Nevertheless, Svitlana was set on staying in Kyivat least she was until Russian forces began firing Grad rockets at seemingly random apartment blocks, a terror tactic she experienced in Luhansk. Its a matter of principle, she said. I simply dont want to live under the rule of occupiers. I did not invite them here. I dont need them to save me. I asked if she and her daughter managed to find any small moments of pleasure these days. Were happy when we hear about new sanctions and killed Russian soldiers, she said.
One day in Kyiv, I visited a donation center set up for the Ukrainian Army in a warren of rooms attached to the national military hospital. Boots, jackets, canned fruit, instant noodles, toilet paper, and medical supplies teetered in towering stacks. Every few minutes, someone came by to drop off more goods. They were accepted by Yulia Nizhnik-Zaichenko, who trained as a makeup artist before organizing aid supplies in the early days of the Donbas war. Back then, she had stood near the checkout counters of grocery stores, asking those in line to donate food and other supplies to be sent to the front. The air of improvisation and solidarity remained. We can barely keep up, she told me. Accept, give, accept, give, accept, giveand sometimes hide in the basement when the sirens go off.
A few minutes later, we heard the unmistakable warning of an air raid. Volunteers who had been sorting supplies hastened inside and closed the steel door. I sat on a couch next to Nizhnik-Zaichenko, listening to the muffled booms. Of course this is scary, she said. During the Donbas war, we didnt have to worry about missiles or heavy artillery reaching the city. She could finish her volunteer work and go home for a shower and a quiet nights sleep. Now there is no such peaceful place, she said. She felt Kyiv emptying out. The scariest thing to imagine is Russian rule in Kyiv, making us submit to them as if were just another region in the Russian Federation. Thats the only thing that could make me consider leavingif I manage to survive, of course.
Putin, after more than twenty years in power, seems to have committed a grave error of projection. The Russian state he has built is a vertical machine, distant from those it rules, and responsive to those at the top. Ukraine is home to a messy, vibrant society, with years of experience in horizontal organization. I found myself mystified, as did just about anyone I spoke to in Kyiv, about what Putin thought would happen even if he seized the capital and unseated Zelensky. Did he expect people to just go along with it?
The sense of purpose and solidarity among Ukrainians was in sharp contrast to the apparently demoralized state of many of the Russian soldiers sent into the fight. From interrogations of those who had been captured, a common theme emerged; namely, none of their commanding officers bothered to explain the purpose of their mission. Perhaps because no one had told them, either. Reports surfaced of Russian soldiers abandoning their tanks and armored vehicles and walking into the woods. At a press conference in Kyiv, a man described as a captured Russian officer, addressing the Ukrainian people, said, If you can find it in yourself to forgive us, please do. If not, God, well, well accept that, as we should.
Billboards around Kyiv castigated the Russian troops. Russian soldier, stop! How can you look your children in the eye! one read. Another admonished, Dont take a life on behalf of Putin! Return home with a clean conscience. Some were still more blunt: Russian soldier, go fuck yourself! Though addressed to the invading forces, the taglines seemed to boost morale among the Ukrainians themselves. The billboards were also a testament to the fratricidal nature of the war. In land invasions, the aggressor rarely shares a language, not to mention a culture and a history, with the defending side.
As the days wore on, soldiers guarding the checkpoints became less jittery. Shops were restocked with food, and the lines shrank considerably. The streets were cleaned; even trash pickup started again. Andrii Hrushchynskyi, the head of Kyivspetstrans, the firm responsible for collecting seventy per cent of the citys refuse, told me that sixteen of the companys thirty trucks were in service. (Several of the others were positioned as roadblocks at major entrances to the city.) His main problem was losing employees to the Army or the Territorial Defense Forces. My guys want to rush into battle, Hrushchynskyi said. I tell them that anyone can stand at a checkpoint with a gun, but collecting trash isnt for everybody.
Later that day, I stopped by Dubler, a stylish caf co-owned by a local architect named Slava Balbek. It had been closed for days, but I found a dozen young people seated around a long wooden table finishing a late breakfast. Balbek was conducting a planning meeting with volunteers. He had turned the caf into a nonprofit kitchen and delivery hub, sending meals to Territorial Defense units, hospitals, and anyone else left behind. I went straightaway to my local military-recruitment depot, but they told me they were already fullin the first ten days of the war, a hundred thousand people reportedly enlisted in the volunteer forcesso I thought, O.K., how else can I be helpful, Balbek, who is thirty-eight, and an amateur triathlete, told me. Im a good trouble-shooter, and if you leave out the particular horrors of war, this is basically organizational work. You need strong nerves and cold reason.
