Ukraine’s Waiting Game
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:
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.
