When the Hospitallers asked whether anyone else was living in her house, she said that she was alone.
“You know who will be in your house?” August said. “The Russians, that’s who. What will you do then?”
The woman was unmoved: “I’m eighty-two years old. I hope you live as long as me.”
Her friend was already gone. More vehicles were pulling up. “Bring her back,” August told the driver. “We have other people to help.”
The van turned again toward the rising smoke plumes.
Most Ukrainians who signed up during the first days of the general mobilization were assigned to the Territorial Defense Forces, a kind of national reserve. It was soon at capacity and turning people away. A middle-aged physiotherapist at St. Michael’s told me that he had waited all night in the lobby of a conscription office before being sent home. He joined the Hospitallers instead. Others banded together in ad-hoc collectives, assembling Molotov cocktails, sewing camouflage nets, building fortifications, and preparing and delivering food. One day in Kyiv, I met a young bar manager who belonged to a network of about two hundred former restaurant workers—cooks, waiters, baristas—who made thousands of meals a day for Army units and for civilians marooned in their homes. The military lacked sufficient body armor, and as the war dragged on the bar manager began paying a metal fabricator, using his personal savings, to cut steel-plate inserts for bulletproof vests.
Some troops were also in urgent need of basic medical equipment. At St. Michael’s, Anastasia spent hours assembling individual first-aid kits for infantry units: pouches containing pressure bandages, tourniquets, trauma shears, emergency blankets, hemostatic gauze, and chest-wound seals. These products had been either sent by European donors or purchased by the Hospitallers. More ambulances were acquired similarly, their stencilled lettering indicating their provenance: “ambulanza,” “ambulancia,” “ambulans.”
Anya, the ex-girlfriend of August’s who had given him the lucky ribbon, was in charge of fund-raising. She’d been studying the violin at the Kyiv Conservatory when the Revolution of Dignity started; a policeman had broken her hand at Independence Square. “I’d spent my whole life, since I was four years old, playing all day,” she told me. The injury had put an end to her musical career. A year later, she’d volunteered to fight in the Donbas.
To raise money, Anya marshalled her contacts in the Ukrainian diaspora and solicited contributions on social media. One day, after helping to acquire five thousand tourniquets from a Swiss manufacturer, she told me, “There are no more tourniquets in Switzerland!”
As the fighting continued on the outskirts of the capital, the Hospitallers set about establishing several “stabilization points.” At these forward positions, wounded soldiers and civilians could receive initial treatment—mainly hemorrhage control and intravenous therapy—before being evacuated to primary-care facilities in Kyiv. In the first week of March, I went with August and Orest to the edge of a neighborhood called Horenka, where the Hospitallers were scouting out a location for a new stabilization point. Horenka, which bordered Bucha to the east, was the scene of fierce Russian shelling—on our way, as we passed Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles, a mortar exploded on the road ahead of us, rocking the ambulance and obliging us to turn back for a while. It was dark when we finally reached our destination, and bright trails streaked across the night sky. Rockets launched by the Ukrainians flashed in the woods. We linked up with a Territorial Defense unit that had occupied an abandoned children’s sanatorium. The volunteers did not look particularly impressive—they were older, and some of them were out of shape—but they told me that they had been preparing for this moment for seven years.
The men belonged to a “civilian sniper club” that had formed in 2015. In anticipation of an expansion of the war in the Donbas, they had gathered on weekends to practice marksmanship, outdoor skills, combat medicine, and even “tactical alpinism.” (A sudden urban assault might require them to rappel from their apartment buildings.) They did not know one another’s names—or any other identifying details. When I expressed surprise at this, an ungainly man in a black turtleneck replied, “It’s easy for me, because I come from the gamer society.”
