12 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022
OVERTHERE
ABREAKINTHEFIGHTING
L
ast Tuesday, after thirteen months
of fighting in Ukraine, Yaryna Chor-
nohuz got off a FlixBus in midtown
Manhattan. Chornohuz, a twenty-sev-
en-year-old recon soldier, drone pilot,
and combat medic, wore her military
uniform with sapphire earrings and a
nose ring; she has a serpent tattooed on
her forearm, and she had her hair in
cornrows. “It’s an Army hair style in
Ukraine,” she said.
She was visiting the U.S. from the
front; she is on a rotation in the Don-
bas. Standing on the corner of Eighth
Avenue, she was approached by several
pedestrians who asked about her rank.
“I’m, like, light infantry,” she said. She
explained that her fatigues were from
the Ukrainian Army. One man shouted,
“U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” A policeman asked
her the brand of her boots.
Just before leaving for America, Chor-
nohuz had gone to the gray zone—“ter-
ritory that is not ours, but perhaps not
theirs,” she said. “You can meet anyone
there, at any time. Mines, groups of en-
emies, wounded, dead. There was a group
of border guards who had been killed.
I found the body of a shot female bor-
der guard. That was difficult.”
She walked toward Hudson Yards. “I
do recon, so I’m used to not being in the
same place,” she said. “In my unit, we’re
using civilian cars now because most ar-
mored vehicles are destroyed. I drive a
Mitsubishi.” She took out her phone to
show a photo of her car. “It was shot
twice. It’s not armored. My car is called
Gypsy King,” she said. She f lipped
through images of her injection medi-
cine kit, and of evacuated wounded men
in her back seat. Referring to her duties
as a drone pilot, she said, “I can throw
different surprises, grenades.”
In February, Chornohuz was sup-
posed to be coming to the end of her
rotation. Instead, her unit ended up stay-
ing on at the front. “We went north of
Mariupol to help other units break the
enveloping forces. But they had already
closed the envelope,” she said. “So we
had to defend a village in the north. Our
group of five was on the field road for
days. Then we had street combat.” Her
commander was killed. “We defended
the village from Russian artillery. We
had almost no armor. I heard shouting
from a basement, and a ten-year-old boy
with a shrapnel wound in his chest was
there with his mother and her ten-
month-old baby. I evacuated them.” As
she was cleaning the blood from her car,
the fighting started again. “We just used
all the grenade launchers we had, and
Javelins. We ran out of everything.” She
continued, “Things are better now that
we have HIMARS rockets.”
Part of the purpose of her visit to the
Yaryna Chornohuz
Vineyard since 1963. Edward Brooke,
who, in 1966, became the first Black U.S.
senator since Reconstruction (and the
first elected by popular vote) lived part
time on the island, which he called his
“spiritual home.” Martin Luther King,
Jr., Harry Belafonte, Adam Clayton Pow-
ell, Jr., and the novelist Dorothy West
all vacationed there.
DeSantis could have sent the migrants
to any community in the country that
was large enough to sustain an airstrip.
He chose Martha’s Vineyard because of
its reputation both for prosperity and for
left-leaning politics. The whole line of
attack recalled Irving Kristol’s adage that
a neoconservative is simply a liberal who
has been mugged by reality. Yet it is im-
portant to note that the generally liberal
sanctuary cities being targeted didn’t
adopt their policies in a vacuum. Accord-
ing to the Migration Policy Institute,
there are more than two hundred thou-
sand undocumented migrants living in
Massachusetts. The other traditionally
liberal strongholds of New York and Cal-
ifornia have undocumented populations
of roughly eight hundred and thirty-five
thousand and more than two million, re-
spectively. Sanctuary cities like Boston,
New York, and Los Angeles came to
those positions not in the absence of mi-
grants but in their presence.
The cynical expectations were con-
trasted by what actually happened on
Martha’s Vineyard once the migrants
were discovered. Restaurants provided
free food, cots were set up in a church,
and a Spanish-language Mass was or-
ganized. Residents gave bedding, toi-
letries, and candy. Lawyers for Civil
Rights Boston filed a class-action suit
against DeSantis and other Florida state
officials, alleging that the migrants had
been victimized by a “fraudulent and
discriminatory scheme.” (A county sher-
iff in Texas is also investigating whether
the migrants might be considered vic-
tims of crimes, and last week Jason Pizzo,
a Democratic state senator represent-
ing part of Miami-Dade County, sued
to block further flights.)
This outpouring of support has, pre-
dictably, been underplayed among im-
migration hawks. It’s worth recalling
that, not long ago, voices on the reac-
tionary right were mouthing brittle de-
fenses of the Trump-era decision to take
children from their parents at the South-
ern border and detain them, with no
clear plan for reuniting the families. That
situation also resulted in migrants being
surreptitiously flown to distant locales
around the country without knowing
where they were being taken. The cru-
elty is consistent, but it also highlights,
unintentionally, another fact: DeSantis,
Abbott, and those who endorse their ac-
tions believe that liberals will see things
differently once they’ve metaphorically
walked in others’ shoes. But, to make
that point, they are fine with further
abusing people who have already walked
miles—hundreds of them—in their own.
—Jelani Cobb
