What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine

After thwarting a quick victory for Russia, Ukrainians are galvanized—and facing a punitive assault.
Dead bodies lie under tarps on a street in 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

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.”

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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.

“I never have time to read but if I did these are the books I’d read.”
Cartoon by P. C. Vey

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

With war looming again, Kalinina was prepared for the worst. “We got lucky in 2014,” she told me. “The town was taken back quickly and without a whole lot of noise.” But in recent days it had become clear that Putin was prepared to turn the conflict into something much bigger, with greater significance for all sides. “If they capture Shchastia, we won’t get it back anytime soon,” Kalinina said. “Not as long as Putin is alive.” Once “the Tsar,” as she jokingly referred to him, extends his dominion over Shchastia, “everyone will be expected to get in line.”

In Sievierodonetsk, forty-five miles away, I visited the office of Serhiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region. Like many government officials across Ukraine, faced with the Russian attempt to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership or, failing that, to decimate the country, Haidai seemed to channel Zelensky’s defiance. “Putin has tried every measure possible to pressure us, but it hasn’t worked,” he told me. “So he simply wants to blow Ukraine apart.”

Haidai, at least on paper, is responsible not only for those living in territory controlled by Ukraine but also for the smaller population in separatist-controlled areas of the region. His own life, he said, “completely destroys Russian propaganda.” As a child, he lived in Sievierodonetsk, speaking Russian, then moved to Lviv, in western Ukraine. He learned Ukrainian because he thought it melodic and beautiful. “There was never any aggression toward the Russian language,” he told me. As we spoke, Haidai got a call from officials in Kyiv, asking about the situation in Shchastia. “They’re shooting Grads,” he said. “They’ve gone crazy.”

Haidai told me that Putin’s understanding of Ukraine was, at best, incomplete and outdated. In 2014, the country’s Army was disorganized and unprepared. Now it was an experienced and competent fighting force, with a sizable arsenal of antitank missiles and armed drones. “We know perfectly well what the Russian military machine is like,” he said. “But this won’t be some easy stroll for them. A war will cause irreparable damage to Ukraine, yes, but to Russia, too.”

Over the previous month, as more than a hundred and fifty thousand Russian troops assembled along the Ukrainian border, I had written a number of stories trying to decipher Putin’s intentions. Most analysts and foreign-policy experts in Moscow predicted a simmering, drawn-out standoff, with Russia keeping forces on the border as a lever to pressure the West. A full-scale invasion, they reasoned, would be counterproductive folly. I had gone to Kramatorsk, a midsize city that houses the Ukrainian command overseeing the war in the Donbas, in search of evidence of what some considered a more likely scenario: Russian forces would enter the separatist enclaves and use Ukraine’s response as an excuse to launch a wider incursion, maybe striking somewhat deeper into Ukraine.

An even more terrifying reality became clear around 5 A.M. on February 24th, when I felt three window-rattling explosions in my hotel room in Kramatorsk. I ran downstairs to the hotel’s basement and checked the news. Russian bombs and missiles were landing not only at the military airfield in Kramatorsk but in Kharkiv and Kyiv, with more explosions heard across the country. Russian tanks began streaming into Ukraine from Belarus and Crimea. Putin was on Russian television, declaring the start of his “special military operation,” and calling the situation in the Donbas a genocide. “To this end,” he said, “we will seek to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine.”

What did “de-Nazification” mean in a country with a Jewish President who was elected with seventy-three per cent of the vote? The subtext, at least, was ominous. In recent years, Putin has surrounded himself only with a small number of like-minded security officials, a habit that intensified during the pandemic, when he isolated himself to an extreme degree compared with other world leaders. He emerged a mouthpiece of obscurantist theories, more convinced than ever of the fundamental illegitimacy of the Ukrainian nation. Ukraine, Putin believed, was not a country with its own history and claim to independence but a territory cobbled together from Austria-Hungary and the former Russian Empire by the Bolsheviks. Its lack of proper statehood had allowed it, time and again, to be exploited by outside powers as a staging ground for weakening Russia. The United States and its allies were using Ukraine to pursue “a policy of containing Russia,” he said. “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation.”

