Web Excursions 2022-05-08
[Note: Containing graphic descriptions; reader discretion advised. Apologize for the long quotes but don’t want to cut short of the powerful narrative.]
The Wound-Dressers
Ukrainians who were abroad, of course, could have chosen to remain so. But every seat on the bus was occupied.
The mayor of Kyiv would soon announce that half of the city’s three million residents had fled. The remaining population leaned toward the stubborn, the courageous, the hopeful, the deluded, and the poor. Anastasia’s father, Sergey, wasn’t poor. He answered the door in anelegant patterned robe, his rotund mid-section straining at the sash. His cheeksflushed with drink, he jovially greeted his daughter as if she were home for theholidays. His demeanor soured after wesat down at the kitchen table and Anastasia began urging him and her step-mother, Irena, to abandon the city.
Bandages, gauze, saline, syringes, litters, splints, and other medical equip-ment were piled on a set of stairs. Donated food—sacks of potatoes, jars of pickled vegetables, preserved meat, canned goods—crowded the corridors. The refectory had been converted intosleeping quarters, and dozens of mat-tresses covered the dining tables. In the kitchen, medics waited in line for bowls of borscht and kasha. I would get to know many of them: an economics professor, a dentist, a cellist, a cryptocurrency trader, a knife-fighting coach, aballet dancer, numerous students, a film-maker, a farmer, a therapist, several journalists. Fearing Russian reprisals, they all used code names.
Late in the day, a van arrived withtwo old women, one of whom refused to get out. “You have to come,” her friendyelled at her. “Maybe we won’t see each other again! Just come. Come!”“I want to go home.” “Please, get out of the car,” a Hos-pitaller told her.“Don’t try to convince me,” she re-plied. “I don’t want to go anywhere but home. ”When the Hospitallers asked whether anyone else was living in her house, she said that she was alone. “You know who will be in your house?” August said. “The Russians, that’s who. What will you do then?” The woman was unmoved: “I’m eighty-two years old. I hope you live as long as me.” Her friend was already gone. More vehicles were pulling up. “Bring her back,” August told the driver. “We have other people to help.” The van turned again toward therising smoke plumes.
The rage and desperation of the people at the bridge suggested harrowing experiences. “I want him to die!” a limp-ing babushka in a floral head scarf cried as August helped her down the embankment. She meant Putin. “He’s a fascist! He’s a bastard! He’s not even abastard—he’s an animal!” Another woman, who’d left her house in a sweat-suit and slippers, with nothing but a purse, told August, “They’re by the forest. If you need to bomb our houses, do it. Just kill them.”
The men belonged to a “civilian sniper club” that had formed in 2015. In anticipation of an expansion of the war in the Donbas, they had gathered on weekends to practice marksmanship, outdoor skills, combat medicine, and even “tactical alpinism.” (A sudden urban assault might require them to rappel from their apartment buildings.) They did not know one another’snames—or any other identifying details. When I expressed surprise at this, an ungainly man in a black turtleneck replied, “It’s easy for me, because I come from the gamer society.”
More ambulances were acquired similarly, their stencilled lettering indicating their provenance: “ambulanza,”“ambulancia,” “ambulans.”
To raise money, Anya marshalled her contacts in the Ukrainian diaspora and solicited contributions on social media. One day, after helping to acquire five thousand tourniquets from a Swiss man-ufacturer, she told me, “There are nomore tourniquets in Switzerland!”
An hour later, a market a few miles east of us was shelled. I went there and found firefighters hosing down a burning complex of outdoor stalls. Nothing that might have been mistaken as a military target was anywhere in sight. I was filming the damage when another mortar landed, a short distance away from me. The blast and shrapnel wounded a woman who, bleeding from her abdomen, was quickly loaded into an ambulance. Such “double-tap” strikes hadbeen common in Syria, where Russia and the Assad regime had systematically targeted first responders to demoralize the population and terrorize it into submission.
That night, an eighty-four-year-old woman was delivered to the stabilization point with shrapnel wounds to hergroin and abdomen. She did not cry out. When a medic commented on her grit, the woman said that she had alsos urvived the Second World War.
The Hospitallers I’d met also seemed to be animated by this impulse. However, the groups with which some of them had previously been affiliated had faced criticism, both in Ukraine andabroad. The Azov Battalion and Right Sector had emerged out of the Revolution of Dignity, from protesters who had spear-headed confrontations with the police at Independence Square. There was no question that leaders of the Azov Battalion and Right Sector championed a chauvinistic, illiberal ethos. Some had openly espoused anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism. Both organizations had gone on to fight in the east. Some hardline types, including white supremacists, were drawn to their bellicosity and jingoism; others gravitated to them less because of any ideological affinity than because they were inspired by the groups’ discipline and bravery. After the revolution, the Ukrainian armed forces were in a state of disarray, enfeebled by years of corruption and neglect. For people such as Mamont—as well as Yana Zinkevych, the founder of the Hospitallers, who briefly joined a Right Sector unit when she went to the Donbas after high school—volunteer militias offered an appealing alternative.
