44 1.23.22
anticipation of Ukraine Independence Day going
on up and down the line, but the day before had
been Russian Air Force Day.
The commander called himself Volodya,
though by now I’d learned that the soldiers gave
journalists fake names as a matter of course. A
23-year-old lieutenant, he aped the imperious-
ness of a middle-aged colonel. Wearing cam-
oufl age mesh leisure pants, a T-shirt stretched
over a bulging gut and a bushy chin-curtain-
style beard, he sat in a folding chair, smoking,
a pack of Parliaments and a cellphone tucked
deep into his groin. I asked if he’d been permit-
ted to fi re back. Though company commanders
were sometimes allowed to return artillery fi re
at will, they often had to wait for approval from
higher up.
‘‘I will not answer this question,’’ he said. ‘‘This
is a painful question.’’ He continued: ‘‘My soldiers
are quite patriotic, war-minded. They want to
fi ght, to protect their turf. They don’t panic. In
fact, they want to move forward and take our
land back. They’re just waiting for the command.’’
‘‘But the command never comes?’’
‘‘How can I say it? They’re not disappointed,
but maybe they want something more.’’
As though to underscore his point, we heard
incoming rockets and the cracks of automatic
rifl e fi re.
I entered the trenchworks, hidden by the
forest, that surrounded Zolote. I spoke with
the young soldiers manning fi re positions and
observation posts. ‘‘In the beginning of the war,
we didn’t stay in one place for more than two
days,’’ one rifl eman told me. He started as a tank
commander. He hadn’t known what was hap-
pening, who was where, everything moving so
fast, but at least he got to fi ght. Now he knew
exactly where the war stood and what was hap-
pening — nothing — and he felt useless. ‘‘You
hardly see anyone. We’re just waiting for some-
thing unknown.’’
The farther into the trenchworks I got, the
further back into history I seemed to go. The
earthen walls were bolstered with thoughtful
wood planking. Men peered over the rim with
antique periscopes. They waited by a hand-crank
fi eld telephone that didn’t ring. One man had a
Japanese revolver from the early 20th century —
a replica, it turned out, but no less anachronous
for that. If it had hired set decorators to recreate
the Western Front in 1915, the army could hardly
have done better.
‘‘It is like the First World War,’’ a tall, gangly
man said, voicing what I was thinking. Having
given up on formal battle dress, he wore a black
hoodie that framed unkempt hair and a left ear-
lobe tattooed with the number 14 — his age when
his grandfather, who raised him, died, he told me.
He had once been fi red with the cause, but now,
he said, ‘‘It’s very boring. I’m just going through
the motions. Sometimes I get depressed. I fold
my arms and want to give up on the war.’’
Misha had given up a lot to get here. He was
Russian and crossed the border to fi ght. Fas-
cinated by war from an early age, he said his
favorite book was ‘‘Storm of Steel,’’ the memoir
of the German World War I hero Ernst Jünger.
In the spring of 2014, when he was 19, Misha
announced that he was going to the front to
volunteer for Ukraine. His father, a veteran of
the Soviet Army, objected. The Ukrainians were
wrong, his father said. Donbas was Russian land.
In fact, all Ukraine was.
Misha disagreed. He believed in self- deter-
mination, and it was obvious to him that Putin
was backing the secessionists in order to enslave
Ukraine. ‘‘Russia is now an empire like any other,
like America,’’ he told me. ‘‘They always colonize
other countries, and the policy is always clear.
To invade, to conquer, to destroy.’’
He has been on the front ever since. He lost
his Russian citizenship and wasn’t able to return
to Russia for his father’s funeral. If he went back,
he would surely be imprisoned. Now a Ukrainian
citizen, he was fed up, but he didn’t know what
else to do. ‘‘I live for war,’’ he said.
I was a bit confused by Misha’s story. You don’t
often meet a Russian obsessed with Ernst Jünger,
an author dear to fascists. But I admired his cour-
age — or I did until I learned later that the 14 on
Misha’s ear was, in fact, a sign of his membership
in C14, a Russian white-supremacist group.