From Kramatorsk, I drove west with a photographer and our fixer, the head of a local charity, toward Dnipro, a regional hub of a million people, then on to Kyiv. The drive took us along the Dnieper River, which separates the country geographically into east and west. The two sides have long been seen as culturally and politically distinct, but that characterization obscures more than it reveals. In 2019, Zelensky, a native Russian speaker from Kryvyi Rih, an industrial center in the south, won a majority of the votes in nearly all of the country’s regions, including in the west. And national polling showed majority support for the prospect of Ukraine joining the European Union, including nearly half of those surveyed in the east.

We passed cars packed with families and their belongings, and columns of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles rumbling into position to counter the Russian assault. When we stopped for fuel, outside the capital, I witnessed a scene that seemed emblematic of the country’s growing civic consciousness, which had been thrust into acute relief by the onset of war. An attendant stood watch, directing traffic to the pumps. A car with Lithuanian plates pulled up. Some Ukrainians register their cars abroad, to avoid paying import duties and taxes on automobile purchases. “No gas for people who don’t contribute to the state,” the attendant shouted. “Support our Army, support our people, then get your gas!” The car sped away.

There were frequent military checkpoints along the highway. Some were manned by Ukrainian soldiers, others by local volunteers, who constructed barricades out of concrete blocks and car tires. But as we rode into Kyiv the streets were quiet. We stopped at an apartment building on Lobanovskyi Prospect, a wide boulevard in the city’s southwest; a missile strike had torn a three-story gash in the façade.

Over the years, I’ve come to love Kyiv, with its pre-Revolutionary architecture, cheerful people, and fabulous restaurants, not to mention a techno music scene that is arguably among the best on the Continent. Now few people ventured outside; those who did so after curfew were, by default, considered pro-Russian diversanty, or saboteurs. “We are hunting these people,” Vitali Klitschko, Kyiv’s mayor and a former heavyweight boxing champion, said, claiming that six diversanty had been killed in a single night. A Ukrainian friend joked that I’d be in trouble if I was stopped at a Territorial Defense checkpoint and asked to say what had become a kind of code word for sussing out enemy agents: palyanitsa, the name of a soft white-bread loaf. The word rolls off the tongue of Ukrainian speakers but is hard for Russians to pronounce.

Semyon, a seven-year-old boy, was taken to a children’s hospital in Kyiv after his family’s car was struck by Russian fire.Photograph by Emanuele Satolli for The New Yorker

At first, Russian troops tried to penetrate the capital with light, nimble assault teams, apparently operating under the assumption that they could take the city in a matter of days. “It looked like they planned for a kind of raid,” Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian defense minister, said. “They thought they could weaken Ukraine’s military with air and artillery strikes and carry out a special operation to replace the government.”

Instead, they met a formidable defense. Russian paratroopers seized the Hostomel airport, just outside Kyiv, only to be overrun by a Ukrainian counterattack. At an overpass not far from the Kyiv Zoo, I came to a spot where, the night before, Ukrainian soldiers had ambushed Russian forces as they tried to infiltrate a weapons supply deep in the city. A pair of burned-out military vehicles stood in the street, with shards of metal and glass trailing for half a mile. Pieces of flesh lay scattered on the road.

Every morning brought renewed fear that this would be the day the city was fully encircled. A forty-mile Russian convoy of tanks and armor seemed to have stalled north of Kyiv, likely hampered by lack of fuel or by poor logistics. (“They didn’t have a plan for more than three or four days,” Zagorodnyuk said.) Still, a sense of siege set in. More checkpoints appeared. Residents began sleeping in metro stations, which had been turned into makeshift bomb shelters, housing as many as fifteen thousand people a night. It was hard to find a pharmacy. Restaurants shut down, and only a few supermarkets remained open, often with lines that left patrons waiting outside for hours. I settled into a diet of cheese, salami, and apples.

