'We don't want to live in Russia': What now for Kherson, the first major city to fall in Ukraine?

After six weeks under Russian occupation, Tetiana Danets decided it was time to flee her Ukrainian city of Kherson as the signs multiplied of Russia’s long-term control.

The Russian currency was set to be introduced and reports mounted that a sham referendum would be held to legitimize Russian annexation, she said. Military checkpoints are everywhere, and she began having panic attacks.

“If we don’t go now ... we go never,” Danets, 22, told USA TODAY by phone Monday from Romania two weeks after she fled by car. She couldn’t persuade her aging parents to join her.

Kherson, a southern city of about 280,000 and home to ship-building industry on the Dnieper River, became the first major Ukrainian city to fall to Russian forces March 2. Since then, Russia's actions to cement control and warnings from U.S. and Ukrainian officials of possible annexation plans have ramped up fear and uncertainty in the strategic provincial capital.

“It's terrible for people. We don't want to live in Russia. People are worried, they cry. Many people leave Kherson, very many people,” Danets said.

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Last week, the city’s mayor was replaced with a Russian appointee, and Reuters reported that a pro-Ukraine protest was broken up on April 27, a date that Ukrainian officials had said could mark a referendum toward creating a breakaway region.

Last weekend, Russia was scheduled to introduce its own currency. An internet outage hit the city. Service was restored but rerouted through Russian infrastructure, which is “likely now subject to Russian internet regulations, surveillance and censorship,” the internet service disruption monitor NetBlocks said on its website.

On Monday, Michael Carpenter, the U.S. permanent representative to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, warned of a push by Russia to “engineer a referendum” amid an effort to annex the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, along with Kherson. That followed a British intelligence update that found Russia intends to “exert strong political and economic influence in Kherson over the long term.”

For Russia, Kherson’s transport links are important to its war effort and for control over Crimea, the British report said.

Fears about what that might mean – from the economic fallout to concerns that Russia intends to mobilize the population to support the war effort – have led more to flee Kherson.

In Odesa, more Kherson residents show up each day to an aid center for evacuees, Nikolay Viknianskiy, who helps lead the volunteer aid center effort, told USA TODAY via WhatsApp.

CNN reported a convoy of hundreds of people fled Kherson on Sunday, driving north toward the city of Kryvyi Rih. Some vehicles had white cloths wrapped around the door handles and side mirrors and banners with the word “children” written on them.

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Oksana Hliebushkina, 41, who led a Kherson nongovernmental organization, said she felt in constant danger over two months of occupation amid shortages of medicine and streets that emptied out by the afternoon. It was the internet cell service cutoff that followed rumors of a referendum that led her to leave Monday.

"It was a difficult decision," she said in a phone call Wednesday, lamenting that some residents had lost jobs and couldn't afford to leave.

Danets, a sports trainer, traveled the clogged roads before she made it through Russian checkpoints to Romania, spending a night in Mykolaiv when it was hit by a bomb. She said she was grateful to be alive.

Many are turned back from heading east, she said, and travel to Crimea and Georgia before flying to Europe. Some can’t afford the expense, and others don’t want to leave homes and businesses.

Kherson resident Vladyslava Kulik, 17, said that when the war began, she piled into a home with 12 relatives as explosions boomed and jets roared overhead. “We laid mattresses in the corridor and slept there ... away from the windows and hid behind the load-bearing walls,” she said via WhatsApp.

Under occupation, Kulik said, she was afraid soldiers would break into their homes to rape or kill.

“I was scared to live with them,” said Kulik, a college student studying music. “When civilians went out to rallies, they fired into the air and threw tear grenades. Phones were checked on the streets. If there was any information about the war or a word about (Russian President Vladimir) Putin ... they shot phones.”

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Fearing the fighting if there was a counterattack, she and her fiancé and several others took a four-car convoy to Cherkasy in central Ukraine, she said.

As Russia makes moves for long-term control, she won’t return unless her home is liberated.

“My family will not live in Kherson if the city becomes Russia,” she said.

Residents hoped Ukrainian forces would liberate the city, but there were few indications of a counteroffensive. Others said they worry that Russian control will harm the economy, making it harder for businesses to operate.

The internet and cell outage left relatives in other countries fretting about family in Kherson, some of whom are struggling without work.

Yuliya Makiyevskaya, who immigrated to the USA at age 14 and lives in Kentucky, has been in touch almost daily with her 58-year-old brother, Valeriy, who has been hunkered down in his Kherson apartment with his son, wife and daughter-in-law.

After running to shelters from overhead artillery fire, Valeriy wrote last month to Makiyevskaya that prices for food had shot up and only one of his four household members still had a job.

Kherson suffers from a shortage of medicine, cash, dairy and other food products.

“I am worried,” Valeriy wrote on Telegram to Makiyevskaya, who shared the message with USA TODAY with her brother's permission. “How does one survive? What will happen next? … There is a complete absence of future planning.”

Russia blocked all humanitarian assistance except its own. With no cash deliveries to Kherson’s banks, the circulation of Ukraine’s hryvnia currency is dwindling. Access to Ukrainian TV was blocked and replaced by Russian state channels. A strict curfew was imposed. Hliebushkina said some farmers had equipment taken, which threatens their harvests.

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A teacher told The Associated Press last month in a telephone interview that soldiers walk around silently, “trying to give the impression that they come in peace to liberate us from something.”

Russia has not clarified whether a referendum will take place. If it does, U.S. officials fear it could be similar to one held in Russian-annexed Crimea in 2014, which won nearly 97% approval but was considered illegitimate. Russia could declare a breakaway region similar to those in eastern Ukraine.

Danets wants to return to Ukraine and attend medical school but isn’t certain what’s ahead. Her father, at 71, wants to stay in his home.

“Kherson will be occupied for (many) long years,” she said. “Putin seems to think that Ukraine is his territory.”

Contributing: The Associated Press

Chris Kenning is a national news writer. Reach him at ckenning@gannett.com or follow him on Twitter @chris_kenning

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kherson, Ukraine, occupied by Russian troops: What now for residents?