“When they poured across the border,
I was cautioned to surrender.
This I could not do.
I took my gun and vanished”
Leonard Cohen, “The Partisan.”
War anniversaries are for remembering. In Ukraine, war is not past tense; history has not yet replaced the present or pointed to a more peaceful future.
On February 24, 2022, in the early morning hours, the Russian military launched a multi-front assault on Ukraine. They expected a cakewalk. Western intelligence services, led by the US and UK, had predicted the attack and had issued warnings. They had also predicted a swift collapse of any Ukrainian resistance, in the face of overwhelming odds. To the extent there was any thought for aiding Ukraine in the face of a Russian invasion, it was geared towards helping a future guerilla, underground war.
As a way of remembering the Ukraine war, by looking back, I want to dig into three close-in accounts of the conflict—two books and a documentary film.
A good starting point is the account of a leading Ukrainian-born journalist, Yaroslav Trofimov.
Trofimov is a veteran reporter for the Wall Street Journal. At the outset of the Russian invasion his paper had ordered its correspondents to leave Kyiv and head west to what it hoped would be the relative security of Lviv. But Trofimov and a friend and former British commando, Stevo Stephen, his de facto security adviser, stayed behind, as did a Spanish photographer for the WSJ, Mansu Brabo.
Trofimov’s, Our Enemies Will Vanish, which draws its title from the Ukrainian national anthem, offers an engrossing, personal account of the first year of the Russian invasion. He watched and reported as key cities held in the face of the Russian onslaught, not just the capital, Kyiv, but also Kharkiv, on the Russian border in the country’s north -east and the industrial town of Mariupol to the south. The fighting forces were a mix of local volunteers with rudimentary weapons and training, irregular formations called into action, often drawing on veterans of the earlier Russian invasion of Crimea and take-over attempt in the Donbas region in 2014, and regular Ukrainian miliary units. If the initial shock of the war was felt by Ukrainians—a feeling of disbelief that war would actually come to their country-- it was soon shared by the Russian military, who found themselves facing fierce battles and taking unexpected losses.
No first-hand journalistic account will ever tell the story of how Ukraine managed to resist the initial Russian attack from some 190,000 troops. What it can relate is what it looked and felt like—to Trofimov, improvised, astonishing, impassioned. Trofimov details well the creation of improvised fighting units and the role that local civilians played as intelligence gatherers and spotters for Ukrainian ambushes and strikes.
Returning to Kyiv from an effort to get close to the early fighting at Hostomel airport, which the Russian military had planned to use as an air bridge for its assault into Kyiv and decapitation of the Zelensky regime, Trofimov writes:
“As we drove back into the city, away from the front line, we relaxed. In neighbourhood after neighbourhood, Territorial defence fighters piled up old refrigerators, furniture, even broken bikes to create barricades and checkpoints.”
He watched heavy Ukrainian motorized artillery (Pion howitzers) trundling through downtown Kviv towards the fighting, followed by orange-painted municipal trucks carrying ammunition for the big guns.
Among the best parts of the book are these eye-witness experiences of the fighting in and around Kyiv. And the tips for how to survive when artillery is raining down on you:
“Shrapnel from an artillery shell hitting the grounds sprays out in an upturned conical pattern, and so the lower you are, the less likely you are to be pierced by jagged shards of metal.”
That Russian artillery fire was increasingly directed at civilians and civilian infrastructure. As Trofimov relates, once it became clear that Putin’s initial war plan had failed, “Russian forces took out their fury on civilians.”
One city particularly hard hit by this “fury,” was Kharkiv. Trofimov and his companions made their way there and found a city centre in ruins, the populace who had stayed behind beyond angry at what the Russians had done. The Russian-speaking mayor of Kharkiv told him, “Our people are in shock. The mindset has reversed completely. The attitude to Russia is very negative now. There will probably be several generations before that changes.”
If the sight of downtown Kharkiv was a shock to Trofimov, worse was ahead, as an overextended Russian army withdrew in haste from the outskirts of Kyiv. The speed of the Russian withdrawal meant that it had no time to conceal the scale of the war crimes committed in Bucha against civilians. Russian officials, from Putin down, shrugged the evidence off as Ukrainian propaganda. Putin even honoured the Russian unit, the 64thbrigade, that committed the atrocities.
You have to credit Trofimov with the unimaginable bravery of a war correspondent. One chapter details his trip to the front lines in the eastern Donbas region, in a repurposed bank armoured truck, where he joined a reconnaissance unit of an irregular unit of the Ukrainian army, reconstituted from the conflict in 2014, that went forward to scout out Russian positions. This involved close encounters with Russian soldiers and tanks. There was, at least then, a jauntiness to the outlook of some Ukrainian officers he met in the field. One told him they might meet up next in Moscow.
