The New Yorker/Gessen: A Moment of Excruciating Anticipation in Kyiv

Everyone in Kyiv has a plan. D., a non-profit administrator, will drive six hours to meet her mother and teen-age brother at a spot near their house, and together they will cross over the Dniester River into Moldova. D. is also trying to apply for a carry license. She has a colleague who has dusted off his BB gun.

N., a video producer, her girlfriend, S., and the other adult members of their household—N.’s father and S.’s mother—had a family meeting to discuss their preparations. They rejected the idea of arming themselves, but not before researching options for quickly learning to shoot a gun. (“Who are we kidding?” N. ultimately concluded.) They dismissed the idea of heading west, because they have cats and dogs and they feared that their house would get robbed if they left it unattended. They considered getting an alarm system, but concluded that it would be useless if the police force stopped functioning. They discussed getting two large guard dogs, but they really don’t want that. Finally, they arranged to send N. and S.’s ten-year-old son to stay with friends in Western Europe if the need arose. Then N. set about stocking up. “We will only buy stuff we’re actually going to use this time,” she declared, mindful of the supplies of grain that they stockpiled in 2014, when Russia occupied Crimea, and kept until the grains became infested with pantry moths. Her first priority is to amass reserves of fuel for the car, for the generator, and for heating the house. People have been exchanging recommendations on social media: plastic canisters are acceptable for diesel, they write, but make sure to use metal ones for gasoline. N. has figured out that fancy-looking flat gas canisters designed for motorboats are harder to lift and use than the old-fashioned vertical ones. Fortunately, N.’s father is old enough to remember Soviet-era gasoline shortages and the art of using a hose and a small enema bulb to get the flow going. Finally, N. bought five bottles of vodka—the universal currency of wartime—and piled them into the freezer.

Russian sabre-rattling has been ramping up steadily since this summer. People in Kyiv started getting ready for war several weeks ago. Just before the New Year, a deputy mayor, Andriy Krishchenko, said that residents should pack a “go bag” in case of a Russian attack on the Ukrainian capital. In January, a few Western embassies—those of the U.S., Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom—evacuated some nonessential personnel and diplomats’ families. The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, has appealed to the people of his country to stay calm, and to Western politicians and media to stop spreading panic. On social media, residents of Kyiv have been trading advice on preparing for the next war: withdraw cash and convert it to dollars; make copies of key documents and laminate them to protect them from the elements.

All that supposed know-how angered Lena Samoilenko, a thirty-six-year-old cultural activist in Kyiv. Samoilenko grew up in Antratsyt, which is now part of the Russian-occupied east. On January 22nd, she wrote a Facebook post debunking the very idea that one can prepare for war. “When my town was occupied, the banks were the first to get plundered,” she wrote. “Then medications vanished from the drug stores . . . . Then the doctors left . . . . Many people stayed in town then. My mother’s colleague stayed and was killed in her own apartment; they tortured her for a long time, trying to find out where she hid her retirement payments . . . . Some people were killed on the highway. Someone was killed for his car. Many people faced demands for ransom for their family members. The former mayor was tortured and died. Hundreds of people vanished. Their go bags, their laminated documents, and their survival kits did not protect them.”

I met with Samoilenko at my hotel in Kyiv; she lives outside the city with her husband, the poet Anton Polunin, their two children, who are five and six, and a motley group of out-of-town relatives. She described her home as “a displaced people’s house,” too chaotic for a stranger to be invited in. Antratsyt, which Samoilenko left in her twenties, is an economically depressed mining town a mere twenty miles from the border with Russia. After leaving her home town, Samoilenko spent several years living in St. Petersburg; in the fall of 2013, she was attending a film festival in Kyiv when Viktor Yanukovych, the President of Ukraine at the time, backed out of signing an association agreement with the European Union. People gathered in Kyiv’s central square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, and Samoilenko joined. The protest lasted several months, until February, 2014, when Yanukovich was deposed and fled the country for Russia. More than a hundred people died at the hands of the authorities during the protests of 2013-2014, which Ukrainians call the Revolution of Dignity, or simply the Maidan. Russia occupied Crimea in March, 2014, and in April it attacked Ukraine from the east, cutting the Donetsk and Luhansk regions off from the rest of the country.

