56 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
programs every day, then, yes, you will
believe.”
His parents, Russians from the
Kuban region, near Crimea, had moved
across the border to Luhansk after their
wedding. They had both died before
the Revolution of Dignity, but, Proko-
pov told me, his mother had recently
visited him in a dream. “When I saw
her, I was so happy,” he recalled. “I said,
‘Mom, come and sit with me.’” Before
they had a chance to talk, Prokopov
was jolted awake by an explosion some-
where in Kyiv. He opened his eyes to
the sound of air-raid sirens. Still, he
said, “I continued to speak with her. I
was crying. I said, ‘Mom, this is your
motherland. How is it possible they are
doing this to us?’ ”
Prokopov had also been sleeping
during the attack on the apartment
tower. He’d woken to window shards
falling on his face. Rushing outside,
he’d found an elderly woman, half
dressed and barefoot, escaping the burn-
ing building. As he recounted this, with
the same unsettling urgency he had
conveyed while describing his inter-
rupted dream, I began to suspect how
the two events might be connected.
When I asked Prokopov how he
thought his mother would have seen
the current crisis—from his perspec-
tive or from his brother’s—he avoided
answering directly. “She was a good
woman,” he said. “She loved art and
poetry. She taught me poems about the
Second World War—about the Rus-
sian heroes and Russian women who
took up arms against the German fas-
cists.” He stared wide-eyed at the smoke
and flames, as if to reassure himself that
it was not a dream. “Now the war is
here,” he said. “But it’s not the German
fascists. It’s the Russian fascists.”
T
he Ukrainian counter-offensive
that took place while Anastasia
and I were at the maternity hospital
marked a pivotal turn in the battle of
Kyiv. As destructive as the Russian shell-
ing was, there had been more outgoing
artillery than incoming. nato member
states, spurred by the unexpected resil-
ience of Ukraine’s resistance, had begun
shipping huge numbers of arms to the
country. By mid-March, the U.S. was
allocating billions of dollars for anti-air-
craft and anti-tank systems, radar equip-
ment, helicopters, drones, grenade
launchers, artillery rounds, and other
matériel. Later, additional aid packages
would include such heavy weapons as
howitzers, the long-range cannons that
U.S. marines had used to level Raqqa,
in northern Syria.
The Ukrainian troops, which nato
advisers had been training throughout
the conflict in the Donbas, employed
this arsenal with exceptional profi-
ciency—and not just in Kyiv. A broader
shift was also under way. At the end of
March, Russian forces retreated from
Trostyanets, a city in the northeast which
they had occupied for a month. I vis-
ited a few days later. A landscaped pub-
lic square was now a muddy wasteland
littered with obliterated Russian tanks
and armored vehicles. Amid the wreck-
age, a Second World War memorial,
featuring a life-size Soviet tank, still sat
atop a hulking plinth. A plaque em-
bossed with a hammer and sickle com-
memorated the Soviet battalion that
had captured the nearby train station,
severing a German supply line.
According to a group of soldiers I
later met in Trostyanets, the Ukrainian
Army had all but encircled the city,
leaving the Russian forces with only
one road out and two choices: “Go or
die.” The soldiers estimated that about
a hundred and fifty vehicles had de-
parted. When I asked whether the with-
drawal had been negotiated, they said
that such matters were above their pay
grade. However, one soldier remarked,
“Apparently, there was a deal. Other-
wise, we would never have let them
leave like that.”
In the square, two Ukrainian Rail-
ways employees were painting over the
“Z” markings on a flatbed that belonged
to the city’s train station. (The letter,
originally used as an identifying marker
for Russian convoys, now symbolized
support for the invasion in general,
and could be seen on T-shirts, bill-
boards, and bumper stickers through-
out Russia.) The station was across the
square; on my way there, I encountered
a middle-aged man walking his bicy-
cle through the mud. He wanted to
check on his daughter’s house, which,
he’d heard, had been destroyed. The
man’s name was Oleksandr, and he told
me that, toward the end of the occu-
pation, Russian soldiers had taken ref-uge in a basement underneath the sta-
tion. We decided to have a look together.
Several locomotives on the tracks
had been blown up, and the platform
was covered with mortar shells and
wooden ammunition boxes. I turned
on my phone’s light and followed Olek-
sandr down a f light of stairs, into a
dank network of rooms cluttered with
Russian uniforms, boots, and ration
packs. Socks were draped over pipes,
playing cards lay on tables, and a shock-
ing number of empty vodka, wine, and
whiskey bottles were scattered every-
where. I was taken aback by the evi-
dence of heavy communal drinking—
this was the fourth war I had covered
and the first time I’d ever seen that—
but many residents later told me that
one of the first things the Russians did
in Trostyanets was plunder its super-
markets for booze.
Oleksandr seemed less aghast at the
alcohol than at the presence of Bibles
and icons. In a room filled with ban-
dages, bags of saline, and bloody mat-
tresses, he picked up a New Testament
and marvelled, “Look at that! It’s hor-
rible! How could they be religious?”
In a narrow corridor outside the
room, more than a dozen letters and
cards from Russian schoolchildren
were taped to the wall. A nine-year-
old named Olya had signed a colorful
drawing of a bright sun smiling down
on two tanks with flowers protruding
from their cannons. “For Peace” and
“Victory for Russia” were scrawled in
the sky, beside a red Soviet flag. “Dear
soldier!” another note read. “I really
hope that you will be strong and able
to defend us, and that the world will
be sunny and happy.” In early March,
in the Russian city of Kazan, a hospice
for terminally ill children had released
a picture of its patients standing with
their parents and staff in a “Z” forma-
tion in the snow. The messages and il-
lustrations in the rooms beneath the
train station were nearly identical to
one another—obviously copied from a
template—and what most disturbed
me was not that children had been so
cynically exploited but that adults had
derived genuine comfort from this rote
compliance.
Perhaps it was wrong to think of
them as adults. All over Trostyanets,
people were emerging from their homes