Trofimov’s account ends at the first year of the Russian invasion and with a coda about the failure of a planned Russian winter offensive. At the one-year anniversary of the war, he notes that the mood in Kviy was one of “quiet triumph and grief.” He watched as Ukraine’s President Zelensky delivered an anniversary speech in February 2023 that promised “now we will do everything so that, this year, we achieve a victory.”
As we know, 2023 did not bring a victory for Ukraine; its promised spring/summer offensive stalled as it confronted multiple lines of Russian defences in the south, guarding the gateway to Crimea. 2023 produced only a military stalemate.
Reading Trofimov is to relive, and re-remember, the agonising parade of news about the Ukraine war in its first year, the highs of successive resistance and the lows of grievous losses.
Trofimov never made it to Mariupol. Probably a good thing—if he had there likely would be no book.
One journalist crew did make the journey and, astonishingly, lived to tell the tale.
“20 Days in Mariupol” is the award-winning documentary by Ukrainian photo-journalist, Mstylav Chernov. The documentary was produced as a collaboration between Associated Press, for whom Chernov worked, and the US Public Broadcasting System (PBS) program, “Frontline.” The film was premiered at the Sundance film festival, and screened at the 78th session of the UN General Assembly.
The documentary draws on Chernov’s daily dispatches from Mariupol and personal footage shot by his crew when they were the only remaining journalists covering the brutal Russian siege of the city.
Chernov and his team decided to go to Mariupol on February 24, 2022, the first day of the war, certain that the city would be a major target of the Russian attack. He was right about that. One hour after their arrival, the first Russian bombs fell on the outskirts of the city. What he couldn’t imagine was the nature of the Russian military conduct. Early in the documentary, the film crew tells a distraught Ukrainian woman who it meets on the street to go home and assures her that the Russians don’t shoot civilians.
Chernov and his crew deployed close to a Ukrainian hospital in Mariupol and were accompanied by a Ukrainian miliary officer to try to keep them safe. Early on, they see Russian tanks with the now famous “Z” painted in white on their turrets, encircling the hospital and gratuitously bashing some parked Ukrainian city buses (or maybe they were having trouble with the tank’s reverse gear).
If that scene was ominous, much worse was to come. Chernov visited the aftermath of a Russian military strike on a maternity hospital, which destroyed it. He shot images of patients being brought out of the remnants of the hospital, including one very pregnant and bloodied woman on a gurney being pushed by medics across a rubble-strewn courtyard. He followed the patients as they were transferred to another hospital for treatment and discovered that the pregnant woman who he had filmed had died of her injuries as had the child in her womb. This was related to him on camera by the attending female physician, who had the fixed stare of shell-shock.
The Russian ambassador to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, falsely claimed during a UN Security Council meeting that images showing the aftermath of a Russian missile strike on a maternity hospital in Mariupol were staged by Ukrainian actors. As Canada’s ambassador to the UN, Bob Rae, once famously quipped, ‘ You can tell the Russians are lying, because they are moving their lips.’
By day 20 of their stay in Mariupol, Chernov comments “the city is slowly dying, like a human being.” Chernov and his team had to get out or risk the loss of their lives and all the footage that they had shot. They managed to escape the city in the Ukrainian liaison officer’s car, with his family, made it through numerous Russian checkpoints, and finally joined a Red Cross evacuation convoy. The film footage remained safe, hidden away in the car.
Chernov witnessed only one-quarter of the slow death under siege of Mariupol. The siege lasted 86 days before the last defenders surrendered in the Avostal steel works. The death toll from the Russian siege remains unknown. A minimum figure is 25,000. Then true toll now lies buried under the rubble of Mariupol as the Russian occupiers hastily erect new buildings over the ruins of the old, forever erasing a lot of evidence of war crimes, as Human Rights Watch have noted in a recent report.[1]
The film ends with a scene of mass graves, the victims marked by sticks bearing crudely painted numbers.
But one scene in this horror show will stay with me. Early in their filming of Mariupol the AP crew finds a young boy huddled in a makeshift bomb shelter, crying. When they ask him what is the matter, he says “I don’t want to die. I wish it would end soon.”
I can only hope he made it through the siege alive and somehow managed to get out of the city rather than being “exfiltrated” by the Russians. As for the war ending soon, there is not much hope of that. The story of the Russian execution of Mariupol, documented with extreme bravery by Chernov and his crew, alongside other scenes of war crimes across Ukraine, have put paid to any negotiated settlement.
“20 days in Mariupol” was publicly released in 2023 and can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.
