to accept, she told them, but if they didn’t, they had three days to leave town, per Russian orders.

On June 20, she convened a meeting of her former colleagues in the education department at the central administration building. One who attended was Andriy Dibrova, the sports coach. He and the others were ushered into a conference room, where they were met by Kozlyonkova and an F.S.B. agent. Outside it stood armed soldiers in balaclavas. Kozlyonkova addressed the assembled townspeople in Ukrainian. “She said that she was scared like the rest of us, and that Volodymyr Saldo was scared, too,” Dibrova recalls. “But they had made a decision and thought it was correct, because Russia would be here forever.”

The F.S.B. agent rose to speak. He appeared to Dibrova to be Asian or Caucasian. “Russia is a multicultural nation,” he said, in Russian. “I am not Russian, either. But Russia is here forever, and you are under the protection of Russia. We want you to work with us. Those of you who don’t want to work with us, don’t interfere. If we learn you’re interfering, we will speak with you in a different tone than I am now, and in a different place.”

After the meeting, Kozlyonkova approached Dibrova. She wanted to give him a leading role in the new education department. He declined. He was given three days. He and his family fled. Antonina Cherednyk, the former Bilozerka council head, was arrested and taken to Kozlyonkova’s office. Kozlyonkova told her that, under Russian control, the agricultural firm that Cherednyk managed would expand, and Cherednyk would personally profit. Cherednyk asked her why she was helping the Russians. Kozlyonkova said that she didn’t want to abandon the people of the town, and Russia was offering them better opportunities. Cherednyk refused to join her, but many others did not, and Kozlyonkova assembled a cadre

When I asked Bilozerkans about the types of collaborators they knew, I heard a taxonomy: There were the older Soviet nostalgists, usually pensioners, who missed what they remembered as the stability and pride of life in the U.S.S.R. and believed Putin could recreate it; there were the “zombies,” the people who lapped up Russian propaganda, even the most obvious lies, like the claim their nation was a NATO puppet state led by a Jewish fascist; the “konservas,” or “tin cans,” the people with not much going on in life who just needed to be approached and cracked open; and the “waiters,” the fence-sitters who waited to see how the war went, so that they could align themselves with the winning side. Most belonged to that last category, I was told, including most of Kozlyonkova’s staff. The betrayal that stung most was that of Anatoliy Korniev, the priest at St. John of Kronstadt, an Orthodox church in town. Korniev distributed aid and sheltered people in the church at the start of the war, but the Russian Orthodox Church backed Putin, and soon enough Korniev told parishioners that Russia was here to stay. They should adjust to the new reality.

It seemed obvious to me that some townspeople would have collaborated out of fear or the need to survive. But when I made this point to loyalists in Bilozerka, it was usually dismissed. The underlying motivation was simple selfishness, they said. They thought the collaborators weren’t even pro-Russian, just pro-themselves, with no more ideology than loyalty. The occupation was a chance to advance their careers, to improve their stations, to collect an extra pension check or just make a little extra cash. This explanation went for everyone from Kozlyonkova down to the strawberry farmer whom Oleksandr Guz pointed out at his repair shop, who was barely making it around the corner in his sputtering sedan. If he’d gained anything from Russia, it evidently hadn’t been much. (I could not reach any of the accused collaborators from Bilozerka or Volodymyr Saldo.)

One woman, Alyona Zelinska, had a different theory. A researcher with a nonprofit government watchdog group in Bilozerka, Zelinska investigated Kozlyonkova for misusing state funds before the war. To be sure, she told me, Kozlyonkova was part of an “amoral group of people.” But her betrayal didn’t derive just from selfishness. Kozlyonkova had a cynical “philosophy of life” that was more complex and inherited, Zelinska believed. She learned to be cynical in the waning days of the Soviet Union, a survival instinct of a people raised amid coercion and deceit. “What were we taught in the Soviet Union?” said Zelinska, who was 12 years old when Ukraine became independent. “The children march in line. Don’t stand out, and everything will be OK. That is what Sovietism is.” Kozlyonkova and other accused collaborators were “leftovers of this herd mentality.” She had used the war for personal gain, giving up on the idea that Ukraine could improve on the sclerotic empire from which it broke off a generation ago. Forsaking the promise of a more decent life that was their young republic: For Zelinska, that was the real treachery.

