What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine
Civilian casualties in the city of Irpin. “I said such a thing can’t happen,” one Ukrainian woman observed of Russia’s decision to invade. “They haven’t gone completely crazy. Well, you see—they went crazy.”Photograph by Jérôme Sessini / Magnum for The New Yorker
After thwarting a quick victory for Russia, Ukrainians are galvanized—and facing a punitive assault.
by Joshua Yaffa
Patient Unknown No. 1, a seven-year-old boy, arrived at Ohmatdyt children’s hospital, in Kyiv, on the second day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He had been riding in a car with his parents and two sisters when they came under fire. Shells exploded around them, sending shrapnel ripping through glass and metal, then flesh. His parents and one sister died on the spot; his other sister was taken to a different hospital. An ambulance brought the boy, unconscious and losing blood, to Ohmatdyt, where doctors performed emergency surgery and put him on a ventilator. It was a couple of days before the staff located his grandmother and learned the boy’s name: Semyon.
No one had been sleeping much in Kyiv since the start of what Vladimir Putin was calling a “special military operation,” but one of the doctors who treated Semyon, a pediatric surgeon named Roman Zhezhera, looked particularly exhausted. When I first met him, he was slumped in a chair in the hallway, several days’ growth of beard on his face. He led me up a flight of stairs to Semyon’s hospital room. A tiny head poked out from under a light-blue blanket. Tubes and bandages covered his face. Machines whirred and beeped. I asked about the boy’s condition. Not good, Zhezhera said: shrapnel had passed through the side of his neck. He was on life support, with little sign of brain activity. “As a doctor, I understand what happened to this child,” Zhezhera told me. “But I don’t understand what is going on around us, here and across the country—something absurd and terrible is happening.”
A television in the corner of the room was on, delivering the news from Belarus, where delegations from the Ukrainian and Russian governments were engaged in a futile day of negotiations. The Kremlin’s opening position built on Putin’s stated aims from the first day of the war: Ukraine must not only recognize Crimea as Russian and the Donetsk and Luhansk territories, in eastern Ukraine, as independent states, but declare its neutrality and demilitarize—a vaguely articulated process that suggested, in effect, a rejection of its own national sovereignty. Members of the Ukrainian delegation, for their part, sought an immediate end to the Russian offensive. After the talks, Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, tweeted, “Unfortunately, the Russian side is still extremely biased regarding the destructive processes it launched.”
A grinding stalemate was taking shape. Having embarked on a war that did not deliver a quick triumph, and which was exacting a ruinous toll on the Russian economy, Putin had no choice but to emerge with something he could credibly present as a victory. Zelensky, seeing that the Ukrainian military held up against the initial onslaught of Russian forces far longer than most experts had expected—and that the country rallied together—was not inclined to concede to an aggressor. Ukraine became an independent state after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991, and, no matter how fractious its politics have been since, the vast majority of Ukrainians have shown little interest in coming once more under the writ of Moscow. It appeared that only one of two things could make it through this war: Putin’s Presidency or Ukrainian statehood.
As the fighting dragged on, the wards at Ohmatdyt steadily filled up with children injured in shelling and missile strikes. I walked down the corridor and peeked through a glass door at a thirteen-year-old boy on a hospital bed, his face cut and bruised by an explosion of shrapnel. He, too, had been struck while riding in his family’s car. His six-year-old cousin died; his mother lay injured in the bed next to his. Doctors told me of another child, in the Kyiv suburbs, who died as he waited for an ambulance, which was stuck on the road, owing to intense fighting. “I feel simple, ordinary, very human anger,” Zhezhera told me.
The hospital was facing a crisis with its regular patients. Hundreds of children suffering from severe conditions required urgent treatment and operations. Supplies of expensive and rare cancer medicines were running low; flights were grounded and logistics scrambled, making it impossible to get stem cells for bone-marrow transplants. Given the ongoing risk of missile strikes and air raids, most of the children had been moved to a series of basements in the hospital complex. Inside one, dozens of mattresses were arrayed on a concrete floor. The space was dank and drafty. The ceiling leaked. Mothers rocked their crying children or lay silently with them. Pots of food were kept warm on small stoves. One infant needed a shunt implanted to remove fluid from her brain. A six-month-old girl and her mother had checked in to Ohmatdyt for an operation to regulate the baby’s lymphatic system. “We were all ready, and the war started,” the woman told me.
Two days later, with Russian forces still held at bay outside Kyiv, I returned to Ohmatdyt. A bus was parked out front, and a number of doctors were waving and crying. Nataliia Kubalya, the head of the chemotherapy department, who has worked at the hospital for thirty years, explained that the bus was taking children and their families to Poland for treatment. “It is a great tragedy,” she said. “We were finally able to offer these children the level of care they need in Ukraine, but now we have no choice but to send them away, and along with them the purpose of my life.”
Nearby, Alexey Sinitsky was seeing off his young son, who had leukemia. Sinitsky, who is forty-four and had previously worked at an agricultural-equipment manufacturer, had decided to remain in Kyiv to join his local unit of the Territorial Defense Forces, a volunteer military corps that has, in recent weeks, attracted thousands of people from across the country. “When the kids leave, it will be easier for everyone,” he said. “After all, someone needs to stay behind. If no one is here, the Russians will just enter and that will be it.”