His parents, Russians from the Kuban region, near Crimea, had moved across the border to Luhansk after their wedding. They had both died before the Revolution of Dignity, but, Proko-pov told me, his mother had recently visited him in a dream. “When I saw her, I was so happy,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Mom, come and sit with me.’” Before they had a chance to talk, Prokopov was jolted awake by an explosion somewhere in Kyiv. He opened his eyes to the sound of air-raid sirens. Still, he said, “I continued to speak with her. I was crying. I said, ‘Mom, this is your motherland. How is it possible they aredoing this to us?’ ” Prokopov had also been sleeping during the attack on the apartment tower. He’d woken to window shards falling on his face. Rushing outside, he’d found an elderly woman, half dressed and barefoot, escaping the burning building. As he recounted this, with the same unsettling urgency he had conveyed while describing his interrupted dream, I began to suspect how the two events might be connected.
I was taken a back by the evidence of heavy communal drinking—this was the fourth war I had covered and the first time I’d ever seen that—but many residents later told me that one of the first things the Russians did in Trostyanets was plunder its supermarkets for booze.
A landscaped public square was now a muddy wasteland littered with obliterated Russian tanksand armored vehicles. Amid the wreckage, a Second World War memorial, featuring a life-size Soviet tank, still sat atop a hulking plinth. A plaque embossed with a hammer and sickle commemorated the Soviet battalion thathad captured the nearby train station, severing a German supply line.
Oleksandr seemed less aghast at the alcohol than at the presence of Bibles and icons. In a room filled with bandages, bags of saline, and bloody mattresses, he picked up a New Testament and marvelled, “Look at that! It’s horrible! How could they be religious?”
In a narrow corridor outside theroom, more than a dozen letters and cards from Russian schoolchildrenwere taped to the wall. A nine-year-old named Olya had signed a colorful drawing of a bright sun smiling down on two tanks with flowers protruding from their cannons. “For Peace” and “Victory for Russia” were scrawled inthe sky, beside a red Soviet flag. “Dears oldier!” another note read. “I really hope that you will be strong and ableto defend us, and that the world will be sunny and happy.” In early March, in the Russian city of Kazan, a hospice for terminally ill children had released a picture of its patients standing with their parents and staff in a “Z” formation in the snow. The messages and illustrations in the rooms beneath the train station were nearly identical to one another—obviously copied from a template—and what most disturbed me was not that children had been so cynically exploited but that adults had derived genuine comfort from this rote compliance.
In the square, two Ukrainian Railways employees were painting over the “Z” markings on a flatbed that belongedto the city’s train station. (The letter, originally used as an identifying marker for Russian convoys, now symbolized support for the invasion in general, and could be seen on T-shirts, billboards, and bumper stickers throughout Russia.)
“What’s this?” Halaka asked, holding up a zippered pouch. “Ah,” Havryliuk said. “His coins.” She was smiling. She opened the pouch to reveal a cache of foreign currency that people had given Sergey from their travels to Cyprus, Singapore, the U.S., Indonesia. He’d been a collector. A dozen miniature beachchairs were arranged on a shelf, and Havryliuk explained that it was an installation Sergey had made for his defunct cell phones, each of which had occupied a chair. The Russians hadtaken the phones.
It is traditional for Ukrainians to leave some of the deceased’s preferred food on a grave, but during the occupation the residents of Bucha barelyhad enough sustenance to survive. Volodymyr had loved caffeine, and Cherednichenko had found a small packet of instant coffee to place on the otherwise unmarked mound of dirt.
When the Russians first invaded Bucha, a team of volunteers risked their lives collecting bodies and delivering them to the local morgue. After ten days, with the morgue at capacity and lacking refrigeration, residents dug amass grave behind a local Orthodox church. As corpses piled up, a tractor covered them with earth. When the first grave was full, a second was excavated, and then a third. I visited the church the day after I met Iryna Havryliuk. Bulky black bags were still heaped in the third pit, and limbs protruded from the mud. The priest, Father Andrii Halavin, was in the nave, repairing windows shattered by projectiles. “It’s not just here,” he told me. “People are buried all over Bucha.”
One of the priests from St. Michael’s was there. His name was Ivan Sydor, and at the monastery I had interviewed him about the night of December 11, 2013—three weeks after President Vik-tor Yanukovych, acquiescing to Russia, had cancelled the E.U. agreement. Father Sydor had been a seminary stu-dent at the time. At around 1 a.m., he began receiving panicked calls. Hundreds of security forces had stormed the protesters encamped at Independence Square. Until then, the demonstrations had largely been tolerated. Now the government had resolved toquash them. “They were asking me to ring the bells,” Father Sydor had recalled. The tower at St. Michael’s contained dozens of cast-bronze bells linked to a keyboard of wooden batons—a caril-lonand Father Sydor served as the bell ringer. Typically, the carillon was played for brief interludes in advance of morning services and prayers. But there was also a form of bell ringing called nabat, which heralded grave danger and was extremely rare. The lastknown instance of nabat at St. Mi-chael’s had been in 1240, when the Mongols laid siege to Kyiv. After securing approval from the abbot, Father Sydor and five other priests-in-training had climbed the tower and taken turns pounding the batons of the carillon with their fists. They did not stop until 5 a.m. Then they descended the tower and walked down the hill to Independence Square. The protesters were still there; the battered security forces were leaving. “We had won,” he told me.
At a high school not far from Ivana-Franka Street, crushed beer cans surrounded former artillery positions. The principal’s office had been trashed. A Russian soldier had used a rubber stamp to painstakingly imprint the outline of a phallus on the wall.