The defection no one understood was that of Andriy Koshelev. Koshelev and his wife, a nurse in the surgical ward at the hospital, were well liked in town. They shared the property on Pushkin Street with his parents. His mother was a popular teacher at the main public school, and she and his father owned the butcher shop where Koshelev worked. Koshelev was kind and humble, according to Oleksandr Shcherbyna, a friend of his. So humble, indeed, that he was “a completely unnoticeable figure.” At the beginning of the occupation, he and Koshelev waited on food lines together and talked about the war. “He would emphasize that he was pro-Ukraine,” Shcherbyna says, “that he was categorically against the Russians.” When the shelling was bad, Koshelev’s wife would bring people to the basement of the hospital to take shelter. The coach Andriy Dibrova and his wife, Alina, lived nearby, and Alina was friendly with her. They saw each other during the occupation and commiserated over the situation. No one in the family had ever been heard to express pro-Russian views before the war. As far as I could determine, none of the accused collaborators had.

Nevertheless, soon after taking up their posts, they were outed online. In addition to the mostly innocuous local forums like the Telegram channel Bilozerka Chat, there were partisan forums devoted to shaming Russian helpmeets. The administrators of Bilozerka Chat knew the channel was being monitored by Russian intelligence, and they erased posts that would raise suspicion. The administrators of the partisan forums clearly wanted to raise suspicion — to let accused collaborators know that they were being monitored, too. A photo of a smiling Koshelev was posted on the Telegram channel Database of Traitors of Kherson, along with his home address.

As more collaborators were accused, the distrust even among loyalists grew. It appeared anyone, no matter how patriotic they’d once been, could turn. “They were normal people, worked alongside each other, had wonderful families,” the teacher Valentyna Boiko says. “Then you find out they’re working with the Russians.” Ukrainian barkeepers sold the Russians vodka and beer. Townspeople drank with them. Some local women were openly dating occupiers. On Aug. 22, two days before Ukrainian Independence Day, a sort of counterfestival was put on by the Russians. Vetrova wrote in her diary that an elderly woman, who “used to be patriotic,” came into the shop and defended her decision to attend the festival: The Russians “gave me two pensions,” the woman said. “They give out humanitarian aid free of charge, they hand out bread free of charge, my daughter was given a job. I’m going to go!” Vetrova lamented, “We live now not only under occupation, but also among traitors.”

Vetrova didn’t mention that they also lived among patriots. There was a reason the Russians were still searching homes for weapons and pressing with ever-greater brutality for the names of veterans and reservists. The underground didn’t just exist online. It was real and it was armed. Referred to as rukh oporu, the resistance movement, it was decentralized, with partisans working in cooperation with the Ukrainian Armed Forces and secret service, or S.B.U., and on their own. Though attribution can’t be confirmed, it was credited with a string of assassinations: A pro-Russian blogger was shot dead in Kherson City. The head of the Department of Family, Youth and Sports in Volodymyr Saldo’s administration was blown up in his car. A deputy of Saldo’s died in a suspicious car accident, and an assistant was shot dead while sitting in his Mercedes near Saldo’s house. Though her home was close to her office in the administration building, Iryna Kozlyonkova took to commuting by car in a bulletproof vest and helmet, accompanied by bodyguards. The townspeople found the spectacle ridiculous, but her caution was wise. Oleksandr Kysil, the police commander, told me he was tracking her and her cadre through a network of counterinformants.

