is as wronged a place as you will fi nd in Ukraine.
The village is on the front line that separates
forces of the Ukrainian military from those of a
secessionist statelet that calls itself the Donetsk
People’s Republic. Backed by Russia, the D.P.R.
has been at war with Ukraine for nearly eight
years. Its fi ghters fi re on the Ukrainian troops.
The Ukrainians fi re back. Or vice versa. No
ground is taken, none ceded. The combatants
rarely set eyes on one another. Rockets miss their
targets and land in Pisky instead, the explosions
echoing through the frames of the already-shat-
tered homes and what was once the nave of the
church. The priest fl ed years ago. So did most of
the villagers.
Some rockets do fi nd their targets. On a
morning in early August, Volodymyr Veryovka
and Yaroslav Semenyaka, soldiers in a Ukrainian
Army company stationed at Pisky, were ordered
to drive a freight truck down Lenin Road, which
runs through Pisky and along the front, to a
bridge in the village. The D.P.R. forces had been
shelling every day through the summer, and the
truck bucked in and out of fresh craters. The
stretch Volodymyr and Yaroslav rode along now
didn’t have the full cover of the tree line, and
they knew they might be exposed to enemy bat-
teries. There wasn’t much they could do about
this. Loaded onto the truck’s bed was a crane,
and Yaroslav could push the engine only so hard.
So they talked.
They had met for the fi rst time that day. Volo-
dymyr was a railway engineer until he joined up
at age 34, because, as he said, ‘‘It had to be done.’’
Ukraine needed all the fi ghters it could get no
matter their age. He had even been commissioned
an offi cer, though this was his fi rst deployment.
He had been in uniform only a few months.
Yaroslav, three years younger, was the veter-
an. He rushed to the front as soon as the shoot-
ing started, in April 2014, when the D.P.R. and a
lesser twin in sedition, the neighboring Luhansk
People’s Republic, broke off from Ukraine. The
secessionist war had quickly consumed far east-
ern Ukraine, the region colloquially known as
Donbas, and then spread west. Ukrainians like
Yaroslav were unsure whether their young nation,
independent at that point for barely two decades,
would survive.
His father, who did dispiriting service in the
Soviet Ground Forces in East Germany during
the Cold War, tried to talk him out of it. But Yaro-
slav, swollen with the same patriotism Volodymyr
now felt, asked him, ‘‘If not me, who?’’ He was one
of thousands of Ukrainians, young and old, men
and women, who rushed to defend their country
then. He had been on the front since, fi ghting in
some of the war’s pivotal battles. Roughly 13,000
Ukrainian soldiers and civilians had died.
But now the war was stalemated. The front
line had barely shifted in years. Ukraine wasn’t
relenting, but neither was it willing to go on
the off ensive to retake the seized territory. The
enemy likewise refused to retreat. Yet it was clear
to Yaroslav, and to anyone else paying attention,
that Russia no longer had much use for the D.P.R.
or L.P.R. It hadn’t fully annexed them, as it had
Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, instead leaving the
statelets in a kind of limbo of national identity:
part Russian, part Ukrainian, generally miserable.
While the people there waited to learn their
fates, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine,
who was elected in 2019 on the promise of restor-
ing Donbas to the country, had made no progress
in this regard and was increasingly unpopular. The
European countries that had seen fi t to reproach
Russia over the war had now moved on. As for
the United States, Ukrainians had held out hope
that President Biden would be an improvement on
Donald Trump, who courted President Vladimir
Putin of Russia and tried to block military aid to
Ukraine. Biden was taking a harder line with Putin,
but when the two met earlier in the summer and
Zelensky tried to interpose on the summit with
dire warnings about the war, he was ignored.
As the stalemate dragged on, Yaroslav felt that
even the Ukrainian Army had become indiff erent
to soldiers like him. On visits home, he told his
father and fi ancée that his will to fi ght had run
dry. He had put in his papers. He had bought a
house and renovated it. Soon he would be there,
tending his vegetable garden.
It wasn’t long after Yaroslav told Volodymyr
he’d gotten engaged that the fi rst rocket came in.
It missed the truck, crashing into the trees just
behind. Volodymyr didn’t know what happened.
Before he could ask, Yaroslav was opening his door
and leaping from the cab. Volodymyr followed.
The second rocket also missed the truck
but hit something. Volodymyr came to on his
stomach. He was by the bushes on the roadside,
unaware of how he had gotten there. He looked
at his right sleeve. It was soaked through with
blood. He felt a hot wetness dripping over his left
cheek. Looking up, he saw Yaroslav, still standing.
He wondered why.
The third rocket hit the truck. This time, when
Volodymyr opened his eyes, the vehicle was in
fl ames. So were the bushes around him. Yaroslav
lay on his back.
Volodymyr crawled to him. He grabbed hold
of Yaroslav’s shirt. He tried to pull him from the
road, but Yaroslav was heavy, and Volodymyrhad the use of only his left arm. Blood poured
into his eye.
He dragged Yaroslav away from the fl ames. He
didn’t have the strength to move him any farther.I was at a trenchworks on the far side of Lenin
Road, with a group of soldiers, when we heard
the rockets explode and looked up to see black
smoke billowing above the tree line. We rushed
over. We found the truck still in fl ames and the
road enveloped in smoke.
At company headquarters, the commander
told me that the truck had been hit with a guided
anti-tank rocket. Volodymyr was en route to the
hospital, Yaroslav’s body to the morgue.
Some soldiers and I went to Pisky, where I
wanted to fi nd someone who saw the attack. I’d
barely entered the village when the notion that
anyone might be there rendered itself ridiculous.
Pisky looked like an oil painting of some previ-
ous war. The destroyed buildings were no longer
just destroyed but ruins, their debris picturesque,
saplings sprouting from the blast holes. I might
have been looking at the aftermath of a battle on
the Eastern Front in 1943. The most conspicuous
signs of the current fi ghting were the fi ns of unex-
ploded rockets poking out from the pavement,
and even these looked decades old.
I came to a house that appeared, contrary to
all reason, inhabited. The roof was collapsed, but
there was a bicycle leaning on the fence, freshly
chopped wood, the whines of cats. My calls of
greeting were fi nally met with slurred shouts
from within. Onto the porch shuff led a shirtless
and mostly toothless man, the drawstring of his
leisure pants barely clinging around his waist, a
crucifi x bouncing in the hair of his sunken chest.
‘‘I was on the road when I saw a wrecked car,’’
he told me. ‘‘I tried to turn, and that’s when the
goddamned rocket hit me.’’
Inviting me in, Yuri continued his account,
confessing that the rocket hadn’t actually hit
him but had come close enough, knocking him
from his bike. Though it is true that Yuri was very
drunk. He remounted his bike, he said, and rode
to the headquarters. ‘‘I goddamn told the men,
‘Go and get your guy, he is lying there, he’s god-
damn shouting.’ ’’
I tried to learn more about what he saw, but
Yuri wanted to tell me about making a living in
wartime Pisky. He should have been retired by
now, he said, but he still had to ride around hiring
himself out for yardwork. He was a fi sherman, but
with the river running along the front, that was
too dangerous now. Anyway, there was no one
left to sell fi sh to. From a pile of clothing he pulled
the jacket he wore at the pipe factory where he
worked before it was blown up in 2015.26 1.23.22
Th is article was written with the support of the Pulitzer
Center on Crisis Reporting.
PISKY