One day, as fighting inched closer to the city center, I drove out to International Square, in a western neighborhood, near where the bulk of Russian forces had massed. There had been a firefight the night before. The carcass of a torched military transport truck lay slumped on the asphalt. A shot-up Army bus with deflated tires stood across the square. Shrapnel and bullet casings crunched underfoot. A group of locals had gathered to take a look. I spoke with a woman who asked to use a pseudonym, whom I’ll call Svitlana. She lived with her twelve-year-old daughter in a nearby apartment. “When the explosions started, I woke her up,” she told me. Her daughter stood beside her, in a puffy coat and a wool hat. “She was hysterical, terrified, crying.”

Svitlana explained that her grandparents came from Rostov-on-Don, a major city in southwestern Russia, then settled in eastern Ukraine. I barely managed to ask a question before she offered her own response to Putin’s notion of Pan-Slavic unity. “I’m ethnically Russian, I speak Russian, and I hate Russians,” she said. She and her daughter had been living in Luhansk in 2014, when the war started there, and fled to the capital. Four years later, she bought an apartment in what she presumed were the safe and bucolic outskirts of Kyiv, a place to build a life. “Now Russia’s wars are coming to me for the second time,” she said.

Earlier in the year, neighbors in Kyiv had asked Svitlana, given that she had lived through one conflict with Russia, what she expected. She told them that Putin might escalate the war in the Donbas, but that a full-scale invasion was unthinkable. “I said such a thing can’t happen. They haven’t gone completely crazy. Well, you see—they went crazy.”

Nevertheless, Svitlana was set on staying in Kyiv—at least she was until Russian forces began firing Grad rockets at seemingly random apartment blocks, a terror tactic she experienced in Luhansk. “It’s a matter of principle,” she said. “I simply don’t want to live under the rule of occupiers. I did not invite them here. I don’t need them to save me.” I asked if she and her daughter managed to find any small moments of pleasure these days. “We’re happy when we hear about new sanctions and killed Russian soldiers,” she said.

One day in Kyiv, I visited a donation center set up for the Ukrainian Army in a warren of rooms attached to the national military hospital. Boots, jackets, canned fruit, instant noodles, toilet paper, and medical supplies teetered in towering stacks. Every few minutes, someone came by to drop off more goods. They were accepted by Yulia Nizhnik-Zaichenko, who trained as a makeup artist before organizing aid supplies in the early days of the Donbas war. Back then, she had stood near the checkout counters of grocery stores, asking those in line to donate food and other supplies to be sent to the front. The air of improvisation and solidarity remained. “We can barely keep up,” she told me. “Accept, give, accept, give, accept, give—and sometimes hide in the basement when the sirens go off.”

A few minutes later, we heard the unmistakable warning of an air raid. Volunteers who had been sorting supplies hastened inside and closed the steel door. I sat on a couch next to Nizhnik-Zaichenko, listening to the muffled booms. “Of course this is scary,” she said. “During the Donbas war, we didn’t have to worry about missiles or heavy artillery reaching the city.” She could finish her volunteer work and go home for a shower and a quiet night’s sleep. “Now there is no such peaceful place,” she said. She felt Kyiv emptying out. “The scariest thing to imagine is Russian rule in Kyiv, making us submit to them as if we’re just another region in the Russian Federation. That’s the only thing that could make me consider leaving—if I manage to survive, of course.”

Putin, after more than twenty years in power, seems to have committed a grave error of projection. The Russian state he has built is a vertical machine, distant from those it rules, and responsive to those at the top. Ukraine is home to a messy, vibrant society, with years of experience in horizontal organization. I found myself mystified, as did just about anyone I spoke to in Kyiv, about what Putin thought would happen even if he seized the capital and unseated Zelensky. Did he expect people to just go along with it?

The sense of purpose and solidarity among Ukrainians was in sharp contrast to the apparently demoralized state of many of the Russian soldiers sent into the fight. From interrogations of those who had been captured, a common theme emerged; namely, none of their commanding officers bothered to explain the purpose of their mission. Perhaps because no one had told them, either. Reports surfaced of Russian soldiers abandoning their tanks and armored vehicles and walking into the woods. At a press conference in Kyiv, a man described as a captured Russian officer, addressing the Ukrainian people, said, “If you can find it in yourself to forgive us, please do. If not, God, well, we’ll accept that, as we should.”