Kysil took a leading role in the resistance. Well connected in the U.A.F. and S.B.U., he devised a system to help with their precision missile strikes. A lifelong hunter, Kysil had an intimate knowledge of the landscape and had hunting friends across the villages and farms on the right bank. He recruited spotters throughout the area. They kept tabs on Russian troop and equipment movements and gathered at Kysil’s house for a regular backgammon game that was actually an intelligence-sharing meeting. After he had confirmed a current Russian position with multiple sources, he would relay the intelligence to his government contacts. He monitored the strikes on his phone through the spotters, standing atop a ladder in his attic to get a cell signal. If a strike was off-target, he’d try to help correct fire. He and the spotters spoke in hunting code. Kysil described the process to me this way:

“I would get a call from another hunter. I would tell him, ‘Do you remember where we barbecued when we opened the hunting season? We barbecued at Khvylia.’ The Russians had just entered there. He would say, ‘Yeah, I remember.’ And I would say, ‘We should roast something there again.’” This meant a strike had missed its target. The spotter would go out, reconnoiter, determine how off the missile had been and call Kysil back. Kysil would then relay the information to the artillerists, who would recalibrate and fire again. “Later he calls and asks, ‘How’s the barbecue?’ And I tell him, ‘It’s fine, we’ve grilled all the meat.’”

Loyalists with less expertise did what they could. There were U.A.F. and S.B.U. Telegram and Signal channels on which people could report Russian positions and upload photos. For those who didn’t feel safe having those channels on their phones, Kyiv had installed a hidden portal in Diia, the government mobile application on which Ukrainians store their state documents. If the user followed a certain link, the application took them to an embedded page where they could relay information. Others took greater chances. Volodymyr Zheludenko, a former head of the Stanislav community council, strapped fishing rods to his motorcycle and rode around the waterways of the area, looking for Russian positions and noting their locations. When he was stopped at a checkpoint or by a patrol, he would explain that, with no work and little food, he had resorted to catching and selling fish. Antonina Cherednyk found cans of blue and yellow spray paint and went out in the dark, writing “UAF is coming” at bus stops, on roadways and on fences. When Alyona Zelinska learned of the graffiti, she told me, she was “filled with hope.”

At the Bilozerka hospital, most of the doctors had fled, but almost all the emergency medics had stayed on, including Bahinska and Pelykh. The ambulance service forced the medics to sign agreements saying they would treat injured Russians. The indifference of Russian commanders to the lives of their troops was well known: Images of Russian injured and dead abandoned on roadsides and in fields were another morale-boosting meme for Ukrainians. But the Russians in Bilozerka didn’t trust the Ukrainian medics with their lives, either. Bahinska was never abused, but Pelykh said he was beaten and robbed by an occupier. “They rarely called us,” Bahinska said. “They were afraid we’d kill them.”

One time, Pelykh and Bahinska were on their way to a call when a Russian armored personnel carrier cut them off. Inside it was a soldier perforated with shrapnel and in dire shape. A Russian medic had tied on an arterial tourniquet ineptly, and the man was bleeding out. The soldiers forced Bahinska and Pelykh to put him in their ambulance and speed him to a clinic in Kherson City. Pelykh kept the injured man alive, but only just. “Let’s just say,” he told me, “that he could have been handed over in a condition that came with better prospects than disablement or death.”

Last summer, as the partisans killed more accused collaborators, a Ukrainian counteroffensive gained momentum, pushing Russians in the Mykolaiv region back toward Kherson. The parade of Russian casualties became constant. A woman told me: “We became hard. We learned to enjoy the sight of Russian bodies coming through.” The closer the Ukrainian troops got, the more desperate the occupiers got. They began conscripting Ukrainian men into the Russian Army. The more Russian troops were killed with the help of Kysil and others, the more Ukrainians were abducted. Dawn brought the sound of Tigers and A.P.C.s screeching to a halt at houses, doors being kicked in, people being dragged off.

