‘They’re Hunting Me.’ Life as a Ukrainian Mayor on the Front Line
Being the leader of Kherson may feel more like a curse than an honor. But one woman isn’t giving up, even though the Russians are sitting just across the river and shelling her city nearly every hour.
By Jeffrey Gettleman
She’s been almost killed six times. She sleeps on a cot in a hallway. She makes $375 a month, and her city in southern Ukraine has become one of the war’s most pummeled places, fired on by Russian artillery nearly every hour.
But Ms. Luhova, the only female mayor of a major city in Ukraine, remains determined to project a sense of normality even though Kherson is anything but normal. She holds regular meetings — in underground bunkers. She excoriates department heads — for taking too long to set up bomb shelters. She circulates in neighborhoods and chit-chats with residents — whose lives have been torn apart by explosions...
Ms. Luhova sees her job defined by basic verbs: bury, clean, fix and feed. Of the 10 percent or so of Kherson’s original population of 330,000 who remain, many are too old, too poor, too stubborn or too strung out to flee.
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www.yahoo.com/now/theyre-hunting-life-ukrainian-mayor-124050482.html