“I’m so busy I have to eat lunch at my desk.”
Cartoon by Sam Gross

Billboards around Kyiv castigated the Russian troops. “Russian soldier, stop! How can you look your children in the eye!” one read. Another admonished, “Don’t take a life on behalf of Putin! Return home with a clean conscience.” Some were still more blunt: “Russian soldier, go fuck yourself!” Though addressed to the invading forces, the taglines seemed to boost morale among the Ukrainians themselves. The billboards were also a testament to the fratricidal nature of the war. In land invasions, the aggressor rarely shares a language, not to mention a culture and a history, with the defending side.

As the days wore on, soldiers guarding the checkpoints became less jittery. Shops were restocked with food, and the lines shrank considerably. The streets were cleaned; even trash pickup started again. Andrii Hrushchynskyi, the head of Kyivspetstrans, the firm responsible for collecting seventy per cent of the city’s refuse, told me that sixteen of the company’s thirty trucks were in service. (Several of the others were positioned as roadblocks at major entrances to the city.) His main problem was losing employees to the Army or the Territorial Defense Forces. “My guys want to rush into battle,” Hrushchynskyi said. “I tell them that anyone can stand at a checkpoint with a gun, but collecting trash isn’t for everybody.”

Later that day, I stopped by Dubler, a stylish café co-owned by a local architect named Slava Balbek. It had been closed for days, but I found a dozen young people seated around a long wooden table finishing a late breakfast. Balbek was conducting a planning meeting with volunteers. He had turned the café into a nonprofit kitchen and delivery hub, sending meals to Territorial Defense units, hospitals, and anyone else left behind. “I went straightaway to my local military-recruitment depot, but they told me they were already full”—in the first ten days of the war, a hundred thousand people reportedly enlisted in the volunteer forces—“so I thought, O.K., how else can I be helpful,” Balbek, who is thirty-eight, and an amateur triathlete, told me. “I’m a good trouble-shooter, and if you leave out the particular horrors of war, this is basically organizational work. You need strong nerves and cold reason.”

Balbek receives calls all the time: a restaurant owner phoned to say he had three hundred kilograms of food to donate if someone could pick it up; another contact was able to provide thousands of plastic takeout containers. Balbek and his team are now delivering ten thousand meals a day. “In any organization, the most important thing is a shared idea,” he said. “And if nothing else we have that—a common enemy and a need to help defeat it.”

A crude military logic underpinned Putin’s decision to invade. He and the paranoid coterie of security officials around him believed that Ukraine had become the instrument of an ever-expanding West. Even if Ukraine didn’t formally join NATO, it was receiving weapons and military training from NATO countries. With time, perhaps this support could amount to a kind of backdoor NATO membership. If Putin saw U.S. missile-defense systems in Poland and Romania as a danger, the prospect of them in Ukraine may have felt existential. Better to strike while Russia retained the military advantage, and use that force to refashion Ukraine’s politics—and foreign policy—to accord with his vision of Russia’s security interests.

But there was also an element of historical messianism in Putin’s thinking, a pseudo-philosophical strain that ran far deeper than concerns over Western armaments. In July, he published a six-thousand-word treatise in which he proclaimed Russians and Ukrainians to be “one people,” but with a clear hierarchy: Ukraine’s rightful place was under the protection and imperial care of Russia, not led astray—politically, militarily, culturally—by the West. “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is possible only in partnership with Russia,” he wrote. Only by acting now to rejoin the two peoples, as they were meant to be, could Putin prevent Ukraine from becoming irreparably European or even, for that matter, Ukrainian. Because once that happened it would be too late: Russia would indeed be occupying a foreign land.

The indiscriminate bombing of Ukrainian cities, unsurprisingly, achieved the opposite effect. Residential districts in Kharkiv were hit with cluster munitions, killing people as they walked home from the grocery store. In Chernihiv, a Russian plane dropped a series of unguided aerial bombs—including one that weighed an estimated thousand pounds—killing at least forty-seven. On March 9th, a Russian air strike in Mariupol, a city with a predominantly Russian-speaking population, demolished a hospital’s maternity ward, leaving pregnant women to scramble out of the burnt wreckage. “It’s brutal,” Zagorodnyuk said. “They want to create panic and terror, to demoralize the population and break their will to fight. But that won’t work with Ukrainians.”

