THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 55
out. When a medic commented on her
grit, the woman said that she had also
survived the Second World War.
T
he eighty-four-year-old had been
injured in a strike on the local
fire station, which was across the street
from her house, a few blocks from our
position. I visited the next morning.
The station was still smoking, and the
ground was gouged with craters. Vasyl
Oksak, the fire chief, watched his men
spray water on the collapsed walls and
roof. He seemed to accept the attack
with placid resignation. The Russians
had destroyed almost every public build-
ing in his jurisdiction, he said. A few
days earlier, the children’s sanatorium
where I’d stayed with August and Orest
had been hit.
Shortly after I returned to the sta-
bilization point, a group of soldiers
pulled up in a civilian S.U.V. One of
them had been wounded by artillery.
While the Hospitallers treated the
casualty, a soldier named Roman Shul-
yar told me that they all belonged to a
Territorial Defense unit deployed in the
neighborhood. Shulyar was a mergers-
and-acquisitions attorney whose life,
until three weeks earlier, had revolved
around negotiating corporate contracts.
“We’re not professional soldiers, but
we are holding our position,” he said.
A second patient from the unit was a
plumber in his fifties who had begun
experiencing heart palpitations and
extreme hypertension during the bom-
bardment. As the medics gave the
plumber oxygen and treated his wounded
comrade—a retired police officer—
Shulyar told me, “Not one of us has
quit. No one has run away.” In a later
phone call, he said, “Once you’ve had
that feeling of being a soldier in war-
time, you want to repeat it. You want
to be useful to your country.”
The Hospitallers I’d met also seemed
to be animated by this impulse. How-
ever, the groups with which some of
them had previously been affiliated had
faced criticism, both in Ukraine and
abroad. In the Donbas, Mamont had
served with the Azov Battalion, and one
night at the maternity hospital Yuzik,
the neurosurgeon, showed me a tattoo
on his chest: a medical cross below the
words “right sector,” in Ukrainian.
The Azov Battalion and Right Sector
had emerged out of the Revolution of
Dignity, from protesters who had spear-
headed confrontations with the police
at Independence Square. Both organi-
zations had gone on to fight in the east.
Some hard-line types, including white
supremacists, were drawn to their bel-
licosity and jingoism; others gravitated
to them less because of any ideological
affinity than because they were inspired
by the groups’ discipline and
bravery. After the revolu-
tion, the Ukrainian armed
forces were in a state of dis-
array, enfeebled by years of
corruption and neglect. For
people such as Mamont—
as well as Yana Zinkevych,
the founder of the Hospi-
tallers, who briefly joined a
Right Sector unit when she
went to the Donbas after
high school—volunteer militias offered
an appealing alternative.
The invocation of “nationalist” as a
derogatory term with fascistic conno-
tations baffled many Ukrainians, who
argued that their nation’s history had
been defined by the Russian denial of
its right to exist. Whereas American
and European nationalism typically
implied internal persecution of oth-
ers—vilifying marginalized segments
of the domestic population—Yuzik and
Mamont’s foremost concern was re-
sisting an external and vastly more pow-
erful aggressor. Much of the Azov Bat-
talion, including Mamont’s former
platoon, was currently defending Ma-
riupol against a Russian onslaught that
threatened to annihilate it. One of Ma-
mont’s friends had been killed there;
the friend’s father had died while vol-
unteering in Kharkiv. Mamont was ex-
asperated by non-Ukrainians still con-
fused about who the tyrants were.
There was no question that lead-
ers of the Azov Battalion and Right
Sector championed a chauvinistic, il-
liberal ethos. Some had openly es-
poused anti-Semitism, homophobia,
and racism. In 2010, the first Azov
commander, Andriy Biletsky, declared
his desire to “lead the white races of
the world in a final crusade,” and in
2015 the founder of Right Sector, Dmy-
tro Yarosh, said that a gay-pride pa-
rade in Kyiv “spat on the graves of
those who died and defended Ukraine.”Over all, however, such views were
more marginal in Ukraine than in
Russia—or, for that matter, in the U.S.
Yarosh ran for President, in 2014, but
received less than one per cent of the
vote. In 2019, Right Sector and veter-
ans of the Azov Battalion allied with
other far-right groups to field parlia-
mentary candidates and failed to win
a single seat. That year, Volodymyr Zel-
ensky, a Russian-speaking
Jew whose great-grand-
parents had died in the Ho-
locaust, was elected Presi-
dent in a landslide.
The director of the ma-
ternity hospital where we
were staying, Valery Zukin,
was also Jewish. Zukin had
urged Yuzik and the Hos-
pitallers to make use of his
facility. When he visited
the site one day, he told me that he
was from Donetsk, a major city in the
Donbas. His family, along with many
Jews, had fled Donetsk in 2014, after
Russian-backed separatists took con-
trol of it. “The level of anti-Semitism
had become unbelievable,” he said.
When I mentioned depictions of anti-
Russian fighters as neo-Nazis, Zukin
replied, “It’s very big bullshit.”
Putin had fixated on the Azov Bat-
talion as an excuse for his pitiless as-
sault on Mariupol, where the group
was based. Ever since the Revolution
of Dignity, though, Russian propagan-
dists had generated a steady feed of
disinformation for those inclined to
rationalize Russian belligerence and
malign Ukrainian self-defense. During
my second week in Kyiv, I visited a tall
apartment building that had been struck
by two Russian rockets. As tenants and
neighbors watched firefighters put out
the flames, I spoke with one of the on-
lookers, Oleksii Prokopov, who was
renting a room in a university dormi-
tory next door. Prokopov was from the
Donbas city of Luhansk, which, like
Donetsk, was governed by pro-Rus-
sian separatists. Though he’d left Lu-
hansk in 2014, his brother had stayed.
“I don’t communicate with him any-
more,” he said. “He’s been watching
Russian TV for eight years, and now
he believes whatever Russia says.”
Sounding more saddened than resent-
ful, Prokopov added, “If you watch these