And now to Andrey Kurkov, a leading Ukrainian author and journalist. Author of many works, including most recently, a novel, The Grey Bees (published in 2018; translated and published in English in 2020 ). Kurkov’s novel is a slightly surrealist account of a retiree living in a no-man’s land between warring parties in the first Russo-Ukrainian war, which began in 2014 with the Russian seizure of Crimea and military support for separatist forces in the eastern region of the Donbas. The protagonist, Sergey Sergeich, left alone in an abandoned village, cares nothing for the military conflict. What keeps him in his home, when all the other villagers have left, without electricity, reliant on a coal-burning stove he built, with little access to food, are his bees—his grey bees. Grey because they, too are suffering from the war, one errant artillery strike away from annihilation as they hibernate through the winter in a shed. The bees produce grey-tinged honey that tastes of gunpowder.
Sergey decides to give his bees a holiday, and tries to take them to Crimea, to visit a fellow bee-keeper, a Crimean Tartar. It proves an ill-fated journey.
The Grey Bees is a wonderful novel, capturing the isolation and resilience of the human spirit in a wasteland produced by war and repression.
With the onset of the Russian invasion, Kurkov kept what he called a private diary and personal history of the war, translated into English as Diary of an Invasion, first published in the UK in 2022.
Diary of an Invasion is not war reporting; its not about combat at the front. Kurkov evacuated Kyiv with his family at the outset of the war and, like many Ukrainians, headed west, in his case to an apartment loaned to him in the Transcarpathian mountains. From there he watched the war unfold day by agonising day, kept up a steady stream of correspondence with friends, and responded to foreign journalists. He found he had to set aside a novel he was working on. The times weren’t right.
Kurkov’s book is a personal reminiscence of what the war felt like to him and how it impacted on the things and people he loved. It spans only the first months of the war in 2022. He missed his cottage in a village outside Kyiv, missed his vegetable garden, missed book stores, all of which closed down with the invasion. While submerged in the environment of a country at war, he never lost hope and never wavered from a belief that Putin’s war was about the destruction of “the entire state of Ukraine,” its culture, its people.
There are quirky vignettes: the story of how Kharkiv had to make sure that its underground transportation tunnels were clear of pets and animals that had escaped the above-ground carnage, before they could be reopened; the account of the female commander of a self-propelled howitzer, with a large Tik-Tok following, who dreamed of painting her tank in camouflage pink (the military authorities apparently let her paint the inside).
And there are the larger ruminations sprinkled throughout.
An entry for the week after the Russian invasion captures the sense that the coming of war was inevitable, yet remained unbelievable:
“It was very hard to believe that the war had begun. That is, it was already clear that it had, but I did not want to believe this. You have to get used psychologically to the idea that war has begun. Because from that moment on, war determines your way of life, your way of thinking, your way of making decisions.” (p. 85)
Writing of the first air attacks on Kviy, also unbelievable, Kurkov writes:
“I do not think we were naïve. Our shock at the actions of our eastern neighbour is evidence of modern people’s unpreparedness for horrors that have no place in contemporary life.” (120)
Kurkov is also clear that war will stay with the people of Ukraine long after it is over. It will burrow in mind and body:
“I have a feeling that the war in now inside me. It is like knowing that you live with a tumor that cannot be removed. You cannot get away from the war. It has become a chronic, incurable disease. It can kill, or it can simply remain in the body and in the head, regularly reminding you of its presence.” (152)
This passage can serve as the book’s coda:
“Ukraine will either be free, independent, and European, or it will not exist at all. Then they will write about it in European history books, shamefacedly hiding the fact that the destruction of Ukraine was possible only with the tacit consent of Europe and the entire civilized world.” (125)
It is a sentiment that must be confronted at the start of the third year of this catastrophic, civilizational-challenging war. If its beginnings remind us of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, a prelude to the outbreak of World War Two, its end must not.
War anniversaries are for remembering, a pledge not to forget. To be reminded of the extraordinary will to resist of Ukraine and its people in the face of a monstrous assault.
A just peace remains far off for Ukraine. That must not be a cause for forgetting, or for slackening efforts to assist Ukraine to ensure that a just peace is achievable.
[1] Human Rights Watch, “Beneath the Rubble: Documenting Devastation and Loss in Mariupol,” https://www.hrw.org/feature/russia-ukraine-war-mariupol
Beautifully written, Wesley. Thank you for this.
A very thoughtful article and reminder of the atrocities of war, particularly in the face of Russian barbaries. For those who have not seen 20 Days… it’s a must for those that live in the security of North America. Be forewarned however, it’s not for the fain of heart. Kudos to my fellow Canadian Wesley Wark and his eloquence in telling non-fictions of importance.