The question, then, is how much longer Putin can continue the campaign. For all the inefficiencies and outright bumbling of the first two weeks, Russia, with an annual military budget more than seven times larger than Ukraine’s, enjoys a formidable advantage in terms of brute military might. Ukraine, for its part, has lost ground in the south and east of the country, but managed to hold off the bulk of Russia’s invasion force. It has relied on a combination of battle-hardened troops who have been fighting since 2014, antitank and anti-aircraft missiles supplied by the West, and, perhaps no less important, the moral determination to expel an invading force.

The spirit of the country’s resistance has been exemplified by its President. Before the war began, Zelensky was struggling. His inability to uproot corruption and government inefficiency, and his failure to resolve the conflict in the east, had eroded his popularity. But once the war began he called on his experience as an actor, revealed a deft feel for the national psyche, and attained almost mythic status. In a series of short, defiant speeches that quickly went viral on social media, he appeared at once approachable—unshaven, in olive-green T-shirts and warmup jackets, carrying his own chair into a press conference—and coolly heroic. With Russia evidently hunting him down (there had reportedly been three foiled assassination attempts on him), his presence in the capital felt imbued with bravery, the opposite of what Putin likely expected.

One popular video began with the camera looking out a window on a nighttime scene in Kyiv. Zelensky came into the frame, walking down a hallway toward his office in the Presidential suite, evidence that he was still in Kyiv, still at work. “I’m not hiding, and I’m not afraid of anyone,” he said. The next morning, he stepped outside to enjoy a moment of early spring: “Everything is fine. We will overcome.” As the Russian campaign turned more grim, so did Zelensky’s mood. “We will find every bastard who shot at our cities, our people, who bombed our land, who launched rockets,” he said, on March 6th. “There will be no quiet place on earth for you. Except for the grave.”

Civilians dodged mortar fire as they tried to escape the Russian advance on Irpin, in March.Photograph by Jérôme Sessini / Magnum for The New Yorker

One afternoon, I visited an outpost of the Territorial Defense Forces, in Kyiv’s government district, a hilly enclave of cobblestoned streets that houses Ukraine’s parliament and Presidential-administration offices. When my car pulled up, a group of Ukrainian soldiers formed a semicircle around it, their rifles drawn.

In a nearby building, a hall for government officials, which had a colonnaded ballroom and heavy drapes, I was greeted by Evgeny, the outpost’s commander. He had a slight frame, a graying beard, and the coiled energy of a man familiar with combat. Evgeny was from the Russian city of Maykop, in the North Caucasus. His first war was in Afghanistan, in the eighties, where he fought as a young Soviet conscript. Two decades ago, he moved to Kyiv and worked in construction. When the Donbas war started, he joined a pro-Ukrainian battalion—his second war, as he put it. Since 2015, he had worked as an adviser to Ukraine’s defense ministry and overseen humanitarian programs, including prisoner exchanges. On the second day of Russia’s invasion, he picked up his rifle and assembled a number of other veterans, as well as like-minded friends and acquaintances, including his son-in-law, to form a Territorial Defense unit—his third war.

Evgeny said that he had been moved to fight for Ukraine after the Maidan protests, which toppled the Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. “Ukraine experienced something like liberation, like a chicken being born, breaking out of its egg,” he said. But, he went on, “over that same time, nothing was born in Russia.” The state of mind is largely the same as it was, he told me. “As the master says, so be it.”

There hadn’t been much fighting inside the government quarter. Every day brought a new report of Russian mercenaries or Chechen paramilitaries being sent to storm Kyiv and kill Zelensky, but it was hard to tell what was true and what was information warfare. “At the moment, things are very calm here,” Evgeny said, even as the building shook from distant artillery fire. “But later they could be very not calm.” He spoke about his unit’s role protecting Zelensky, among other targets. “The President is a symbol,” he said. “By defending him, we defend the country.”

