Last night, the Russian army surrounded Kherson in southern Ukraine, near the mouth of the Dnieper, setting up checkpoints on roads leading into and out of the city. Today, they entered it. Footage proliferating online shows a school destroyed by shelling, damage to residential buildings and soldiers looting local shops. The city of 290,000 people used to be on the way to Crimea. Since Putin annexed the peninsula in 2014, however, Kherson has been the final stop before a militarised border. Ukrainian officials from Crimea relocated there. The ‘border’, they assured me a few years ago, was temporary, one day to be redrawn. Now the Russian military is redrawing it daily.