shelves: Voltaire, Camus, Maupassant.
In a stack on an armoire, I noticed the
same collection of Shevchenko’s poetry
that Iryna Havryliuk had retrieved from
under her and Sergey’s bed.
I thought of the old woman on the
bridge who’d refused to cross the Irpin
River. It wasn’t clear how Nina and Lyud-
myla had died—but the outcome seemed
inevitable. A Russian tank had plowed
through the yard across the street. A
sniper had occupied the attic of a house
next door. Amid such brute lethality,
what chance did the sisters have?
Another elderly woman, who lived
alone in Bucha, had recounted begging
for her life when Russian soldiers burst
into her house one day. “I never would
have imagined that, at seventy, I would
have to get on my knees before a nine-
teen-year-old bastard,” she’d told me.
Echoing the residents of Trostyanets,
she and others described the occupiers
less as fearsome, battle-hardened butch-
ers than as capriciously homicidal youth.
At a high school not far from Ivana-
Franka Street, crushed beer cans sur-
rounded former artillery positions. The
principal’s office had been trashed. A
Russian soldier had used a rubber stamp
to painstakingly imprint the outline of
a phallus on the wall.
A
nastasia, Artem, and Mamont had
been stationed at a stabilization
point near Irpin. One day, after the
Russian retreat, Anastasia went with
Yuzik, the neurosurgeon with the cane
and the miniature-handgun necklace,
to distribute food, water, and medi-
cine in Bucha. They met an elderly
woman who had been wounded in a
blast several days earlier. Shrapnel had
cut a large gash in her arm. “We had
to argue with her to let us dress it,”
Anastasia said. “She kept saying that
we shouldn’t waste our time.”
On April 6th, another Hospitaller
called me to say that he was en route
to the church in Bucha with the mass
graves. “I can’t say why,” he told me. I
was already in the area and got to the
church a few minutes before several
ambulances and vans arrived. One of
the priests from St. Michael’s was
there. His name was Ivan Sydor, and
at the monastery I had interviewed
him about the night of December 11,
2013—three weeks after President Vik-
tor Yanukovych, acquiescing to Rus-
sia, had cancelled the E.U. agreement.
Father Sydor had been a seminary stu-
dent at the time. At around 1 a.m., he
began receiving panicked calls. Hun-
dreds of security forces had stormed
the protesters encamped at Indepen-
dence Square. Until then, the demon-
strations had largely been tolerated.
Now the government had resolved to
quash them.
“They were asking me to ring the
bells,” Father Sydor had recalled. The
tower at St. Michael’s contained doz-
ens of cast-bronze bells linked to a
keyboard of wooden batons—a caril-
lon—and Father Sydor served as thebell ringer. Typically, the carillon was
played for brief interludes in advance
of morning services and prayers. But
there was also a form of bell ringing
called nabat, which heralded grave dan-
ger and was extremely rare. The last
known instance of nabat at St. Mi-
chael’s had been in 1240, when the
Mongols laid siege to Kyiv.
After securing approval from the
abbot, Father Sydor and five other
priests-in-training had climbed the
tower and taken turns pounding the
batons of the carillon with their fists.
They did not stop until 5 a.m. Then
they descended the tower and walked
down the hill to Independence Square.
The protesters were still there; the bat-
tered security forces were leaving.
“We had won,” he told me.
In Bucha, Father Sydor stood be-
side an older man with a long gray-
ing beard, a black clerical robe, and a
tall cylindrical headdress. I recognized
him as Metropolitan Epiphanius, the
head of the Orthodox Church of
Ukraine. Photographs of Epiphanius,
often with foreign dignitaries, were
hung throughout St. Michael’s, and
I’d seen him address a group of jour-
nalists in the cathedral. When a re-
porter had asked whether he had a
message for Putin, Epiphanius had
said, “I don’t want to address this
person—he’s the Antichrist. When
you see our destroyed cities, you re-
alize that only the Devil is capable of
such things, or someone in league
with the Devil.”
While Father Halavin greeted
Sydor and Epiphanius, a medic helped
Yana Zinkevych, the leader of the
Hospitallers, into her wheelchair. Ev-
eryone then proceeded to the pit.
Standing at the edge, the three clergy-
men intoned a dirge, in a low, melo-
dious chant. Walking the length of
the trench, Epiphanius sprinkled holy
water, from a silver basin, over the
heaped-up corpses.
It was a private ceremony, and only
a handful of medics attended. Au-
gust—the “Band of Brothers” fan—
was among them. A month earlier, I’d
run into August at St. Michael’s while
he was putting on his ammo vest and
flak jacket. Grinning broadly and em-
anating excitement, he’d told me, “I’m
“She’s still getting ready.” going to the war!” That person was