I recognized these men. Of course, the difference between them and their American analogues—preppers, survivalists, militia members—was that the dreaded scenario they had envisaged was not a lurid fantasy. As the gamer in the turtleneck told me, “We woke up on February 24th and said, ‘O.K., it’s here. It’s happening.’ ”
There were some similar types in the Hospitallers. When we got back to St. Michael’s, a new arrival, with a goatee, wire-framed glasses, and short-cropped hair, was unpacking a vast trove of tactical apparel—some of it still shrink-wrapped and marked with price tags—onto a mattress next to mine. He was from Kyiv but lived in Alberta and was code-named Canada. After doing a tour in the Donbas, in 2016, he’d realized: “It can happen anywhere.” He had a business salvaging and reselling used winter tires, but he devoted much of his time and money to his “project.” In Alberta, he had a dozen guns, a thousand rounds of ammunition, plastic containers stocked with food, and a beloved “patrol truck”—an S.U.V. that he had customized with a sixteen-thousand-pound winch, roll bars, and a rifle rack. He was saving up for portable solar panels; when things fell apart, he planned to strike out for the wilderness with his wife and live off the land.
Had we met in North America, I likely would have seen Canada’s world view as paranoid and apocalyptic. In Ukraine, though, it was harder to dismiss: many analysts were speculating that Russia might deploy a nuclear weapon. Russian soldiers had attacked a nuclear power plant in Zaporizhzhia, causing a fire. Some of the forces targeting Kyiv had entered the country through the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, churning up contaminated soil and digging trenches in a lethally radioactive forest.
Canada’s wife was also Ukrainian. Her parents and brother lived in Mariupol, which had no electricity, heat, or water, and was running out of food. The day after I met Canada, Russian aircraft bombed a maternity hospital in the city. His in-laws weren’t answering their phones.
The situation in Mariupol was uniquely grim, but the Russians were targeting civilian areas and infrastructure across Ukraine, most notably in Kharkiv, three hundred miles to the east of Kyiv. On March 16th, I went there with a few photographers. Shelling had laid waste to several square blocks downtown. Offices, shops, restaurants, cafés, university buildings, and an iconic pub named after Ernest Hemingway were in ruins, some encased in ice from broken pipes. An enormous crater yawned outside the regional administrative headquarters, a six-story monolith that had partially withstood the blast. A second missile had destroyed a kitchen in the basement, killing several women. The top of a skull lay nearby. Firefighters with shovels were still digging through the rubble, searching for bodies. A Territorial Defense soldier, code-named I.T., said that twenty-four corpses had already been retrieved. I.T., who had been inside the building during the strike, told me, “I should be dead.” He’d worked as a computer engineer in Kharkiv before the war, and he shared Anastasia’s astonishment at the sudden onset of havoc. “Two weeks ago, I was arguing with my wife, telling her I was bored with my life,” he recalled, with rueful irony. Looking around at the collapsed buildings, the charred husks of vehicles, and the mountains of wreckage, he seemed unable to process it all. “I feel like I’m in a video game,” he said.
An hour later, a market a few miles east of us was shelled. I went there and found firefighters hosing down a burning complex of outdoor stalls. Nothing that might have been mistaken as a military target was anywhere in sight. I was filming the damage when another mortar landed, a short distance away from me. The blast and shrapnel wounded a woman who, bleeding from her abdomen, was quickly loaded into an ambulance. Such “double-tap” strikes had been common in Syria, where Russia and the Assad regime had systematically targeted first responders to demoralize the population and terrorize it into submission.
The same strategy was clearly being employed in Ukraine. That day, the Russians also bombed a theatre in Mariupol where civilians were sheltering. “CHILDREN” had been painted in Russian, in huge white letters, over the parking lot. Hundreds reportedly died. The next afternoon, in Kharkiv, one of Eastern Europe’s biggest markets was shelled. Thousands of people had worked there before the war. A raging inferno consumed the complex, and tar-black smoke darkened the sky.
The following morning, I was eating breakfast in the lobby of our hotel when a huge explosion shook the building. Its glass façade warped in and out as we all jumped from our chairs. The target had been a government academy for civil-service employees. It wasn’t far, and we arrived there at the same time as a team of rescuers. A whole section of the institution had been reduced to smashed slabs of concrete, bent I-beams, and twisted rebar. A dead man lay next to the building. Another man, caked with dust, was climbing out of a ground-floor window.
Nearby, a firefighter, in a white helmet and flame-retardant coveralls, heard shouts emanating from a narrow crevice. “Can you hear me?” he yelled. “Do you have air to breathe?” Another rescuer pointed a few feet away. “He’s somewhere down here!”
