killed him. “His death changed my
vision of the war,” Anastasia told me,
at the monument on Andriyivsky De-
scent. “It became concrete, and I un-
derstood that I had to go there.” The
following month, she accompanied
a group carrying donated supplies—ra-
tions, power banks, generators—to
military units on the front line. At one
forward position, she met an ambu-
lance driver who showed her videos of
casualty evacuations that he had on his
phone. “I was really impressed, and I
felt I wasn’t doing enough,” Anastasia
said. When she told the driver that she
would like to become a medic but had
no experience, he gave her the name of
an organization that could train her:
the Hospitallers.
In 2017, when Anastasia was twenty-
three, she attended a one-week course
with the Hospitallers at their base, in
southern Ukraine. She began deploy-
ing to the Donbas for brief rotations
when not at school. The inertia and
slow-grinding toll of the conflict pro-
duced a specific kind of anguish. The
first casualty that Anastasia evacuated
was a soldier who had nearly severed
his arm while trying to kill himself.
Mines, mortars, and bullets had killed
or wounded others. “Most of them are
younger than me,” Anastasia wrote, in
a journal entry. She worried that their
deaths changed “absolutely nothing.”
In the summer of 2020, after a tour
in the Donbas during the pandemic,
she recommitted to her studies in
France. “I thought I had put the war
behind me,” she said. Now she planned
to rejoin the Hospitallers. Her first
priority, though, was to see her father
and to persuade him and his wife to go
abroad. As we left the monument to
Slipak, we could hear the rumble of
ordnance in the suburbs to the north.
A forty-mile Russian column, com-
posed of hundreds of tanks, armored
vehicles, and approximately fifteen
thousand troops, was bearing down on
the capital. Most Western analysts be-
lieved that Kyiv would be rapidly en-
circled, blockaded, and subjected to
devastating shelling. U.S. intelligence
officials estimated that Russian forces
could take the city within two or three
days. The Ukrainian Ambassador to
Germany later told the Frankfurter All-
gemeine Zeitung that Germany’s finance
minister had rebuffed his appeals for
aid and weapons, and had said to him,
“You have only a few hours.”
The mayor of Kyiv would soon an-
nounce that half of the city’s three mil-
lion 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 an
elegant patterned robe, his rotund mid-
section straining at the sash. His cheeks
flushed with drink, he jovially greeted
his daughter as if she were home for the
holidays. His demeanor soured after we
sat down at the kitchen table and An-
astasia began urging him and her step-
mother, Irena, to abandon the city.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Sergey
said.
Irena, who also wore a robe, assured
Anastasia that they could protect them-
selves: they had an antique hunting rifle
and three bullets. On a large television,
a news anchor was talking about Putin.
Irena shook her head. Like many Ukrai-
nians, she and Sergey were stunned by
the Russian President’s decision to in-
vade. In a speech a few days before the
incursion, Putin had offered various fan-
ciful justifications: that “modern Ukraine
was entirely created by Russia” andshould never have been recognized as a
sovereign state; that the Revolution of
Dignity was a “coup d’état” perpetrated
wholly by “radical nationalists,” corrupt
oligarchs, and neo-Nazis; that the Ukrai-
nian military answered directly to nato
and had committed genocide in the
Donbas; and that Ukraine intended to
develop nuclear weapons. Irena said that
she believed Putin was possessed.
We left the house, and Anastasia
asked if we could stop by St. Michael’s,
a few blocks away, so that she could
pray. She was a devout believer. As soon
as we’d arrived at her temporary apart-
ment, she had removed from her back-
pack a small icon of the Virgin Mary
and placed it on the windowsill.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine
vigorously opposed Russian interfer-
ence in the country and had backed the
Revolution of Dignity. St. Michael’s
stood at the top of a hill that sloped
down to Independence Square, and
during the protests the monastery be-
came a sanctuary from the mayhem.
Priests and volunteer medics treated
wounded protesters and served them
food. The dead were brought there to
be mourned by their friends. Now a
memorial outside the cathedral hon-
ored the demonstrators killed during“Wait—you two were also rescued by, and live
happily ever after with, Prince Charming?”