The Russians had established a system of ad hoc jails across Kherson, in government buildings, schools, courthouses, police stations and elsewhere. Captives were held for days, weeks, even months. They were interrogated for intelligence, but the larger goal seems to have been to stamp out Ukrainian patriotism and break wills. They were beaten with truncheons, shocked with electricity, subjected to sexualized torture. Men were stripped naked and live wires attached to their genitals. The prisons were manned by soldiers and F.S.B. and OMON agents, and, eventually, agents with Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service. The most sadistic guards were often the Donbas militiamen. This stood to reason: The template for the detention system in Kherson seems to have been based at least in part on the system Russians and Ukrainian collaborators created in Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014 to terrorize civilians there.

Ukrainians referred to the jails as “the basements.” When someone disappeared, it was said they were “in the basement.” No one knows yet just how many basements there were in Kherson. Researchers with Global Rights Compliance, a human rights foundation supporting Ukrainian prosecutors, estimates it may have been more than 35. Nor is the total number of captives who passed through the system known. Ukrainian prosecutors have identified 700 cases of detention in Kherson City alone. In Bilozerka, there was a basement in the main school and a more dreaded one in the courthouse. The courthouse building is across the street from the hospital, and Bahinska recalls that when the courthouse windows were open, she could hear the screams of the victims. Ivan Samoylenko, the head of the Stanislav council, was taken there. “When I saw the blood on the floor and the ropes hanging from the walls,” Samoylenko told me, “I knew I was in for it.”

Perhaps the most ghoulish basement was in a police station in Kherson City. That is where Antonina Cherednyk, the former Bilozerka council head, was taken the third time she was arrested. She and roughly 100 other inmates, by her count, slept on wood planks on the floor. They were barely fed and given no medical care, and they used plastic bottles for toilets. She was interrogated and tortured repeatedly. Wires attached to a battery were clipped to her fingers and water poured over them, and then she was shocked. She overheard what she believes were the rapes of male prisoners. While she was there, three male prisoners accused of being partisans were shot dead. She and other victims I interviewed were forced to record videos in which they were made to say that they had been abused by Ukrainian forces, or that they supported Russia, or both. Released after 18 days, Cherednyk returned to Bilozerka barely able to stand. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture reported earlier this year that the torture was so ubiquitous and systematic, it amounted to Russian state policy.

Still, all the torture couldn’t stem the flow of intelligence to Kyiv. On Sept. 15, 2022, heads of various occupation administrations from around occupied Kherson gathered at the central government building in Kherson City. Five Ukrainian missiles slammed into the building.

A week later, voting in the referendum to make Kherson a part of the Russian Federation began. Volodymyr Saldo announced, “We have set the course for reunification with Russia and will not deviate from it.” Iryna Kozlyonkova issued a statement to the people of Bilozerka: “I urge you to decide who we will live with in the future. Will we continue to endure this lawlessness or join the Russian Federation?”

Kozlyonkova’s underlings drove around town in military vehicles with ballot boxes and knocked on doors. If the inhabitants answered their doors, they were instructed to mark a plus or a minus on a ballot as rifle-wielding soldiers stood over them. Many people didn’t answer. Many houses were skipped. Some refused to vote. Nonetheless, the Kremlin announced the referendum passed by 87 percent. On Sept. 29, in Moscow, Vladimir Putin signed a decree annexing Kherson, which, for him, was a particularly important prize. He refers often to Grigory Potemkin, the statesman who undertook the first Russian annexation of Kherson, in the 18th century. In the speech marking last year’s annexation, Putin called Kherson Novorossiya, or New Russia, Potemkin’s name for it. “This is the will of millions,” he said. In Kherson, “Catherine the Great and Potemkin founded new cities.” Now its people “have become our citizens, forever.”

