In and around Kyiv, war has become part of daily life, even as the public grows weary of its costs.
By Keith Gessen
October 12, 2024
The New Yorker
When I went to Ukraine, in late March of 2022, Kyiv was under siege. Kharkiv and Mariupol were being pummelled. Millions of people were on the move: from the east to Kyiv, from Kyiv to Lviv, from Lviv to Poland and beyond. The war was everywhere.
On a recent trip to Kyiv, I found that the city had gone back to something like its former existence. Some people had returned, and many who fled the fighting in the east had settled in the capital. The city’s parks and bars and sidewalk cafés were full of life. The streets were clogged with traffic. The war was grinding on, brutally, in the east, but, if it weren’t for the billboards urging people to sign up for the Ukrainian Army, the striking lack of men of draft age on the street, and the very occasional air-raid siren (which everyone ignored), you would hardly have been able to tell.
In the news, two opposite developments on the battlefield were vying for people’s attention. In early August, Ukrainian forces had overrun Russian border troops, entered the Kursk region, and proceeded another ten kilometres. At the same time, in eastern Ukraine, Russian forces were rapidly advancing, threatening to capture the city of Pokrovsk. Ukraine could make progress in Kursk because Russia refused to relocate its best forces there; Russia could make progress in the Donbas because Ukraine had sent some of its best fighters into Kursk. Who benefitted from this trade-off? It was too soon to tell. Military analysts warned that Ukraine, which had fewer men and munitions, could not win by extending the front line, but political analysts argued that the blow to Putin’s reputation should not be underestimated. The only way to win the war would be to demoralize the enemy. What could be more demoralizing than this?
My friend Leonid Shvets, a journalist based in Kyiv, was thrilled by the audacity of the Kursk offensive. President Volodymyr Zelensky “is a true resource for Ukraine, a country that does not have a lot of resources,” he told me when we met in one of Kyiv’s many parks. “Petro Poroshenko”—Zelensky’s predecessor—“graduate of the international-relations department at the Shevchenko National University, could never have done this. He was always conscious of what you were allowed to do, what you weren’t allowed to do, where the red lines were. Zelensky doesn’t know anything about red lines. And, if he does, he walks right over them.”
Shvets has lived in Kyiv since moving there from Kharkiv, two decades ago. When Russia’s full-scale invasion began, on February 24, 2022, his wife thought that they should get in their car and leave the city. “People thought it was going to be like World War Two,” Shvets said. That is, the capital would be bombarded, but the countryside would be safe. Shvets disagreed: “I thought they’d defend Kyiv to the very last, whereas once you were out of the city you were vulnerable.”
They decided to stay, and Shvets turned out to be right. Life in the capital has been terrifying at times: in the first weeks of the war, when the city was a prime target, and sporadically since then, when Russian missiles have penetrated Kyiv’s staunch air defenses. But the worst of the fighting took place early on, in the suburban communities near the city’s northwest outskirts—Irpin, Hostomel, Borodyanka, and Bucha.
Among the people trapped in those suburbs was a graduate student in anthropology named Evheny Osievsky. He studied cargo cults in Vanuatu, though his inaugural trip there, for which he’d been saving up for years, had been delayed by the COVID pandemic. Then came the invasion. Osievsky was living in a student dormitory in Vorzel, a suburb near Irpin. It was not safe to go out, so, for two weeks, Osievsky, along with some thirty other people and six cats, stayed put. “War, it turns out, comes in shades and degrees,” Osievsky later wrote for the small leftist magazine Spilne, or “Commons.” He went on:
You go to sleep in the evening still reading about military clashes in the news; hear distant explosions the next day; feel the window panes shaking for the first time; realize that the place you have been calling home for the last seven years is surrounded by invaders; see the columns of enemy tanks from the window of your room; and end up under mortar shelling. All of this is war. Its comparatives and superlatives bleed into each other, what may have once seemed like a watershed moment becomes routine. You can sleep under artillery fire, you can read under artillery fire, you can do chores under artillery fire.
Osievsky, during his siege, read a lot of sociology and anthropology. The most relevant book turned out to be David Graeber’s “Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology,” which pointed to the many communities throughout human history that were organized along egalitarian and even anarchist principles. Selfishness and greed were not innate to humans, Graeber wrote, but the products of a specific historical process known as capitalism.
