THANKS, VLAD!:

Kherson's occupation government, run by Russian military commanders and Ukrainian collaborators, wasted little time pulling down Ukrainian flags, taking over Ukrainian schools, trucking in crates of Russian rubles, even importing Russian families. Perhaps nowhere else in Ukraine did Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, devote so much money and violence, the carrot and the stick, to bend a city to his imperial will.

But it did not work.

Guided by contacts in the Ukrainian security services, an assembly of ordinary citizens formed themselves into a grassroots resistance movement. In dozens of interviews, residents and Ukrainian officials described how retirees like Yermolenko -- along with students, mechanics, grandmothers and even a wealthy couple who were fixing up their yacht and got trapped in the city for the better part of a year -- became spirited partisans for the Kherson underground. It was almost like something out of a spy movie.

They took clandestine videos of Russian troops and sent them to Ukrainian forces along with map coordinates. They used code names and passwords to circulate guns and explosives right under the Russians' noses. Some even formed small attack teams that picked off Russian soldiers at night, making the fear and paranoia that settled over the city two-sided.

When the Russian army hastily pulled out in mid-November, perhaps the biggest embarrassment so far to Putin's war effort, Kherson became a powerful symbol. To allies questioning Ukraine's resolve, and to Ukrainians themselves who had suffered so much misery and death and needed a glimmer of hope, Kherson showed what was possible.

Now that the Russian forces are gone and people feel free to talk about what they did and even brag a little, one message keeps emerging.

"I never questioned what we were doing," said Dmytro Yevminov, the yacht owner whom Yermolenko recruited into hiding guns and sacks of grenades in various boatyards. "I never knew I loved my country so much."

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