Antratsyt fell without battle. “There were never any Ukrainian troops there,” Samoilenko told me. This did not mean that there was no bloodshed: people died at the hands of thugs who declared themselves in charge and claimed to be hunting down real and imaginary opponents, and other thugs who robbed, killed, and marauded. Samoilenko, like thousands of other Ukrainians, started organizing aid to people living under the occupation. For the next three years, she raised money for medication and other essentials to be delivered to Antratsyt by a van; the vehicle would then return with families fleeing the region, most often because their members needed medical treatment. (About a million and a half Ukrainians, former residents of Crimea and the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, are currently registered as internally displaced persons.) Samoilenko estimates that she has helped fifty people move to Kyiv. It took her some time to convince her family to leave, but eventually six family members, including Samoilenko’s parents, joined her in Kyiv; she still supports them. (She earns money as a marketing consultant.)

“People can’t imagine what occupation is like,” Samoilenko said. “The scariest thing is when the lights go off everywhere and the hospitals have no power, and their generators don’t work because it turns out they were never maintained. I think the current situation is harder for me because I’ve had that experience of helplessness. But I’m not scared. Fear is what you feel when you don’t know what can happen. But I do.” So, even though Samoilenko knows that it’s impossible to prepare fully for war, she is making preparations. She would like to get her parents and kids out of Kyiv, perhaps buy a house in a remote village on the western edge of Ukraine. She liked one online listing in particular. “It’s way up in the Carpathian Mountains. There is clean water coming from the peak. Plus, it’s so beautiful there, like in ‘The Sound of Music.’ ” The house is cheap—just fifteen thousand dollars. Samoilenko doesn’t have fifteen thousand dollars, but if things get bad she will figure out how to get it.

For now, she will stay in Kyiv and do what she can. She and Polunin stockpiled a bit of gasoline: five ten-liter canisters. “If it’s not too cold, we can run the generator for an hour or two a day, to prepare food and charge our devices. After that, we can play piano by candlelight.” They have invited eight friends to move into their house if the city is under attack. “It’s easier to survive as a commune, even just to watch the kids if adults need to go out to get firewood.” Back during the revolution, Samoilenko learned first aid and how to otherwise assist trained medics. In January, she took two refresher courses, and she is thinking of signing up for civilian reserves.

Back in 2014, Ukrainians formed ad-hoc volunteer fighting battalions to help the underequipped, underprepared regular armed forces. Since then, civilian resistance units have been legalized and formalized. A law that took effect on January 1st makes such units, now known as Territorial Defense Troops, a separate part of the armed forces under the command of a specially appointed general. Today, according to Anton Holoborodko, a journalist who acts as a press spokesman for Kyiv Territorial Defense, what began as a largely self-run volunteer organization is in the process of being integrated into the Army.

Holoborodko and I met at a cafe near the Maidan, where he works out of a small office, producing his own YouTube news show. He is thirty-two, blond, with a face that appears perfectly round. “Before 2015, my only connection to the military was that my father was an officer,” Holoborodko said. He was working as a journalist, first at the Maidan, then in Crimea and the occupied east. “And then I thought, Wait, there is a mobilization drive going on. Why haven’t I signed up?” He served for fourteen months but never saw combat: his battalion stayed in the second line of defense. “I guess I was lucky, though at the time I felt cheated. When I was discharged, I thought I’d never want to have anything to do with the military again. But gradually I came to understand that our neighbor to the east—rather, their political regime—has a problematic relationship with reality and can go crazy any day. And then what am I going to do? It occurred to me that I should think about what my role should be.” In the summer of 2020, Holoborodko signed up as a civilian volunteer.

While we talked, his phone kept ringing: people who find him through social media want to find out how to sign up for Territorial Defense; journalists want to report on civilian reserves. So far, about five hundred people have signed contracts with Territorial Defense in Kyiv. The week we met, Holoborodko said he had arranged some twenty interviews with volunteers. Every Saturday, about eighty people (“That’s a lot!” Holoborodko protested, before I had a chance to say otherwise), most of them men, between the ages of eighteen and fifty-seven, gather somewhere in or just outside Kyiv for training exercises. They work on their urban- or forest-combat maneuvers, using prop guns and other equipment that they’ve bought with their own money. Holoborodko feels lucky that his girlfriend is supportive of his work. She is willing to drive him across town for exercises on Saturday mornings, whereas other volunteers’ partners have been known to complain about family money going to buy so much as a multi-tool to use in the drills.