After spending two weeks in a spontaneously formed commune, Osievsky was able to make some modifications to this theory. It really was the case, he wrote, that people self-organized. Some cooked, some cleaned, and some (refugees from the Donbas, in particular, who had been through war before) taught everyone what to do during shelling. At the same time, Osievsky was sad to note, “A number of people—doubtless a minority, but a statistically significant one—did not choose any role and, it appeared, had no problem whatsoever with that. Moreover, even among the actively engaged, the measure of effort put into the common cause varied widely.” Familiar patterns from prewar life reëmerged: “Even though both sexes participated equally in the preparation of food, it was girls and women who nearly always washed the dishes.” The war had brought out the best in people, but also the average and the worst; in Osievsky, it brought out a wry, engaged, and subtle observer of the human condition. Life, he noted, had gone on even under shelling—“if not exactly uninterrupted, then at least untamed. During the time of isolation, a new couple emerged in our shelter (in defiance of a two-week-long absence of a shower).” And fifteen children were born in the maternity hospital down the street.
Once he got out from under occupation—he and other dormitory residents were evacuated in mid-March—Osievsky tried to join the Army. According to his best friend, Iaroslav Kovalchuk,
a graduate student in history and an editor at Spilne, he did it out of a sense that the burden of the war should be shared equally—most of the soldiers have been working-class men and farmers—and that it needed to be fought. In the late spring of 2022, Kovalchuk recalled, he and Osievsky had had an argument about Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” in which a Mossad agent is tasked with hunting down the Palestinian militants who murdered eleven Israeli athletes during the 1972 Summer Olympics. For Kovalchuk, the lesson of the film was that vengeance was an empty game. You killed the terrorists, whose relatives sought revenge, for which you then sought revenge, forever. But Osievsky disagreed. The people who perpetrated the massacres at Bucha, for example, had to be punished. It was the right thing to do.
A skinny graduate student with no military training, Osievsky was at first turned down by the Army; then, in November, 2022, he was called up. He spent a month training in Britain, and a couple more months in Ukraine, and then was sent to the front. His fellow-soldiers gave him the call sign Vegan.
On his Facebook page, on the first anniversary of the Russian invasion, he wrote an open letter of sorts to people who wondered why he had enlisted:
I have no doubt that when people say, “Someone like you has no place in war,” or, “Let others do the fighting,” they mean it as a compliment, maybe even an expression of support. I do not need such support. It assumes that writing articles or programs, or over-using the word “discourse” . . . is a higher, more elite . . . type of activity than “simply” going to protect one’s family and city, “only” to lose half your arm, “only” to become red foam on the tracks of an enemy tank. People are not divided into varieties and breeds. People here share napkins, bread, cartridges, water, power for their phones, gloves, socks, body heat. I call these people my brothers.
Osievsky was in the Army for six months. In late February of 2023, he was sent to Bakhmut to help with the defense of the doomed city. Though terrified, he fought bravely, assuming command of a group of men after their officer was wounded. Afterward, the Army asked him to attend officer-training school. It would have been an opportunity to get away from the front, but Osievsky was a person who rejected hierarchies, and he refused. On May 19, 2023, he posted a photo of himself with a beard. Two days later, a shell landed in his trench and detonated, tearing off his leg. Because the area was under bombardment, it took an entire day to retrieve him. By then, Osievsky had bled to death. He was twenty-nine years old.
Spend a little more time in Kyiv and you start noticing the memorials. On Maidan, the central square downtown—formerly the scene of protests to overthrow corrupt regimes—thousands of small Ukrainian flags have been planted in memory of soldiers who’ve fallen in the fight against the Russian invasion. Up the hill, along the walls of St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, there is a slightly older memorial with photos of Ukrainian soldiers who died in the separatist conflict in the Donbas, which began in 2014. Next to this, people have been placing photographs of soldiers who’ve died since February 24, 2022. In the eight years of war before the full-scale invasion, about four thousand Ukrainian soldiers lost their lives; in the two and a half years since, the number of war dead is thought to be closer to eighty thousand.