On Sept. 30, Andriy Koshelev recorded his video. Addressing the camera from in front of the Bilozerka cultural center, he spoke rapidly, like a man trying to get through a wedding vow he didn’t write. From his clasped hands protruded a souvenir-size Russian flag. “Today, a historic event is taking place, which we’ve been awaiting for a very long time,” he said. “Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin yesterday signed a decree recognizing the Kherson Oblast as independent.” About 50 people stood behind him, also holding Russian flags, large and small. He raised the little flag, clapped, and then chanted: “Russia! Russia! Russia! Russia! Putin! Putin! Putin!”

Some Bilozerkans told me that the annexation left them feeling truly hopeless for the first time. Maybe Russia really will be here forever, they thought. More local homes had been taken over by the occupiers. Tetiana Nechai lost heart when a Russian soldier, a regular customer in her grocery, confided that he liked the town so much, he planned to stay. He’d picked out the piece of land he would confiscate. “We were feeling quite depressed,” Alyona Zelinska says, “because everyone was expecting the counteroffensive. But it seemed there were just so many Russian soldiers, and they were all so angry.” In her diary, Anhelina Vetrova recorded: “Recently, no sounds of liberation can be heard. Everything fell silent. I am most afraid that we will be abandoned like Crimea.”

In October, not long after partisans nearly killed Andriy Koshelev, Bilozerkans noticed the ranks of the occupiers thinning. Within weeks of Putin’s decree, his troops were in retreat across Kherson’s right bank, their battered columns trundling back the way they came, toward Kherson City and the Dnipro River. When Ukrainian forces got within 30 miles of Bilozerka, Tetiana Nechai saw a soldier she knew, who was drunk and weeping. “I don’t want this war, I don’t want to kill anyone — I want to go home,” he told her. “I can’t even surrender. We are not allowed to.” By then, even she had lost all sympathy. The last occupier she saw up close was a driver whose truck was being loaded in a final round of looting. “I hope you die,” she told him.

In a video address to residents of Kherson’s right bank, Volodymyr Saldo said, “Dear fellow countrymen, we all know that Ukraine has declared total war on Russia.” Saldo exhumed Potemkin’s bones from a cathedral in Kherson City so they wouldn’t be harmed in the coming invasion. He also offered free passage to the left bank or Crimea to anyone who wanted it. Simultaneously, Kyiv urged citizens to evacuate to free Ukraine.

As the rockets rained down, the National Guard troops vacated their barracks in the public school. Then the other billets cleared out. Vehicles and equipment vanished overnight. By the first week of November, the checkpoints stood empty. There were a few tragicomic final scenes — a drunken occupier stood in a plaza, firing into the air, until he was confronted. When Vetrova went to her shop in the morning, she found a bullet hole in the wall across from where she normally stood. On Nov. 9, the Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, ordered troops to abandon Kherson City. The Antonivsky Bridge was finally blown up, and the occupiers were forced to commandeer civilian boats to cross the river. As the Russians fled, so did Kozlyonkova and her cadre.

Cell service cut out, then the electricity. Isolated again, Bilozerkans didn’t know what to expect. Once more, they hunkered down in their homes. “What else did the bloodthirsty dwarf come up with?” Vetrova wrote in her diary, referring to Putin. “Are we trapped?”

The last occupiers were seen driving out of Bilozerka on Nov. 11. Within hours, Ukrainian soldiers arrived. “The streets immediately became crowded. Everyone shares the news, rejoices, women are crossing themselves,” Vetrova wrote. Bilozerkans hugged and kissed the liberators, brought them food. “Our town was awash with yellow and blue colors.” The Russian tricolor was torn from the Tank and replaced with a Ukrainian flag.

But Vetrova’s thoughts soon turned back to treachery. Neighbors who had brought food to the occupying Russian Army were now doing the same for Ukrainian troops. Teenage boys who had appeared in Russian propaganda videos were now running around shouting, ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ “What to expect from these people?” she wrote. “How to make them tear off their masks? How to clean up the country?” Some Ukrainians fear that the entire country is now fated to become like the Donbas, where accused collaborators and patriots still distrust and despise one another, nearly 10 years after the conflict there.

