48 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr
Zelensky, had declared martial law and
ordered a general mobilization, forbid-
ding males between the ages of eigh-
teen and sixty to leave the country.
Ukrainians who were abroad, of course,
could have chosen to remain so. But
every seat on the bus was occupied.
The man across the aisle from Anasta-
sia and me, named Petro, was a thirty-
three-year-old construction
worker who had lived in
France for eight years. He
was bound for his home
town, Ivano-Frankivsk,
where Russian missiles had
recently targeted the air-
port. He planned to spend
one night with his parents,
then report for duty.
As we traversed Luxem-
bourg and Germany, the
driver stopped at a gas station every four
or five hours, to let us use the rest room
and buy food; Petro neither ate nor slept,
and his anxiety seemed to increase as
we neared Ukraine. He had never fired
a weapon. “I don’t know where they’re
going to send me,” he told us midway
through Poland, his hands trembling.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen
to me.” Embarrassed by the tears well-
ing in his eyes, he explained, “Not ev-
eryone is ready for this.”
The Russian military, which was su-
perior in numbers and firepower, was
widely predicted to prevail. Hundreds
of thousands of Ukrainians were already
fleeing the country. The mood on the
bus was sombre as the passengers reck-
oned with their decision to join a pos-
sibly doomed resistance.
Anastasia informed Petro that she,
too, planned to participate in the war.
Twenty-eight years old, petite, and blond,
with a round, open face and a wide smile,
she radiated youthful optimism and ear-
nestness. When she told Petro, “I’m
scared, too, but we need to fight,” he
seemed reassured that such a person had
made the same choice, and by her cer-
tainty that it was the right one.
We reached the Polish-Ukrainian
border the following afternoon. Throngs
of women, children, and elderly people
waited to cross in the opposite direc-
tion, toting as many of their posses-
sions as they could. The driver was un-
able to go to Kyiv and deposited us in
Lviv, some three hundred and fifty miles
to the west. Anastasia and I said good-
bye to Petro and went to the railway
station. Outside, hundreds of people
had converged on stands and tents
where young volunteers in neon safety
vests served hot soup and tea. More
displaced Ukrainians had packed into
the main terminal, bundled in heavy
coats, sleeping on benches or on the
cold tile floor. Suitcases and
strollers clogged the pas-
sageways. Most people were
transiting to points west or
south. The only train to
Kyiv wasn’t scheduled to
depart until midnight, and
Anastasia went to buy some
groceries for her father and
stepmother. There were ru-
mors of a run on the su-
permarkets in Kyiv, by res-
idents anticipating a long Russian siege.
I ducked into a shop to buy cigarettes,
and when I came out Anastasia was
speaking with two old men who were
drinking beer and vodka. They’d just
brought their wives and daughters to
Lviv from the southern port city of Ma-
riupol, on the Sea of Azov, and were
returning to sign up with the armed
forces there. They were in high spirits
and full of bravado.
In the weeks ahead, Russian forces
would decimate Mariupol. The indis-
criminate bombardment would raze
much of the city and kill thousands of
civilians. Other residents would starve
to death. Corpses would contaminate
streams, and stray dogs would feed off
dead Ukrainians left to rot in the streets.
“Slava Ukraini!” one of the two old men
shouted, a little drunkenly, as we wished
them luck and parted ways. I didn’t take
down their names, and I don’t know if
they survived.O
ur train arrived in Kyiv the next
morning. We caught a taxi to an
apartment that Anastasia had rented
before the war for the month of March.
It was on Andriyivsky Descent, a steep
cobblestone road, lined with cafés, bars,
and art galleries, near the Dnieper River.
The hill, usually overrun with tourists
and street musicians, was as deserted as
the rest of the snow-dusted city. Many
residents had taken refuge in subway
stations, camping on the platforms andin the train cars. Almost everyone else
was sheltering in their basements or
locked in their homes. The torpid si-
lence was punctuated by the slow whine
of air-raid sirens—and by crows. Pass-
ing some trees taken over by a strident
flock, Anastasia remarked, “I’ve never
seen that before.” Her father’s place
was within walking distance, and on
our way there we encountered a small
monument dedicated to the acclaimed
Ukrainian baritone Vasyl Slipak.
Anastasia had known him. He had
lived in Paris, where he’d performed at
the Opéra Bastille and the Palais Gar-
nier. He’d also led a parallel life, as a mil-
itant in his home country. In late 2013,
President Viktor Yanukovych, ceding to
Russian pressure, had scuttled an agree-
ment to form closer ties with the Euro-
pean Union. Enormous protests, which
grew into an uprising called the Revo-
lution of Dignity, erupted across Ukraine.
At Independence Square, in downtown
Kyiv, tens of thousands of demonstra-
tors erected barricades and violently
clashed with security forces. By March
of 2014, militarized police, often using
live ammunition, had killed more than
a hundred protesters. The Ukrainian
parliament voted to remove Yanukovych,
who fled to Russia. Vladimir Putin dis-
missed the revolution as a Western con-
trivance and promptly annexed Crimea,
a strategic peninsula between the Black
Sea and the Sea of Azov. His troops
then entered the Donbas, a region in the
southeast of Ukraine, in support of
pro-Russian separatists who wanted to
secede. Ukraine mounted a counter-of-
fensive, and soon an entrenched front
line circumscribed some six thousand
square miles on the Russian border. Many
young Ukrainians who were galvanized
by the revolution, including Slipak, joined
volunteer battalions that had originally
formed at Independence Square. Over
the next seven years, more than two
dozen ceasefires were negotiated and vi-
olated. The result was few significant
territorial gains or losses, and thousands
of dead Ukrainians.
Anastasia had met Slipak through
activist networks in France. The last
time they saw each other, at a protest
in Paris in June, 2016, she was on sum-
mer vacation from the Sorbonne and
he was preparing to return to the Don-
bas. Two weeks later, a Russian sniper