The National Museum of the History of Ukraine, nearby, closed on the morning of the invasion. There were no clear instructions from the Ministry of Culture on what to do, so the curators decided to pack up the collection in case Russian troops reached the capital. The city was under curfew; as a result, about twenty employees lived inside the museum while they sorted its nearly eight hundred thousand artifacts into crates. Many objects were spirited away to a safe location. But now the museum needed to be filled with something else.
Anton Bohdalov, the head of the museum’s department on the history of independent Ukraine, was one of the employees who’d done the packing. As soon as the suburbs around Kyiv were liberated, he and a few researchers drove out to them. In Bucha, Bohdalov saw a headless body that had not yet been buried. He saw ruins. He was particularly struck by what had become of Borodyanka, where high-rise apartment blocks had been subjected to Russian bombardment. Entire sections of buildings were missing. Bohdalov and his colleagues began collecting artifacts—a child’s scooter with part of the baseboard torn off, an improvised white flag of surrender mounted atop a granny cart. They found plenty of interesting materials left behind by Russian troops: bottles of faux-fancy alcohol and printed instructions on how to engage in psychological warfare against the local population. Those artifacts now make up a small exhibit on the first floor of the museum. Other exhibits feature photographs and life stories of the defenders of the Azovstal factory, in Mariupol, and weapons from the current war—along with combat gear used by employees of the museum who have joined the fight.
For Bohdalov, a former schoolteacher, creating a record of the war is important for future generations, but also for people in the present: foreign delegations who come to the city and Ukrainians from parts of the country that have not been as affected by the war. But the omnipresent memorialization feels, too, like a reminder to people in Kyiv. Bohdalov said he had himself become inured to the constant air-raid alerts. “It’s hard to explain to people from other places,” he said, but war had simply become part of everyday life. Volunteer-run Telegram channels told you, in real time, the nature of incoming projectiles, and people had become unwilling experts in them. Shaheds—kamikaze drones Russia had bought by the thousands from Iran—were always shot down. North Korean missiles were still being figured out by air defenses. The occasional hypersonic missile was terrifying. Bohdalov’s wife and children had gone abroad after the invasion, but they’re now back to living in Kyiv. He offered that, when there was a serious air-raid alert, he and his wife would at least get their kids into the bathtub.
The war is being fought in part to defend Ukraine’s decision to integrate with Europe, but it’s also estranging Ukrainians from the countries they wish to join. At a poetry reading at the Kupidon café, in downtown Kyiv, I met a young human-rights worker named Daria Danova, from Melitopol, in occupied southeastern Ukraine. For the past year, Danova has been going around the country for a group called the Educational Human Rights House Chernihiv, gathering evidence of Russian war crimes for an eventual hearing in The Hague. She recently travelled to the Netherlands—her first ever trip out of Ukraine—to present her findings to European parliamentarians and the Helsinki Commission on human rights. Danova found the experience unsettling. “It was surreal,” she said. “I was telling them about people tortured in basements, about people shot by the Russians, and they were asking me about peace talks. ‘When will you
hug your Russian brother?’” During breakfast at her hotel in The Hague, the air-raid-warning app on her phone started blaring loudly. Kyiv was under attack, but Danova was not in Kyiv. She fumbled for her phone and shut it off.
Almost no one in Kyiv was talking about peace. For Shvets, the concept was anathema after Bucha: “Someone kills your children and then you sign a peace agreement with them? Putin has broken every agreement he ever signed.” He was concerned about the Russian advances in the east and described new methods on the front lines: the Russians were moving in smaller groups and engaging more frequently in close combat. His hope was that their army would run out of men before the Ukrainian one did. After all, one was fighting for its life and for freedom, the other for money and lies. He pointed to the increasingly generous contracts being offered to Russian soldiers. They were an indication, perhaps, that Russians were less and less willing to fight.
Zelensky was just then meeting in Kyiv with India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, to discuss Modi’s peace initiative, and would soon travel to the United States to visit the United Nations and meet with American political leaders. He was going to present a “victory plan” to President Biden, which includes requests for NATO membership and a sustained supply of advanced weapons. The plan was intended to show Western allies that the war could be brought to an end if they gave Ukraine the support it needed. But it also had a domestic audience. In the past year, the number of Ukrainians open to negotiations has grown; a poll in July found that forty-four per cent of Ukrainians supported formal peace talks with Russia, up from just twenty-three per cent in May of 2023. At the same time, most of those polled were not willing to make any territorial concessions to Russia, and an overwhelming majority rejected the maximalist terms that Putin has set as a precondition for talks. People are, in other words, of two minds. They do not want the war to go on, but they see no way, for now, to end it.
