‘‘Ride the bike here, ride the bike there,’’ he
said. ‘‘I’m just hustling.’’
From the kitchen, his wife, Masha, 18 years
his junior, yelled interjections. She sat on a stool
peeling potatoes, the ash of her cigarette dan-
gling precariously over the pot. He yelled back.
They got in a yelling match. She was more sober
than Yuri but not by much.
They got together early in the war, when peo-
ple in Pisky were living in basements converted
to bomb shelters. Eventually even the basements
were destroyed by rockets, and their neighbors
left their homes, along with about 800,000 other
Ukrainians. Yuri and Masha stayed. They might
consider leaving, she told me, but where would
they go? And with what money? They couldn’t
even aff ord to fi x the roof.
‘‘Everything is ruined,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s leaking.
What is the point anyway?’’
Back at the company headquarters, which
hunkered in a bombed-out Soviet-era apart-
ment building, with the truck still burning, a
group of men played cards. A press offi cer took
photographs — not of the smoldering wreckage
yards away but of a soldier sitting at a table han-
dling, of all things, an antique crank-powered
fi eld telephone. I seriously wondered whether a
movie was being fi lmed until I learned that the
phone wasn’t an antique. Or rather it was, but
a functioning one. The army installed the old
phones after learning that the enemy had the
use of high-end Russian electronic surveillance. I
would see the wooden-and-brass boxes and their
spools of black wire stretching through trenches
up and down the front.
‘‘Crank it,’’ the press offi cer directed the sol-
dier. ‘‘Now talk.’’ He did a creditable impression
of a radio man making an urgent call to the front
in Stalingrad.
Combat troops get inured to death, but Yaro-
slav’s comrades seemed to me beyond inured,
insensible. The attack on the truck hadn’t slowed
time down, as violence normally does. Time here
felt as though it had slowed long before.Last month, Russia began massing troops on its
border with Ukraine next to Donbas. Putin said
he was responding to Ukrainian provocations and
accused the United States of bringing ‘‘missiles toour home, to the doorstep of our home.’’ There
have long been NATO missiles in Ukraine, and
he wasn’t specifi c, though he probably had in
mind the Javelin anti-tank missiles sent in the fall
by the United States, which has been aiding the
Ukrainian military since the war’s start. Putin’s
defense minister, Sergei Shoigu , claimed Rus-
sia had proof that American mercenaries were
delivering chemical weapons to Donbas in tanks.
NATO cautioned that military action by Russia
would ‘‘carry a heavy price,’’ and the Biden admin-
istration threatened a new regime of sanctions.
Diplomats and journalists warned of a possi-
ble invasion. Their worries were amplifi ed when
Russia sent troops into Kazakhstan during the
fi rst week of January to put down protests. But
Putin’s saber-rattling at Ukraine, like the missiles,
isn’t new. This is Russia’s second buildup in a year
and only the latest in a series of feints since the
war in Donbas began. It appears to be part of
Russia’s larger pursuit, in Ukraine and elsewhere
in the region, of hybrid warfare: the furthering of
political aims through a mixture of military action,
sponsored insurgency, cyber war and misinfor-
mation, a strategy it refi ned in Ukraine in 2014.
But the war in Donbas is hybrid in another
sense. It is both an invasion and a secession, anPhotograph by Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum, for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 27
Volodymyr Veryovka at a
military hospital in Kyiv.
Opening pages: On the front
line near Mariinka, Ukraine.