“Everyone ought to decide who they are going to be,” Holoborodko said. “If they are going to be civilians, they should probably plan to evacuate. If they are going to be soldiers, they should probably sign up for Territorial Defense right now.” On January 22nd, Holoborodko called his parents, who live a couple of hundred miles east of Kyiv, and instructed them, “If you lose cell service and the Internet, get in the car and drive. I want to see you here within ten hours.” They agreed. Holoborodko has a few canisters of gas set aside for his girlfriend and her fifteen-year-old son to make their way to Western Ukraine, if need be. But, although he has given his parents clear instructions, he is not sure how to determine when it’s time to send his family members on their way. (He will himself remain in Kiev to fight.) “The moment when it’s time to evacuate has not been determined with certainty,” he said. “But it is known when it will be too late: when the city is being bombed from the air.”

Until then, Lena Samoilenko plans to party. “I am using all my free time to see people,” she told me. Recently, she rented a hotel room with friends; they talked until dawn, then piled into a car and drove to the Kyiv Sea, a giant man-made reservoir. “Along the way, we listened to the best music in the world.” She played a bit *of Devendra Banhart’s “Shabop Shalom” on her phone. “It’s fun, as un-warlike as it gets. We got there—it was freezing, the sea was pushing up large blocks of ice. We lit sparklers, but it was windy and my clothes nearly caught on fire. It was wonderful.” She showed me the singed cuff of her jacket, an oversized thrifted men’s black suit jacket. She also showed me, on her phone, a picture of a gold lamé dress that she really wants to buy for this period of partying.

When will it be time to stop partying, or to stop preparing and start acting? It’s often difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when a modern war has started, and it is particularly difficult to define a moment of substantive change in a country that has, in fact, been at war for eight years. “If they shut down the Internet, I’ll know,” Samoilenko said. In past conflicts, Russia has led with large cyberattacks. People mention other scenarios, such as the bombing of Kyiv, or a land invasion of the city, and then say that they are unimaginable. “On the other hand, the unimaginable has been happening for eight years,” Holoborodko said.

Toward the end of January, the Ukrainian government bore down on its stay-calm message. A think tank run by the former Defense Minister released a report stating that troops amassed by Russia near the Ukrainian border were not yet sufficient for a full-scale invasion. President Zelensky gathered foreign correspondents to scold them for writing “as though an army is marching down our streets.” Most Western media outlets do not have a permanent correspondent in Kyiv, or even in nearby European capitals such as Warsaw or Vienna, and yet more than two dozen journalists gathered to listen to the President in person. Their presence alone cast doubt on his message that there was no story there.

“There are more foreign correspondents here than at any point since 2014,” Nataliya Gumenyuk, a founder of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, told me. “I wonder: Are we normalizing the expectation of war? Or do they know something we don’t know? When is the moment we say, ‘Stop exaggerating,’ and when is the moment we must start getting ready?” Gumenyuk, who is thirty-eight, covered the Maidan and wrote a book on the occupation of Crimea. When I had dinner with her and her husband, Pyotr Ruzavin, at a restaurant with a tin ceiling, “Brooklyn pizza” on the menu, and an elaborate selection of teas, war seemed as unimaginable as ever. “I have been reading through all the scenarios,” Gumenyuk said. “Some Western papers are reporting that there will be an invasion of Kyiv by troops that will cross the border with Belarus, but how are they going to get here, through the swamps? It’s five hours by car.”

That’s really not far, I thought. “That’s really not far,” Ruzavin said.

Ruzavin, who is thirty, is a Russian journalist based in Moscow. He is tall and skinny and given to squinting and blushing when Gumenyuk corrects something that he has said, which is often. They were married four and a half years ago in Minsk, Belarus, a place that their friends from both Kyiv and Moscow could reach. They’ve continued to work in their respective cities (Ruzavin has worked for several outlets that the Russian state has branded as “foreign agents”), so theirs is a commuter marriage—which is to say, Ruzavin commutes to Kyiv. Commuting has become progressively harder. There have been no direct flights since 2015. When covid hit, the overnight train from Moscow stopped running too. Ruzavin took to flying through Minsk, but, after Belarus forced down a Ryanair flight in order to arrest a dissident who was on board, European airlines stopped flying there. Now Ruzavin commutes via Istanbul or Amsterdam, a long and expensive journey.

Ruzavin thinks that the declaration of war will come by way of Russian television: when prominent media personalities start calling for an invasion of Kyiv or for abolishing the Ukrainian state, it will have begun. “They are the sirens of war,” he said. He was scheduled to fly back to Moscow in mid-January, but postponed his departure until after the Beijing Olympics. It’s a superstition of sorts: Russia launched its offensive against Georgia on the first day of the Summer Games in Beijing, in 2008, and invaded Crimea as the Winter Games in Sochi were winding down. (A rumor, vehemently denied by China, has it that Putin had promised Xi Jinping not to start a big war during the Olympics this time.)