On Independence Day, the thirty-third anniversary of the Ukrainian Supreme Rada’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union, I took a walk around old Kyiv with Aksinya Kurina, a film critic and producer. A lifelong resident of the city who writes frequently about its history and architecture, Kurina felt deeply alienated from the surge of militant patriotism the war had engendered. She hated the new cultural politics that sought to erase anything Russian, and was especially concerned about the Russian language. After many years during which the country had, in effect, two main languages, the situation has been changing rapidly. Ukrainian is now more common than Russian on the streets of Kyiv, and it is now considered unacceptable (and in many cases in violation of the country’s language laws) to conduct public business in Russian.
To Kurina, this represents an injustice. She can write in Ukrainian but does not feel comfortable doing public speaking in it. “But Zelensky learned Ukrainian,” I objected. (After a long career as a Russian-language actor and comedian, he switched to speaking Ukrainian in public when he became a Presidential candidate, in 2019.) Kurina found this irrelevant. “Zelensky thinks that, because he learned Ukrainian, everyone can,” she said. But there are many people older than Zelensky, or less linguistically gifted, who cannot.
Kurina didn’t just hate the cultural politics of the war; she hated the war itself. Her boyfriend at the time of the invasion went off to fight and was wounded. So did many other friends and acquaintances. “It’s this emotional outburst,” she said. “It’s also collective suicide. We are running out of Ukrainians.” Those who went to the front lines were going to their deaths. “Some people would rather die than be humiliated,” Kurina said. “But there are also mothers who want to raise their children and live.” Kurina and her elderly mother live in an apartment on the seventh floor of a high-rise building; though missiles did not often make it through to Kyiv itself, they had been effective at damaging much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, and Kurina was not looking forward to another winter with uncertain electricity and heat.
We were walking through Vladimiro Kalva, a hillside park with views of the Dnipro River. It was a quiet summer evening, and young people went by in groups or pairs. Occasionally, you could spot someone in camouflage or, more tellingly, with the deep tan that marks people who have spent weeks on end in a trench. There were also men in casts, or on crutches, or simply limping along.
Ukraine is facing a severe demographic crisis. There are the soldiers killed in battle, and the civilian victims of war. There are the six million people who have left the country—for Europe, mostly, but also for Russia—and the three million or more who are living under Russian occupation, with unclear prospects for returning to Ukraine. Finally, there are the children who have not been born—in some cases because family members were killed or separated (most of the people who’ve fled to Europe are women and children), and in others because, understandably, this does not seem like a great time to have a kid. Until recently, men under twenty-seven were exempt from the draft, in part because the government wanted them to have children.
In her opposition to further fighting, and her adamance about Russian, Kurina is, publicly, in a small minority. But, beneath the displays of loyalty and fervor, there is a lot of fatigue and dissatisfaction with the war. Earlier in the day, I had seen a group of women on the steps in front of the Independence Monument, on Maidan. Each of them held a handwritten placard. “You will not win the war on the shoulders of the first volunteers,” one of them read. Several others demanded “clear terms of service.” The women were the wives and mothers of soldiers who had gone to serve in the military in the first months of the war and were still there, more than two years later. The Army had failed to define the length of their service, and they couldn’t leave. Nor was the Army doing enough, the women thought, to recruit others. Yaroslava, who is thirty-six and declined to give her last name, said that her daughter, who is seven, had hardly seen her father in two years. All of her friends in school have fathers at home. “It’s crushing her little soul,” she said.
“My husband has done his part,” a woman named Olga, who is also thirty-six, said. She was not advocating for an end to the war—far from it. It was a just war, and she was proud of her husband, a computer programmer, for fighting in it. But enough was enough. She and her husband were expecting a baby. She wanted him back before the child was born. She gestured to the couples strolling along Maidan on a sunny Saturday afternoon. There weren’t many, but there were some. “I want to be like them,” Olga said. “I want their men to replace our men.”