50 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
the uprising—and a wall of remem-
brance featured the photographs of
thousands of soldiers and volunteers
who had died in the Donbas. At the
foot of the wall, flowers had been placed
in upright artillery shells.
After Anastasia’s prayer at the fence,
we returned to the apartment. She was
frustrated with her father and stepmother,
but accepted that their minds were made
up. She texted one of the medics in the
Hospitallers, to find out where they had
mustered. The medic responded that
they were in St. Michael’s.
T
he gate was opened for us the fol-
lowing morning. Inside the mon-
astery, everything was in a state of fre-
netic metamorphosis. Men and women
in combat fatigues hurried in all direc-
tions; priests in black robes unloaded
boxes from trucks and vans; in a lecture
hall where seminary students normally
underwent theological instruction, a sol-
dier provided basic firearms training to
volunteers who had just received Kalash-
nikovs. Shouted commands rang through
hallways adorned with oil paintings of
church patriarchs from centuries past.
Anastasia found Yana Zinkevych,
the leader of the Hospitallers, in a small
office packed with people vying to speak
with her. Twenty-six years old, Zin-
kevych was lavishly tattooed and had
a pierced eyebrow and pink-and-blue
hair. She was also in a wheelchair. This
hadn’t been the case in 2014, when, as
a recent high-school graduate, she’d
abandoned her plans to become a doc-
tor and joined a unit of volunteer fight-
ers in the Donbas. “There was nobody
to treat the wounded,” she later told
me. “I understood I had to do some-
thing.” She began teaching herself
tactical first aid and using it to help
injured comrades. One night, while
huddled in a bunker under heavy bom-
bardment, a chaplain recounted to her
the story of a medieval Catholic mili-
tary order, the Knights Hospitaller. The
next day, Zinkevych resolved to create
her own battalion.
She started with six volunteers and
a pickup truck; eventually, she acquired
a Volkswagen van. Zinkevych led more
than two hundred evacuations until,
at the end of 2015, she was paralyzed
from the waist down in a car accident.
A few months later, she learned that
she was pregnant. Against the expec-
tations of her physicians, she gave
birth, to a daughter, without compli-
cations. She went on to train hun-
dreds of Hospitallers who treatedthousands of casualties. In 2019, she
ran for parliament and was elected as
a representative of the European Sol-
idarity Party.
Zinkevych sent Anastasia to an annex
of the monastery where she was issued
a combat uniform, body armor, gloves,
long underwear, thermal socks, a head-
lamp, a pocketknife, and a sleeping bag.
Helmets were not yet on hand. Anas-
tasia went into a bathroom to change,
and when she emerged—no longer a
civilian, her folded bluejeans under her
arm—she marvelled at the speed with
which her world was transforming. “It
doesn’t feel real,” she told me. “It’s like
a dream, or a nightmare.”
Bandages, gauze, saline, syringes, lit-
ters, splints, and other medical equip-
ment were piled on a set of stairs. Do-
nated food—sacks of potatoes, jars of
pickled vegetables, preserved meat,
canned goods—crowded the corridors.
The refectory had been converted into
sleeping 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 pro-
fessor, a dentist, a cellist, a cryptocur-
rency trader, a knife-fighting coach, a
ballet dancer, numerous students, a film-
maker, a farmer, a therapist, several jour-
nalists. Fearing Russian reprisals, they
all used code names. I found a free mat-
tress across from Italia, a physician’s as-
sistant and a single mother who had
immigrated to Milan two decades ago.
When the war started, she took a bus
back to Kyiv, leaving behind her twenty-
three-year-old daughter. “She supports
my being here,” Italia said. Her daugh-
ter was now assisting Ukrainian refu-
gees, whose numbers across Europe
soon exceeded five million.
Kyiv did not fall. Withering Ukrai-
nian artillery and intrepid ambushes
stopped the Russian convoy. Anasta-
sia and Italia were dispatched to a mu-
nicipal police academy near the air-
port, where they trained officers in first
aid and set up a medical-evacuation
point. Reporters were forbidden there,
but a Hospitaller I’d befriended—code-
named August—invited me to accom-
pany his ambulance to a northwestern
suburb called Irpin, where residents
were escaping the intensifying combat.
August, a twenty-four-year-old“Now that we’ve landed, it’s safe to talk to the person next to you.”