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Ukraines Revolution of Dignity began, according to legend, with a Facebook post. In the fall of 2013, after President Viktor Yanukovych backed out of a deal that would have deepened the countrys relationship with the European Union, the investigative journalist Mustafa Nayyem wrote a post calling on people to gather in Independence Square, in the center of Kyiv. After three months of continuous protests, Yanukovych fled to Russia. Ten years later, Independence Square is desolate most days. Kyiv has imposed a midnight curfew. Martial law, in effect since February, 2022, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, forbids mass gatherings. As for Nayyem, he is now the head of the federal agency for reconstruction, which is attempting to rebuild the country as quickly as the Russians are devastating it. On the tenth anniversary of the Revolution of Dignity, this past November, instead of speaking at a rally, Nayyem was scheduled to preside over a different sort of ceremony: the reopening of a bridge that connects Kyiv to the western suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, where, in the first weeks of the war, some of the worst atrocities committed by Russian forces took place.

A few days before the unveiling, I talked with Nayyem in his office. The reconstruction agency occupies part of a stolid late-Soviet government building. Nayyems suite looks as though it was renovated ambitiously but on a budget, with vertical blinds, plastic panelling, and vinyl knockoffs of Le Corbusier couches in the waiting area. On the walls he had hung giant prints of the famous Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photograph and a panoramic view of Manhattan. New York is my favorite city, he explained. And this is as close as Im going to get to it in the foreseeable future.

Nayyem was born in Kabul in 1981, the second year of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. His mother died three years later, after giving birth to his brother, Masi. When Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan, in 1989, Nayyems father, a former government official, moved to Moscow. Two years later, after marrying a Ukrainian woman, he moved the family to Kyiv. Nayyem rose to prominence in his twenties as a crusading journalist, uncovering stories of top-level government graft in Ukraine. Following the Revolution of Dignity, he served in parliament and played a key role in reforming Ukraines notoriously corrupt and violent police force. Before accepting his current job, he was a deputy minister for infrastructure.

The government launched the reconstruction agency last January, with the announcement that eighteen apartment buildings would be restored in Irpin, where an estimated seventy per cent of the civilian infrastructure had been damaged or destroyed. We are all in a rush to give people hope, Nayyem told me. But that obscures the fact that we are a country at war. Our only real goal is to survive. He was about to leave for a gruelling trip, travelling by car to the southern port city of Odesa to look at the damage sustained in recent attacks, and then to liberated territories in the southeast to begin a pilot project in which an entire village is being rebuilt. You go to Kharkiv and realize that a bridge thats been blown up means it takes three extra hours to get from one point to another, Nayyem said. That can mean the difference between life and death.

Nayyems brother, Masi, was injured in combat early in the war, and brought to a hospital in critical condition. The car carrying him travelled over a stretch of highway that was later damaged. It has since been repaired by Nayyems agency. We have to rebuild even if its going to be destroyed again, he said. We have no choice. Its building for the present, not for the future.

A new saying had taken hold in Ukraine: None of us is coming back from this war. People may emigrate or relocate, but the war is here to stay. The saying has a literal meaning, too: of the hundreds of thousands of people who enlisted in the early days of the invasion, only the most severely injured have been granted a discharge. In October, about a hundred protesters defied martial law and gathered in Kyiv to demand a limit on the amount of time a person can be expected to serve. The exact number of people currently on military duty, like the number of casualties and target numbers for conscription, is secret. In August, President Volodymyr Zelensky had fired the heads of all the regional draft offices, so pervasive was corruption in the systemand so high, apparently, the desire to buy ones way out of being conscripted. Nevertheless, officials continue to hand out draft notices. In December, it emerged that the ministry of defense was working on a plan to start drafting Ukrainians living abroad.

