52 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
of basic medical equipment. At St. Mi-
chael’s, Anastasia spent hours assem-
bling individual first-aid kits for infan-
try units: pouches containing pressure
bandages, tourniquets, trauma shears,
emergency blankets, hemostatic gauze,
and chest-wound seals. These products
had been either sent by European do-
nors or purchased by the Hospitallers.
More ambulances were acquired simi-
larly, their stencilled lettering indicat-
ing their provenance: “ambulanza,”
“ambulancia,” “ambulans.”
Anya, the ex-girlfriend of August’s
who had given him the lucky ribbon,
was in charge of fund-raising. She’d
been studying the violin at the Kyiv
Conservatory when the Revolution of
Dignity started; a policeman had bro-
ken her hand at Independence Square.
“I’d spent my whole life, since I was
four years old, playing all day,” she told
me. The injury had put an end to her
musical career. A year later, she’d vol-
unteered to fight in the Donbas.
To raise money, Anya marshalled her
contacts in the Ukrainian diaspora and
solicited contributions on social media.
One day, after helping to acquire five
thousand tourniquets from a Swiss man-
ufacturer, she told me, “There are no
more tourniquets in Switzerland!”
As the fighting continued on the
outskirts of the capital, the Hospitallers
set about establishing several “stabili-
zation points.” At these forward posi-
tions, wounded soldiers and civilians
could receive initial treatment—mainly
hemorrhage control and intravenous
therapy—before being evacuated to
primary-care facilities in Kyiv. In the
first week of March, I went with Au-
gust and Orest to the edge of a neigh-
borhood called Horenka, where the
Hospitallers were scouting out a loca-
tion for a new stabilization point.
Horenka, which bordered Bucha to the
east, was the scene of fierce Russian
shelling—on our way, as we passed
Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles,
a mortar exploded on the road ahead
of us, rocking the ambulance and oblig-
ing us to turn back for a while. It was
dark when we finally reached our des-
tination, and bright trails streaked across
the night sky. Rockets launched by the
Ukrainians flashed in the woods. We
linked up with a Territorial Defense
unit that had occupied an abandoned
children’s sanatorium. The volunteers
did not look particularly impressive—
they were older, and some of them were
out of shape—but they told me that
they had been preparing for this mo-
ment for seven years.
The men belonged to a “civilian
sniper club” that had formed in 2015.
In anticipation of an expansion of the
war in the Donbas, they had gathered
on weekends to practice marksman-
ship, outdoor skills, combat medicine,
and even “tactical alpinism.” (A sudden
urban assault might require them to
rappel from their apartment buildings.)
They did not know one another’s
names—or any other identifying de-
tails. When I expressed surprise at this,
an ungainly man in a black turtleneck
replied, “It’s easy for me, because I come
from the gamer society.”
I recognized these men. Of course,
the difference between them and their
American analogues—preppers, sur-
vivalists, militia members—was that
the dreaded scenario they had envis-
aged was not a lurid fantasy. As the
gamer in the turtleneck told me, “We
woke up on February 24th and said,
‘O.K., it’s here. It’s happening.’”
There were some similar types in
the Hospitallers. When we got back to
St. Michael’s, a new arrival, with a goa-
tee, wire-framed glasses, and short-
cropped hair, was unpacking a vast trove
of tactical apparel—some of it still
shrink-wrapped and marked with pricetags—onto a mattress next to mine. He
was from Kyiv but lived in Alberta and
was code-named Canada. After doing
a tour in the Donbas, in 2016, he’d re-
alized: “It can happen anywhere.” He
had a business salvaging and reselling
used winter tires, but he devoted much
of his time and money to his “project.”
In Alberta, he had a dozen guns, a thou-
sand rounds of ammunition, plastic
containers stocked with food, and a be-
loved “patrol truck”—an S.U.V. that hehad customized with a sixteen-thou-
sand-pound winch, roll bars, and a rifle
rack. He was saving up for portable
solar panels; when things fell apart, he
planned to strike out for the wilderness
with his wife and live off the land.
Had we met in North America, I likely
would have seen Canada’s world view as
paranoid and apocalyptic. In Ukraine,
though, it was harder to dismiss: many
analysts were speculating that Russia
might deploy a nuclear weapon. Russian
soldiers had attacked a nuclear power
plant in Zaporizhzhia, causing a fire.
Some of the forces targeting Kyiv had
entered the country through the Cher-
nobyl Exclusion Zone, churning up con-
taminated soil and digging trenches in
a lethally radioactive forest.
Canada’s wife was also Ukrainian.
Her parents and brother lived in Ma-
riupol, which had no electricity, heat,
or water, and was running out of food.
The day after I met Canada, Russian
aircraft bombed a maternity hospital
in the city. His in-laws weren’t answer-
ing their phones.T
he situation in Mariupol was
uniquely grim, but the Russians
were targeting civilian areas and infra-
structure across Ukraine, most notably
in Kharkiv, three hundred miles to the
east of Kyiv. On March 16th, I went
there with a few photographers. Shell-
ing had laid waste to several square
blocks downtown. Offices, shops, restau-
rants, cafés, university buildings, and an
iconic pub named after Ernest Hem-
ingway were in ruins, some encased in
ice from broken pipes. An enormous
crater yawned outside the regional ad-
ministrative headquarters, a six-story
monolith that had partially withstood
the blast. A second missile had destroyed
a kitchen in the basement, killing sev-
eral women. The top of a skull lay nearby.
Firefighters with shovels were still dig-
ging through the rubble, searching for
bodies. A Territorial Defense soldier,
code-named I.T., said that twenty-four
corpses had already been retrieved. I.T.,
who had been inside the building during
the strike, told me, “I should be dead.”
He’d worked as a computer engineer in
Kharkiv before the war, and he shared
Anastasia’s astonishment at the sudden
onset of havoc. “Two weeks ago, I was
arguing with my wife, telling her I was