“I’ve been keeping an eye on the Kerch Strait,” east of Crimea, Gumenyuk said, continuing to think through the possible signs that a new stage in the war has begun. “Or a cyberattack—they could take the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant out of commission. Two weeks ago, when someone hacked a dozen leading government sites, I thought it might have begun. But it was only the home pages—the hacks didn’t go deeper.”

“Long story short, if it starts, the first thing they will do is hit anti-aircraft defense sites,” Ruzavin said.

“They’ll go after the infrastructure. Or maybe something strange will happen in the east, like a child dying from a land mine or from a strike by a supposed Ukrainian drone,” Gumenyuk said.

“Russian diplomats will leave Kyiv,” Ruzavin said. “We could tell by tracking them, if only we could identify them.”

“We keep arguing about how to prepare,” Gumenyuk said. “But for what? For not having Internet? How can you prepare for bombings? They just should never happen. But now on the Internet you can find a complete map of Kyiv bomb shelters.”

“Where is our bomb shelter?” Ruzavin asked.

“It’s in the next building over. I told you we should go check it out.”

“That building has a dental office in the basement,” Ruzavin said.

Mykola Balaban is a historian who interrupted his postgraduate studies, in 2014, to join the military, and who now runs a governmental center that studies Russian disinformation. He told me that he has been travelling the country and finding the same sense of “quiet disquiet” everywhere. The government’s efforts to project confidence and counteract panic, he said, are hindered by the legacy of the Soviet Union. The Chernobyl nuclear reactor is located in Ukraine, and every family here remembers the government’s efforts to stem well-founded panic after it exploded, in 1986. “So, if the government tells you that you shouldn’t be running to exchange your currency, that means you should run as fast as you can,” Balaban said. “That’s the Soviet legacy. Add to that a postcolonial distrust of the élites: almost no one in Ukraine treats the government with the same kind of reverence as they do in Russia.”

Nor does the government project a unified front of confidence. During my week in Kyiv, I attended a series of different events connected to Holocaust Memorial Day. At every one of them, government officials—including a Deputy Prime Minister—pleaded with their visiting foreign counterparts to go back to their governments and ask them to work to prevent a war.

The one reassuring message that seemed to gain traction in Kyiv last week was the report, stating that Russia was not ready for a full-scale invasion. I met with Andriy Zagorodnyuk, the former Minister of Defense who co-authored the report, two days after it came out. Zagorodnyuk is an entrepreneur who joined the war effort in 2014: his factory started manufacturing ambulances and heating stoves for Army tents and shipping them to the front, for free. Soon, he was drafted to help reform the Defense Ministry. In 2019, Zelensky appointed him as Minister of Defense, but after a few months Zagorodnyuk resigned and started a think tank, the Centre for Defence Strategies.

“You know what I don’t understand?” he said. “Russia has not made any official threats. All the information about this looming invasion comes by way of intelligence services. There is a huge number of analysts who claim to know what Putin is planning to do, which is impossible, because Russia never has just one plan of action.” Zagorodnyuk, who was twisting a small stack of his own business cards in his hands, started laying them out on the conference table in front of him, to illustrate a sort of logical con that Putin is trying to impose on the West. First card: Russia has the capability to invade Ukraine. Second card: Its amassing of troops at the border is proof of this capability. Third: Consequently, an attack is imminent. Fourth: If the attack happens, Russia will win. Fifth: the United States and nato, alarmed, should therefore negotiate with Putin, which is what he wanted all along.

On the other hand, Ukraine has a far larger and better trained military than it did eight years ago. It also has a civil society that has honed its self-organization skills over the course of the revolution and war. “We know for certain that, whatever part of Ukraine Russia occupies, Ukraine will turn the experience of staying there into hell for Russia,” Zagorodnyuk said. “The military will split up into small units of ten to fifty people and continue fighting, making it unbearable to maintain the occupation. Putin should know that, if he hasn’t completely lost his mind.”

Zagorodnyuk had been giving interviews all day, saying the same thing over and over again. He happened to be using a conference room at the solar-power company run by his wife, Alina Sviderskaya. It was Sviderskaya who had come downstairs to fetch me when I arrived, and in the elevator she told me that she had been thinking of going to Western Ukraine. But hearing her husband talk about his report had calmed her down. Maybe it wasn’t time to flee just yet.