Balbek receives calls all the time: a restaurant owner phoned to say he had three hundred kilograms of food to donate if someone could pick it up; another contact was able to provide thousands of plastic takeout containers. Balbek and his team are now delivering ten thousand meals a day. In any organization, the most important thing is a shared idea, he said. And if nothing else we have thata common enemy and a need to help defeat it.
A crude military logic underpinned Putins decision to invade. He and the paranoid coterie of security officials around him believed that Ukraine had become the instrument of an ever-expanding West. Even if Ukraine didnt formally join NATO, it was receiving weapons and military training from NATO countries. With time, perhaps this support could amount to a kind of backdoor NATO membership. If Putin saw U.S. missile-defense systems in Poland and Romania as a danger, the prospect of them in Ukraine may have felt existential. Better to strike while Russia retained the military advantage, and use that force to refashion Ukraines politicsand foreign policyto accord with his vision of Russias security interests.
But there was also an element of historical messianism in Putins thinking, a pseudo-philosophical strain that ran far deeper than concerns over Western armaments. In July, he published a six-thousand-word treatise in which he proclaimed Russians and Ukrainians to be one people, but with a clear hierarchy: Ukraines rightful place was under the protection and imperial care of Russia, not led astraypolitically, militarily, culturallyby the West. I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia, he wrote. Only by acting now to rejoin the two peoples, as they were meant to be, could Putin preventUkraine from becoming irreparably European or even, for that matter, Ukrainian. Because once that happened it would be too late: Russia would indeed be occupying a foreign land.
The indiscriminate bombing of Ukrainian cities, unsurprisingly, achieved the opposite effect. Residential districts in Kharkiv were hit with cluster munitions, killing people as they walked home from the grocery store. In Chernihiv, a Russian plane dropped a series of unguided aerial bombsincluding one that weighed an estimated thousand poundskilling at least forty-seven. On March 9th, a Russian air strike in Mariupol, a city with a predominantly Russian-speaking population, demolished a hospitals maternity ward, leaving pregnant women to scramble out of the burnt wreckage. Its brutal, Zagorodnyuk said. They want to create panic and terror, to demoralize the population and break their will to fight. But that wont work with Ukrainians.
The question, then, is how much longer Putin can continue the campaign. For all the inefficiencies and outright bumbling of the first two weeks, Russia, with an annual military budget more than seven times larger than Ukraines, enjoys a formidable advantage in terms of brute military might. Ukraine, for its part, has lost ground in the south and east of the country, but managed to hold off the bulk of Russias invasion force. It has relied on a combination of battle-hardened troops who have been fighting since 2014, antitank and anti-aircraft missiles supplied by the West, and, perhaps no less important, the moral determination to expel an invading force.
The spirit of the countrys resistance has been exemplified by its President. Before the war began, Zelensky was struggling. His inability to uproot corruption and government inefficiency, and his failure to resolve the conflict in the east, had eroded his popularity. But once the war began he called on his experience as an actor, revealed a deft feel for the national psyche, and attained almost mythic status. In a series of short, defiant speeches that quickly went viral on social media, he appeared at once approachableunshaven, in olive-green T-shirts and warmup jackets, carrying his own chair into a press conferenceand coolly heroic. With Russia evidently hunting him down (there had reportedly been three foiled assassination attempts on him), his presence in the capital felt imbued with bravery, the opposite of what Putin likely expected.
One popular video began with the camera looking out a window on a nighttime scene in Kyiv. Zelensky came into the frame, walking down a hallway toward his office in the Presidential suite, evidence that he was still in Kyiv, still at work. Im not hiding, and Im not afraid of anyone, he said. The next morning, he stepped outside to enjoy a moment of early spring: Everything is fine. We will overcome. As the Russian campaign turned more grim, so did Zelenskys mood. We will find every bastard who shot at our cities, our people, who bombed our land, who launched rockets, he said, on March 6th. There will be no quiet place on earth for you. Except for the grave.
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What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine - The New Yorker