Until a few months ago, everyone in Ukraine seemed to know how the war would end: Ukraine would liberate its territory, including Crimea, and this, it was assumed, would burst the Russian propaganda bubble and bring about the collapse of Vladimir Putins regime. But then the long-anticipated Ukrainian counter-offensive, which began last spring, failed to achieve any meaningful breakthroughs. Russia still holds about twenty per cent of what was previously Ukrainian territory. Now, when I asked Nayyem about the end of the war, he said, Im afraid to think about it. He went on, I dont know what it would mean for the war to be over. I think that in my lifetime there will not be a time when I wont fear that war may start again any minute. Because Russia is not going anywhere.

I heard similar notes of weariness from countless others. What are we fighting forland? Katerina Sergatskova, a prominent journalist who started a safety-training program for members of the media, told me. We say that well keep fighting until the Russian empire falls apart. But its not going to fall apart. Denys Kobzin, a sociologist from Kharkiv who is on active military duty, told me that, before the war, he used to attend classes on how to live in the moment. Now Ive spent almost two years living entirely in the present, he said. It eats up all your energy. You cant dream, you cant immerse yourself in memories, you are always a little bit on. This life of total uncertaintyits like you went out for a run but you dont know how far you are running. Sometimes you have to speed up, but mostly you just need to keep breathing.

In November, the former NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who had long tried to help bring about peace negotiations, suggested that NATO might accept a Ukraine that didnt include the territories currently occupied by Russia. Such an arrangement could effectively turn the front line into a border and end the fighting without opening negotiations with the Russians. Nayyem thought the suggestion was reasonableafter all, following the Second World War, West Germany became a NATO member while the East was still occupied by the Soviet Union. You know what was good about the Second World War? Nayyem asked wistfully. It ended!

Cartoon by Amy Kurzweil

As it turned out, Nayyems unveiling ceremony was overshadowed by a different news story. Andriy Odarchenko, a parliament member from Zelenskys party, was detained for allegedly attempting to bribe Nayyem. According to prosecutors, Odarchenko had offered Nayyem an incentive to channel reconstruction funds to a university in Kharkiv that Odarchenko had been selected to head. Nayyem had alerted anti-corruption authorities, who set up a sting. Once it appeared that Odarchenko had secured the funding, Nayyem received about ten thousand dollars in bitcoin as a kickback. Odarchenko was arrested minutes before a scheduled meeting of the parliaments anti-corruption committee, of which he was a member. (He has pleaded innocent.)

Such was the state of Ukraine as it entered its third consecutive winter at war: still battling the demon of corruption, still defiant, yet visibly reduced, palpably tired. Nayyem feared that, if the war went on long enough, Ukraine would become more like Russia: autocratic, corrupt, nihilistic. Russia is Russia because Russia is fighting Nazis, he said, referring to Putins false pretense for the war. And we risk becoming Russia because we are actually fighting Nazis.

It is a commonplace to say that Ukraine is waging a war not only for its survival but for the future of democracy in Europe and beyond. In the meantime, in Ukraine, democracy is largely suspended. According to the regular order of things, Ukraine should have a Presidential election in March. Up until the end of Novembera few weeks before the deadline for scheduling the electionZelenskys office seemed open to having one, but ultimately decided against it. We shouldnt have elections, because elections always create disunity, Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former defense minister who now advises the government, told me. We need to be unified.

An estimated four to six million Ukrainians are living under Russian occupation. At least four million are living in E.U. countries, a million more are living in Russia, and at least half a million are living elsewhere outside of Ukraine. Another four million have been internally displaced. These figures include a significant number of people who became adults after the war began and arent registered to vote. Elections are a public discussion, Oleksandra Romantsova, the executive director of Ukraines Center for Civil Liberties, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, told me. But a third of the population is connected with the military. Another third is displaced. With so many people excluded from the public discussion, what would an election even mean? There is also a more practical problem, Romantsova said: Elections cause people to congregate, and, when Ukrainians congregate, Russia bombs them.

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Ukraine's Democracy in Darkness - The New Yorker

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