I found Zhezhera standing by the entrance to the hospital. He looked energized by the urgency of his work, but his eyes were glassy. His wife and two kids were spending each night in the hospital’s underground bomb shelter. His eight-year-old daughter had asked him about a word that she had been hearing: “Dad, what are occupiers?” He answered, “Those who try to capture with force territory that doesn’t belong to them—in this case, Russians.”
I asked Zhezhera how Semyon was doing. The boy had died the day before, he said.
According to Putin’s reading of history, the invasion would enshrine the inviolable unity of Ukraine and Russia. Instead, it has torn the two countries apart. In February, on what turned out to be the eve of war, I travelled to Shchastia, a town of some eleven thousand people on the banks of the Siverskyi Donets River, in the largely Russian-speaking Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. Since Soviet days, Shchastia has functioned as a satellite of Luhansk, an industrial center of roughly four hundred thousand people less than twenty miles away. Every Friday, a line of cars snaked through farmland north of the city, as families went for weekends in the pine forests or picnics along the river. In English, Shchastia means “happiness.”
In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and backed a would-be separatist conflict in the Donbas, Luhansk and much of the surrounding area fell under the control of Russian-backed militias. Shchastia was held by the rebels for less than three months, until it was retaken by a pro-Ukrainian paramilitary group. Families and friends were split by the “contact line,” as the new de-facto Ukrainian border was called. For the first time, Shchastia had to open its own dentist’s offices, hair salons, and veterinary clinics. Allegiances shifted, but the relationship between the two municipalities was never completely severed. For the next three years, a coal-fired power plant in Shchastia supplied electricity to occupied Luhansk, which meant that its workers sometimes headed to the plant under fire from the people to whom they provided power.
Two days before I arrived, Putin recognized the “independence and sovereignty” of the two separatist republics in the Donbas—Luhansk and Donetsk—even though two-thirds of the region, including Shchastia, remained under Ukrainian control. Russian-backed proxy militias had been firing on the town from truck-mounted multiple-rocket launchers, known as Grads, which send fusillades of forty missiles at a time. Several of the Grad volleys were aimed at the power station, leading to blackouts in the area. Once again, residents found themselves in their cellars and bomb shelters, venturing out only occasionally to charge their phones at solar-powered stations around town. The rockets had also knocked out the town’s water supply.
Late one morning, I made my way to Shchastia’s administration building. There was a lull in the shelling, but I could see thick plumes of black smoke rising from the power station in the distance. On the steps, I ran into Oleksandr Dunets, a barrel-chested man who was the head of the city’s civil-military administration, effectively Shchastia’s mayor. In 2014, Dunets, as a lieutenant colonel in the Ukrainian Army—his nickname in the field was Spider—fought in nearby Stanytsia Luhanska and Debaltseve. “I got to know the Russians very closely—eye to eye,” he said. He is originally from Khmelnytskyi, in western Ukraine, and he took up his post in 2020. “I arrived to a relatively peaceful city, and had some rather ambitious plans,” he told me. “We wanted to rebuild and improve life here, so that, however clichéd this sounds, it lived up to its name, Happiness.”
Now his concerns were elemental: “For starters, you have to try and survive.” Eventually, he said, if the power wasn’t restored, the entire populace would have to be evacuated. Dunets’s deputy, Vladimir Tyurin, who lives in Shchastia, but whose mother, father-in-law, and brother live in Russian-occupied Luhansk, told me, “This is even scarier than 2014. Back then, we didn’t yet know what war is, that if a shell falls, this can mean death, you have to hide.” Now he knew: “They’ll simply raze the city.”
Later, I stopped by the apartment of Galina Kalinina, who, friends had told me, was among the town’s more vocal pro-Ukrainian residents. I took a seat in her sunny living room, which was filled with plants. Her three cats hopped up onto the sofa and then onto us. She had just made her third trip that day to the well in the courtyard, lugging plastic jugs up three flights of stairs. At one point, when the shelling picked up, Kalinina said, “Oh, they’re banging on again,” with the eye-rolling exasperation of someone fed up with neighbors who play their music too loudly.
Kalinina moved to Shchastia in 1986 to take a job at the power plant. She recalls a charming, verdant place, with rosebushes lining the central avenues. In the decades after the Soviet collapse, a good number of the town’s residents retained a cultural attachment to Russia, or at least felt some wariness about successive governments in Kyiv. When war broke out in the Donbas, many neighboring cities asserted their allegiance to Ukraine. But in Shchastia more than a few people were willing to accept the arrival of what Kremlin propagandists called Russky Mir, or the Russian World. The idea, at its most grandiose, anticipates a regathering of the lands, uniting Russian speakers whose ties were ruptured by the dissolution of the Soviet Empire. Kalinina understood it more simply: “People were suffering from a kind of euphoria of youth,” she said. “They thought Russia would come and, like a time machine, give them the chance to live as they did before.”
Smoke rises from a power plant during heavy shelling in Shchastia.Photograph by Emanuele Satolli for The New Yorker