The first person in Kherson I spoke with when I began researching the occupation was Ivan Samoylenko, the head of the Stanislav community council. On the phone, Samoylenko told me in candid terms about his detention and torture in the Bilozerka courthouse. For five days, he said, he was questioned and beaten. When I arrived in Kherson, he was an invaluable help, introducing me around. And then, most people I interviewed in Stanislav called Samoylenko the village’s most perfidious traitor. Some had very serious accusations. A Stanislav man held in the Bilozerka courthouse believes it was Samoylenko who’d given him up to the Russians. Other residents pointed out that he’d kept his job as head of the council while other officials fled their posts, and that he had got the power lines and gas mains in Stanislav repaired with the permission of the Russians. It must mean he’d colluded with them.

I told Samoylenko about the accusations. His face fell and he took on a tone of defiance. He’d stayed in his post, he said, because he didn’t want to abandon his village and his parents, and because many villagers asked him to stay. And of course he needed Russian permission to restore the utilities. They ruled the place. How else could he have got it done? He had also implored the Russians to let locals out of detention and had organized the funerals of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. The man who believes Samoylenko betrayed him to the Russians suggested to me that Samoylenko might soon meet an ugly end. I asked Samoylenko if he feared for his life. “I don’t,” he told me, “because I didn’t do anything.”

Last year, Ukraine introduced a broad new clause to its criminal code targeting collaborators. It penalizes “cooperation with the aggressor state, its occupation administration and/or its armed or militarized formations in military, political, informational, administrative, economic and labor spheres.” The main penalty prescribed is barring the offender from public office, but prison time can be imposed. According to a U.N. report, the government has already opened 6,000 investigations into accused collaborators. A report in The Intercept found that the new law has been used to investigate “teachers showing up for work in occupied areas,” “private citizens selling hogs or other goods to Russians,” people “expressing opinions, including via social media, that are seen as supportive of the invasion” and “local officials who remained in their posts under the new authorities.”

Ivan Samoylenko is not being investigated, yet, though he has been interviewed by prosecutors. The major members of Iryna Kozlyonkova’s administration in Bilozerka are under investigation. Kozlyonkova has been charged with treason. But they all were, eventually, bit players; it is increasingly clear that Kherson was betrayed at the highest levels from the start of the war. A former police chief for Kherson is being investigated for treason, as is the onetime deputy chairman of the Kherson Regional Council, who survived a car-bombing last year. The former chief of the S.B.U. directorate in Kherson was removed from his position under suspicion of treason and the former commander of the S.B.U.’s antiterrorism center there has been officially charged. A bomb was planted on Kozlyonkova’s balcony in Bilozerka before she fled. It never detonated. Volodymyr Saldo is also charged with treason. The Russian Ministry of Defense reported that he had been poisoned in his home. If that was true, he survived, and, in December, he turned up in Moscow, where Putin presented him with a state decoration, the Order of Merit to the Fatherland.

No investigation of Andriy Koshelev has been announced. Ukrainian soldiers now live on the Pushkin Street property. It’s said he’s in Crimea. His parents’ butcher shop was shelled earlier this year. By then they, too, had fled town. There is no evidence that they collaborated. But it hardly mattered. Their neighbors made it known that the Koshelev family was no longer welcome in Bilozerka. After the land mine nearly killed him, a partisan Telegram channel posted a still from Koshelev’s video, showing him waving the Russian flag. “Look, this is andriy koshelev,” it read. He “was happy with his life” until “the Kherson partisans got to little andriy. The rest of the scum should prepare for the same fate or worse.”

Additional reporting and translation by Nadia Drabyk.

James Verini is a contributing writer for the magazine. His article in this issue with Paolo Pellegrin is the fourth in their continuing series for the magazine about the war in Ukraine. A book based on the series will be published by Simon & Schuster. Paolo Pellegrin is a Magnum photographer. His most recent book, “Event Horizon,” is a retrospective.