The New York Times Magazine 45sector of the Red Zone, outside the L.P.R., near
the Russian border. In the war’s fi rst days, images
of civilians dashing across a destroyed bridge in
Stanytsia Luhanska, dodging fi re, were broadcast
around the world, calling to mind Sarajevo.
When I visited in August, Stanytsia Luhanska
called to mind Cold War Germany. In front of the
border checkpoint stood a large white obelisk
and a red Soviet star. A plaque read, ‘‘In memory
of the 242 prisoners of war who were executed
in this village in 1942.’’ The checkpoint had, like
so much else on the front, been formalized. The
bridge was rebuilt. There were freshly painted
white storm-fencing, orderly queues, convert-
ed cargo containers housing ATMs and NGO
offi ces, cafes. Taxi drivers waited to pick up fares.
The Ukrainian side of the checkpoint was
crowded with people who were waiting to cross
into the L.P.R., but most people were going
the other direction: to see family, to check on
property they owned, to go shopping. Goods
were less expensive and of better quality on the
Ukrainian side.
A family waited for a minibus at a cafe. The
parents, carrying overnight bags, a large bottle
of water and a plastic bag of snacks, stood pro-
tectively over their young son and daughter, who
sat silent and watchful at a table in the shade of
an umbrella. They were going to Severodonetsk
to visit relatives, the mother, who introduced
herself as Maria, told me. They had waited nearly
three hours to get across from Luhansk, where
they lived.
Her son carried a small guitar case. I asked
about it. She said he was learning piano too. ‘‘He
likes to play patriotic Ukrainian songs.’’ At this
the boy winced. I now noticed he looked fright-
ened. So did his sister.
‘‘The truth is, we’re not going back,’’ Maria
confi ded, unprompted. ‘‘We’re leaving Luhansk
for good.’’
It was as though she had been wanting to tell
someone for ages. Now that she’d said it, relief
seemed to overtake her. I asked why they decid-
ed to defect. Without hesitating, looking at her
children, Maria said, ‘‘To give them a future.’’
Her husband eyed me. He clearly didn’t want
Maria speaking with me, but before he could say
so, their minibus arrived. My interpreter and I
off ered to drive them to Severodonetsk instead.
They could get their tickets refunded. Even the
husband agreed to this readily. They had sunk
everything they had into their escape and needed
all the spare cash they could get.
Once we were driving, Maria poured forth.
They had been planning their escape for years,
she said, slowly moving their possessions out,
trip by trip. On the last trip, they had found an
apartment in a city in central Ukraine where
they’d never been before. They had seen it only
on a map. It was near an industrial center where
her husband, Oleksandr, would hopefully fi nd
work in a plant. In Luhansk, he was a miner.
When his mine closed, he went to work in one
of the illegal open-pit mines. It was absurdly
dangerous work, and many of his friends died.
Maria was a freelance tutor. Between what she
received from her late father’s pension and what
they saved, they had just enough to make the
down payment on their new home. She had
enrolled their son, Andriy, 10, and daughter,
Kira, 6, in a school.
The farther from the checkpoint we got, the
more excited Maria seemed to get about the
future, and this in turn kept bringing her back
to the indignities of life under occupation.
‘‘Everything was decrepit,’’ she said. ‘‘In
Luhansk, you could take a person who had been
healthy and prosperous, and soon they would
become a drunk.’’
Salaries were a fraction of what they were
before the war and prices higher. There were con-
stant electricity outages, food shortages, short-
ages of everything. What goods there were on
shelves were Russian castoff s. There were even
food lines, as in the worst days of the Soviet
Union. Public services had deteriorated or disap-
peared entirely. Garbage piled up in the streets.
The hospitals were falling apart, and many doc-
tors had defected or died in the pandemic.
Most of the people Maria knew, even her own
family members, longed to be absorbed into
Russia and blamed Ukraine for their misery. She
compared them to abused girlfriends. The harder
Russia hit them, the faster they scurried back
to him. She had arrived at a conclusion about
Russians: ‘‘They don’t need freedom. They don’t
e v e n w a n t i t .’’
