A regional capital in Ukraine falls to Russia for the first time

ANDRII YATSKEVICH went to bed on March 1st in a Ukrainian city and woke up in a Russian-controlled one. A sailor born and raised in Kherson, a town in southern Ukraine just north of Crimea, Mr Yatskevich, contacted by phone, says that he checked social media to see security-camera footage of several dozen Russian vehicles parked outside the city administration building. The mayor of Kherson had posted that residents should stay at home, and that the town would need a miracle to restore light, gas, water and heat and to collect the dead.

After one week of a war that has killed more than 2,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the Ukrainian government, Vladimir Putin now has a territorial trophy to show for it. A city of 285,000 people, Kherson is the first regional capital and by far the largest town that Russian forces have taken and held. Elsewhere his war machine has failed to make quick inroads and is already resorting to barbarism. Fresh videos on March 2nd of attacks on government buildings and in residential areas in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, showed bloodied corpses lying in the streets, suggesting that such horrors are not an aberration but a new reality.