A Territorial Defense soldier who belonged to the same unit as the trapped man managed to reach him on his cell phone. He’d been brushing his teeth, in a bathroom below street level, when the building came down. The soldier gave his phone to the firefighter, who asked the trapped man, “What’s your name? Are you standing or sitting?” He then instructed him, “Go to a load-bearing wall, an exterior wall. Sit next to it and pull your knees to your chest.”
“We have to lift the debris piece by piece,” someone announced. Climbing on top of the rubble, the rescuers took turns with sledgehammers and power saws. A crane was sent for. No sooner had it arrived than a soldier yelled at us to vacate the area—another attack was expected. Everyone started running. Firefighters, searching for cover, struggled to kick down the locked door of a building across the street; a man with a crowbar tried and failed to pry it open. The second strike never came, and eventually the rescuers resumed their work, using the crane to pull away furniture-size chunks of concrete. It was getting late, and we decided to head back toward Kyiv.
On our way, we stopped in a small town whose secondary school had been levelled by a Russian air strike the previous morning. In the yard, a group of teachers surveyed the wreckage. “I heard a plane, and then an explosion,” Yaroslava, an English teacher who’d once been a student at the school, told me. She said that there were no Ukrainian soldiers in the vicinity. Some of the teachers were sifting through a demolished classroom. “We’re saving what we can,” Yaroslava said.
I later learned that the man trapped beneath the government academy had been successfully extracted. A Hospitaller from Kharkiv knew him, and showed me a video on his phone of the man walking away from the rubble, eight hours after being buried alive. In the clip, blood splotches his face and jacket. Someone asks him how he’s feeling. “Better than ever,” he answers. “But I could use a cigarette.”
When I rejoined the Hospitallers at St. Michael’s Monastery, on March 20th, their fleet of ambulances had grown from four to more than a dozen. Each vehicle had been spray-painted dark green, and black tape covered their tail-lights. Anastasia was heading to a stabilization point in an abandoned maternity hospital a few blocks from the sanatorium where I’d met the civilian snipers. The fighting had dramatically escalated across the northern suburbs. The medics being relieved by Anastasia’s team had just treated twenty-two soldiers wounded by shelling. All had survived.
The other four Hospitallers in Anastasia’s ambulance were old friends who ran an N.G.O. called the Veteran Hub. One of them, a former military psychologist code-named Artem, had co-founded the organization, in 2018, to provide counselling and employment assistance for veterans of the Donbas. Mamont, the ambulance’s rifleman, had met Artem while seeking help himself, after a Russian mortar left him with a brain injury and a disabled right hand. (He could still shoot with his left.) For years, the vast majority of Ukrainians had been insulated from the conflict with Russia in the east; much of Artem and Mamont’s work had focussed on helping veterans re-integrate into a society from which they’d come to feel estranged. That would no longer be necessary. Artem, foreseeing a nationwide mental-health crisis, told me, “We’re going to have a lot to do when this is over.” The Veteran Hub had already opened a psychological-support hotline, available for traumatized civilians and relatives of soldiers.
Outside the maternity hospital, there was a statue of a stork, a bundled baby dangling from its beak. An artillery shell had lodged in the pavement; shrapnel had pocked the hospital’s walls and shattered its windows. The ranking Hospitaller was a fifty-two-year-old neurosurgeon code-named Yuzik. A grenade in the Donbas had given him a limp. He walked with a cane and wore a lanyard from which dangled a wooden crucifix and a miniature handgun. Yuzik showed us an examination room that he’d converted into an emergency first-aid station. In a lobby lined with photographs of infants, heart-shaped balloons were still filled with helium; on February 26th, when the Russians first shelled Horenka, six women had given birth in the basement.
During the three days that we stayed at the maternity hospital, the Ukrainians mounted a strenuous counter-offensive across the northern suburbs. Armored vehicles raced up and down the street, and Ukrainian artillery thundered until dawn; in response, Russian ordnance pounded our immediate surroundings. One Russian rocket tore through the tiled roof of a house adjacent to the hospital. Others whistled overhead or crashed into the ground close enough to send even Mamont running down the stairs.