The propaganda had been everywhere. Kira
and her classmates had been made to dress
up in military uniforms and sing Soviet war
anthems in their nursery-school class. Kira was
a ‘‘war baby,’’ Maria said: She was born under
the occupation and didn’t know anything else.
She was accustomed to seeing guns every day.
There were armed guards outside her nursery
school, their fi ngers on the triggers. ‘‘Why do
they need to have their fi ngers on the trigger in
front of a nursery school?’’ Andriy could slightly
remember a time before and was worse aff ected.
He couldn’t sleep, was frightened all the time,
even paranoid. When Maria put on Ukrainian
music at home, he ran around the house closing
the windows and begging her to turn it down,
worried someone would hear.
Maria’s problem wasn’t getting to sleep so
much as what happened once she was there.
She had acquired a recurring nightmare. A man
is pointing a rocket-propelled grenade at her.
She screams: ‘‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’’ He pulls
the trigger. She bolts awake.
Andriy and Kira listened, whispering ques-
tions to their parents. They, too, had relaxed.
Andriy peered out his window, not exactly in
wonder, while Kira chewed from a giant choc-
olate bar.Now it was Oleksandr who looked stricken.
He hadn’t loathed life in Luhansk as Maria had.
The lack of freedom didn’t bother him, she said,
with what struck my ear as a mixture of aff ec-
tion and exasperation. She jokingly called him
‘‘the Secessionist.’’ He didn’t argue the point.
He didn’t say much, except to occasionally push
back on her complaints about the life they had
left behind.
‘‘I guess everyone dealt with the occupation dif-
ferently,’’ Maria said. ‘‘They survived, they adjusted.’’
‘‘People went to bars,’’ he said.
‘‘What bars? There was a 10 p.m. curfew.’’
‘‘11,’’ he said.
‘‘OK, 11,’’ she said.
Oleksandr was thoughtful. ‘‘It’s scary to
change everything,’’ he said, ‘‘to start all over
again at 40.’’
They still had a home in Luhansk and a car.
His mother was still there. What would happen
to her if the authorities learned of their defec-
tion? Families of defectors were interrogated
for months and years, he’d heard. Sometimes
they disappeared.
‘‘You can’t criticize Russia,’’ Maria said. ‘‘Not
even on the internet. Everyone is afraid.’’
‘‘What happens if you do?’’ I asked.
‘‘They take you to one of the basements,’’ Olek-
sandr said.
Maria unburdened herself, but she didn’t
drop her guard. She wouldn’t tell me their family
name. When we arrived in Severodonetsk, she
asked us to drop them at a bank. She didn’t want
me seeing where they were staying.
‘‘If you have to write a surname, say it’s Ivan-
ov,’’ Oleksandr told me as he got out of the car
and shook my hand. ‘‘That way, if I have to go
back, they won’t shoot me.’’‘‘Basement’’ is a word you hear often in Ukraine.
It can have one of two meanings. It can refer
to the basements that people fl ed to during the
worst days of the war. Or it can mean what Olek-
sandr meant — the secret prisons in the D.P.R.
and L.P.R. that are used for interrogation, torture
and murder.
I spoke with a former prisoner, Stanislav
Aseev, who was living in Makiyivka, a town out-
side the city of Donetsk. Makiyivka was occu-
pied by D.P.R. forces in 2014 and is still occu-
pied. Like just about everyone else in his town,
he told me, he was raised with very little sense
of being Ukrainian. He spoke Russian, he read
Russian books, he watched Russian TV. When
Russian news said that the Euromaidan protests
were a coup backed by America, he believed
it. When it said the independence movement
in Donbas was genuine, he believed that. His
friends joined the D.P.R. forces, thrilled by the
idea of ‘‘killing fascists.’’
It was hard to know who was in charge or
what they intended, but Aseev saw with his own
eyes the Russian agents around Makiyivka, the