KHERSON, Ukraine – The small green van hurtles down the road, with Russian forces across the river. Inside, Halyna Luhova, the mayor of Kherson, held a helmet on her lap and peered out the armored window.

When the first shell fired, directly in the path of the van, about 200 yards away, the driver locked his elbows, mashed the steering wheel and went straight through the cloud of black smoke.

“My God,” Luhova said, as we ran with her through the city. “They’re hunting me.”

The second shell fell even closer.

He was about to die six times. He sleeps on a cot in a corridor. She earns $375 a month, and his city in southern Ukraine has become one of the worst affected by the war, where Russian artillery fires almost every hour.

But Luhova, the only female mayor of a major Ukrainian city, remains intent on projecting a sense of normality even as Kherson is far from normal. Hold regular meetings in underground bunkers. He scolds the department heads for taking too long to set up bomb shelters. Visit neighborhoods and chat with residents whose lives were torn apart by the explosions.

He attributes the allegations of corruption or mismanagement – of which there are many – to rumors of Russian collaborators being paid to obstruct his administration.

Kherson, a port city on the banks of the Dnieper River, was captured by Russian forces in March; liberated by Ukrainian forces in November; and now, three months later, it lies almost deserted. Groups of out-of-school children wander the deserted avenues lined with bare trees and centuries-old buildings broken in half.

Luhova sees her work as defined by the basic verbs: bury, clean, repair and feed. Of the 10 percent of Kherson’s remaining 330,000 original residents, many are too old, too poor, too stubborn or too nervous to flee.

Recently she has been so overwhelmed by the need for food, water, generators, internet access, buses, boarding houses, medicine and firewood that she said she only gets 40 minutes of sleep a night and was so exhausted that they had to give her medicine through a drip. She’s feeling better, she says, even if she’s not exactly calm.

“We need those bomb shelters now”he snapped at a meeting in early February, when it was several degrees below zero outside.

Opposite her in an underground office sat the heads of the city’s main departments, many wearing winter jackets and hats. The office had no heat.

He was lobbying for dozens of free-standing concrete bomb shelters. When an administrator told her the hiring process had to be followed or they could be charged with corruption, she exploded.

“They’re not doing anything and I’m getting really angry at their stupidity,” Luhova said. “I feel like I don’t have enough air when I’m next to you! You will answer with your own blood, with your own blood!”

The manager rolled his eyes and went out to smoke a cigarette.

In a male-dominated political culture – the mayor of the capital, Kiev, for example, is an imposing former heavyweight boxing champion – Luhova, 46, with her gray suede boots and puffy black jacket with faux fur collar, is a figure different. Raised by a single mother during the last days of the Soviet Union, she laughs as she remembers the hardships back then.

“All those terrible queues to buy beets… Imagine, beets!

At 21 Ukraine was independent and she, married and mother, I taught English at a neighborhood school. She was promoted to principal of the school, which served as a stepping stone to her election as councilor of Kherson eight years ago. Before the Russian invasion last February, you were the council secretary, considered the second official.

Russian forces burned down his house in March and he fled the city shortly thereafter. The Russians tried to make Kherson part of Russia, forcing children to learn Russian in schools and people to use Russian rubles in markets. Their boss, the former mayor of Kherson, was kidnapped in June and hasn’t been seen since. Luhova took his place and became the head of the Kherson military administration.

When he returned in November, he found a city elated by the expulsion of the Russians, but in a very bad state. The Russians had looted everything, from water treatment equipment and centuries-old artwork to Kherson’s fleet of fire trucks and buses. But the Russians didn’t go far.

Ukraine lacked momentum and had no troops to spare to pursue them across the river. So now the Russians are sitting on the opposite bank opposite Kherson and shoot at will.

No city in Ukraine outside the eastern Donbas region where the Russians are advancing is being bombed as much as Kherson. Over the past two and a half months, according to Ukrainian authorities, she has been attacked more than 1,800 times.

Bullets arrive without warning. There are no air raid sirens. They are shells fired from tanks, artillery guns, mortars and rocket launchers that explode seconds later: the Russians are so close, less than half a mile in places. Residents have almost no time to take cover.

“It’s just revenge,” Luhova said. “There’s an old saying: ‘If I can’t have it, nobody can,’ he said, trying to explain why the Russians are bombing the city after they retreat. ‘It’s so stupid, but it’s true.’

Perhaps Kherson is a war torn city on the front line Europe’s deadliest conflict in generations, and Luhova could represent the never-surrender Ukrainian spirit that keeps a Russian flag from flying over this country.

But, as in any other city, its inhabitants love to complain about their mayor.

“I’ve called over a hundred times to get my electricity fixed and nobody comes,” said Olena Yermolenko, a retiree who helped run a cell of citizen spies during the Russian occupation. She also repeated it on social media allegations that the mayor stole humanitarian aidsomething Luhova has adamantly denied.

Oleksandr Slobozhan, executive director of the Association of Ukrainian Cities, said that, as far as he knew, the allegations were a smear campaign by pro-Russian operatives.

Despite the challenges, Luhova is determined to make the city work, in the most basic way. He recently went to Kiev to ask Slobozhan for 20 buses.

“We are paralysed,” he said. “Our trolleybuses aren’t working and we can’t fix them because when our workers go up to fix the lines, snipers kill them.”

He left with the promise of 20 buses.

“I like how he works,” Slobozhan said later. “She carries on despite everything.”

Luhova is expected to attend a donor conference in Poland later this month; she has only left the country a few times in her life. Where she really wants to go is Bali.

“I heard you go there and you come back younger,” he jokes.

Her husband is a taxi driver in another city, and her two adult children live far away, so she is alone in Kherson. Most days she can be seen in her little green van.

When we were with her and the shell went off on the road, her driver spun around as fast as he could.

But the Russians followed her. Across the river, they fired a second shell. He crashed into a house on the highway and the shock wave shook the van. The van kept moving forward, but the ammunition looked lethally intimate.

That night, in a house where she was staying with friends, on a small cot in a corridor near the kitchen, Luhova shrugged.

Over a plate of deliciously crunchy homemade cucumber and brie squares, she held a glass of brandy in her fingers and toasted victory.

“If I could disappear into thin air and end this war, I would,” he said. “I would easily sacrifice myself to end this hell.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society