THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 51
auditor in Kyiv, had long been fasci-
nated by all things military. The HBO
series “Band of Brothers,” in which his
favorite character was the medic, Eu-
gene Roe, had been especially inspir-
ing. In 2017, August attended the same
one-week course as Anastasia; he went
on to spend most of his vacations in
the Donbas, where he learned how to
handle a rifle and fire mortars. He ex-
uded the impatient craving for action
typical of young soldiers not yet run
down by the realities of war. The En-
glish words “FUCK DAY” were scrawled
in Sharpie on a magazine in his ammo
vest, which was also decorated with a
purple ribbon that his former girlfriend,
a Hospitaller named Anya, had given
him for good luck. A patch on his flak
jacket featured the Patagonia logo, al-
tered to read “Donbasonia.”
There were five of us in the ambu-
lance. Heading out of the city, we passed
numerous checkpoints under construc-
tion. Volunteers shovelled dirt from the
roadside into sandbags or felled pine
trees with chain saws, stacking the logs
behind tank traps that had been made
by welding together I-beams. August
stared out the window, gripping a
Kalashnikov, tense and mesmerized.
Another Hospitaller, Orest, sat on a
stretcher, absorbed in reading “Little
Dorrit,” the Charles Dickens novel, on
a tablet. Orest was a thirty-six-year-old
arborist, a father of five, and a passion-
ate mountaineer. A week earlier, he told
me, he’d been trekking near the Roma-
nian border, far from cell-phone recep-
tion, when he picked up a signal on a
high ridge and saw the news. He hiked
for two days to the nearest village and
caught a train back to the capital. He’d
been planning to make an expedition
to the Arctic, and had decided to buy
a bolt-action rif le to protect himself
from polar bears; in Kyiv, he bought an
AR-15 instead.
“The expedition has been post-
poned,” Orest deadpanned.
To prevent the Russians from pen-
etrating Kyiv, the Ukrainians had de-
stroyed the main bridge over the fast-
moving Irpin River. Several buildings
on the south side of the river had been
hit by Russian shells, which had also
killed some f leeing civilians. To the
north, explosions sounded and smoke
filled the sky above another nearby sub-
urb, Bucha. Russian forces had stalled
there, and waves of residents were now
arriving—abandoning their vehicles at
the edge of the caved-in bridge, clam-
bering down a high embankment, and
crossing the icy currents on a treacher-
ous walkway composed of pallets and
scrap lumber. Passenger buses idled,
ready to bring displaced Ukrainians to
downtown Kyiv. People advanced sin-
gle file, lugging bags and suitcases; some
hugged dogs, cats, or babies to their
chests. Elderly men and women with
canes and walkers staggered haltingly
over the rickety planks.
Many geriatric, ill, and injured civil-
ians could not navigate the walkway at
all. August, Orest, and several other
Hospitallers began carrying them across
on litters and spine boards. For the next
six hours, the Hospitallers went back
and forth across the rapids, delivering
dozens of people to ambulances, for
transport to hospitals in Kyiv. Exhausted-
looking Ukrainian soldiers returning
from the front also used the crossing.
At one point, a group of them arrived
conducting a prisoner whose head was
covered in a black hood. His hands were
bound in front of him and his shirt was
stained with blood.
The rage and desperation of the peo-
ple at the bridge suggested harrowing
experiences. “I want him to die!” a limp-
ing babushka in a floral head scarf cried
as August helped her down the em-
bankment. She meant Putin. “He’s a
fascist! He’s a bastard! He’s not even a
bastard—he’s an animal!” Another
woman, who’d left her house in a sweat-
suit and slippers, with nothing but a
purse, told August, “They’re by the for-
est. If you need to bomb our houses, do
it. Just kill them.”
Most of the civilians were women.
A lot of the men from Irpin and Bucha
had stayed behind, to look after pets,
to protect their homes, to assist neigh-
bors, or simply from a sense of duty. In
the afternoon, a pair of male munici-
pal workers brought their families in a
car; a young girl with a pink Tinker
Bell knapsack carried a stuffed My Lit-
tle Pony unicorn under her arm. The
two men ushered their wives and chil-
dren to the end of the bridge. “Listen
to your mother,” one said while hug-
ging and kissing his kids. “Be good to
your mother.” The other man was walk-ing away, hiding his tears, unable to say
goodbye. Suddenly, he stopped and
called out, “Lova!” His adolescent son
turned, and the man hurried back to
embrace him.
Late in the day, a van arrived with
two old women, one of whom refused
to get out. “You have to come,” her friend
yelled at her. “Maybe we won’t see each
other again! Just come. Come!”
“I want to go home.”
“Please, get out of the car,” a Hos-
pitaller told her.
“Don’t try to convince me,” she re-
plied. “I don’t want to go anywhere but
home.”
When the Hospitallers asked whether
anyone else was living in her house, she
said that she was alone.
“You know who will be in your
house?” August said. “The Russians,
that’s who. What will you do then?”
The woman was unmoved: “I’m
eighty-two years old. I hope you live as
long as me.”
Her friend was already gone. More
vehicles were pulling up. “Bring her
back,” August told the driver. “We have
other people to help.”
The van turned again toward the
rising smoke plumes.M
ost Ukrainians who signed up
during the first days of the gen-
eral mobilization were assigned to the
Territorial Defense Forces, a kind of na-
tional reserve. It was soon at capacity
and turning people away. A middle-aged
physiotherapist at St. Michael’s told me
that he had waited all night in the lobby
of a conscription office before being sent
home. He joined the Hospitallers in-
stead. Others banded together in ad-
hoc collectives, assembling Molotov
cocktails, sewing camouflage nets, build-
ing fortifications, and preparing and de-
livering food. One day in Kyiv, I met a
young bar manager who belonged to a
network of about two hundred former
restaurant workers—cooks, waiters,
baristas—who made thousands of meals
a day for Army units and for civilians
marooned in their homes. The military
lacked sufficient body armor, and as the
war dragged on the bar manager began
paying a metal fabricator, using his per-
sonal savings, to cut steel-plate inserts
for bulletproof vests.
Some troops were also in urgent need