Among the volunteers who had come to
Ukraine’s aid at the beginning of the war were
a number of white supremacists from Russia,
Europe and America. No one knows just how
many. They didn’t dislike Putin so much because
he was an imperialist as because his policies,
they believed, oppressed white people. Ukraine
isn’t particularly known for its racism or even,
any longer, for its anti-Semitism. (President Zel-
ensky is Jewish.) But in 2014, the country was
fi ghting for its life and accepted just about any-
one willing to help. Many had stayed and, like
Misha, been accepted.
‘‘I am for the white race,’’ Misha told my inter-
preter in Russian. Maybe wisely, she waited until
we were out of the trench to translate that.
At the command post, the lieutenant said a
begrudging hello to a woman who was leaving
her home, a few yards away. I asked about his
relations with the villagers.
‘‘Communicating with these people, it’s a
painful topic,’’ he said. They were provincial. All
they knew was mining and drinking. To them,
Lviv, where he was from, was Europe. Many of
them were unpatriotic. ‘‘There are the people
who have always been for Ukraine, and there
are those who voted with the secessionists in the
referendum. They are blind kittens.’’
When the woman, whose name was Maryna,
returned, I greeted her. She invited me inside.Walking into her garden was like entering an
oasis; it was diffi cult to believe we were on a
front. The garden was ripe with melons, apricots
and tomatoes. On a picnic table below the trel-
lises of a small grape arbor, Maryna put out tea
and sweets. She would have put out raspberries
too, she explained, but when she went to pick
them that morning, a rocket landed nearby, and
she went back in the house.
Maryna lived there with her sister-in-law,
Valia, who joined us. The family went back three
generations in Zolote. We got on the subject of
the anniversary of independence. They said they
vividly remembered that heady winter, 30 years
before, when Ukrainians voted to leave the Sovi-
et Union. The two women were for it. Maryna
even helped with the balloting, she said.
‘‘People had hope,’’ Valia said. ‘‘We hoped for
the best. Ukraine is a rich, good country. There is a
lot of everything in Ukraine. But here’s what hap-
pened. As they say, now we have what we have.’’
The war made a bad situation worse. For
months they lived in the root cellar. Maryna’s
father was disabled, and they carried him under-
ground every day.
‘‘We didn’t know who the secessionists were,’’
Maryna said. ‘‘We were all the same, and then
we woke up one morning, and suddenly the
people down the road were secessionists. And
we became God knows who.’’ Now they were
the enemy. ‘‘The soldiers say, ‘You are all seces-
sionists here.’ ’’
They didn’t have the means to move. And even
if they did, where would they go? Maryna uttered
a phrase I heard again and again from people in
Donbas: ‘‘Who needs us?’’
Outside, I found the lieutenant still in his
folding chair, still smoking, stroking his beard,
fl anked by subordinates.
‘‘Did she tell you how she was one of the main
secessionists?’’ he asked. ‘‘Did she mention how
she helped organize the referendum? She was
even tried for it. Great woman.’’ The soldiers
laughed a little too hard. ‘‘Here’s what you do:
Dig a hole, fi ll it with lime, throw all these people
in it. Then take a tractor and cover them over
with earth.’’
Looking at my interpreter, he said, ‘‘Don’t
translate that.’’
When I returned to Zolote the next week,
Maryna was injured. She had been returning
from the home of a neighbor, an old man she
looked after, walking next to a fence, when a
rocket came in. She dropped into a crouch.
Shrapnel tore into her shoulder and back.
I looked at the fence. The fresh holes were at
eye level. If she hadn’t ducked, she’d be dead.Since the beginning of the pandemic, only one
checkpoint has remained consistently open
between Ukraine and the secessionist territo-
ries, in Stanytsia Luhanska, a town about 90
miles northeast of Pisky. It is in the northernmostUkraine
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