Evgeny believed that Ukrainians maintained a certain advantage. “We are fighting with our wives, daughters, sons at our backs,” he said. “They have no one.” It sounded like wishful thinking, but Evgeny recalled his childhood in the Caucasus. “However much we curse the Russians, they still have something human inside of them,” he said. “When they see that people—old people, women, children—are coming out of their homes and blocking the streets in towns they’ve captured, maybe some of them will stop and think. Maybe some of them will even turn around.”

In the days that followed, Russia’s military assault grew more punitive, with civilian areas increasingly being targeted. If a quick victory over Ukraine’s armed forces wasn’t possible, then the country’s people would be made to suffer. In Kharkiv, the campaign looked at once like a form of punishment—the Kremlin probably assumed that the city, less than thirty miles from the Russian border, would not resist a Russian intervention—and like a warning, above all to Kyiv. See what can happen if you don’t give in.

Kherson, home to a strategic port with access to the Black Sea, was the first major Ukrainian city to fall. Russian forces imposed a curfew and impeded the arrival of food and other supplies from elsewhere in Ukraine. Trucks of humanitarian aid were brought in from Krasnodar, in southern Russia, a Kherson resident, who asked to remain anonymous, told me: “They thought we’d rush to grab their canned meat, but no one showed up.” Pro-Ukrainian demonstrations have been held regularly in Kherson’s central square, drawing thousands of people, chanting, “Go home, while you’re still alive!” and “Shame!” At one point, Russian troops fired into the air to quell a crowd, but for the most part they have looked on in wary silence. “As soon as the war started, even those who felt some affection for Russia switched to pure aggression,” Konstantin Ryzhenko, a local journalist, told me. “There’s just no scenario at this point in which Kherson will willingly join Russia. They thought we’d go along with it. Now that they realize that’s not possible, they don’t know what to do.”

Since the start of the war, as many as two million Ukrainians have left the country, out of a population of more than forty million. The exodus has been called the fastest-moving European migration since the Second World War. Last week, in Kyiv’s central train station, families crowded up against the departures board, searching for trains to literally anywhere. Children cried; exhausted spouses shouted at each other. The state railway service organized evacuation trains heading west, prioritizing women and children. Every time a train rolled up to a platform, a crowd formed, waiting for the doors to open, then people pushed their way inside, often without knowing where the train was headed. A woman told me of travelling in a compartment meant for four people that held twenty-six.

I set off from Kyiv by car, following back roads to Lviv, western Ukraine’s largest city and a major hub for displaced people fleeing the country. The main highway had grown so clogged that a team of Times reporters recently got stuck along the route and had to spend the night in a village kindergarten. From Lviv, many families are pressing on to the Polish border, more than forty miles away. Once there, it can take days to cross, with people sleeping in their cars or even by the side of the road as they wait.

Galina Kalinina, from Shchastia, had also ended up in Lviv. Once I got to town, I went to see her at a donation center where she was volunteering. The coördinator, a landscape-design instructor named Maria Bogomolova, told me of a family that had just arrived from Irpin, in the Kyiv suburbs, where Russian shelling had targeted a bridge that civilians were using to evacuate, killing at least four. The family had spent several days in a bomb shelter. A five-year-old boy arrived without socks. “What they had on when they fled is what they showed up in,” Bogomolova said. The boy had stopped talking.

Kalinina was sorting winter coats. She told me that, on the first morning of the war, as missiles fell across the country, Shchastia came under attack: “I woke up to hear shelling, machine-gun fire, Grads—they were firing it all.” She had already planned to evacuate. Her bag was packed. By 8 A.M., she was on the road with a friend, but her husband didn’t want to leave. “He says he likes it at home, everything will be normal,” she said. “I told him, ‘How can this be normal?’ ”

Kalinina had intended to reach Kharkiv, where her son and daughter live, but she heard that the city was under heavy bombardment, with Russian tanks approaching. She and her friend drove on to Kyiv. Kalinina eventually got through to her son. His building had been struck—his apartment was now burnt rubble—but he had been in a bomb shelter at the time. Kyiv was getting hit, too. “We quickly saw it wasn’t safe there, either—bombing, bombing, bombing,” she said. Finally, they made it to Lviv, where Kalinina was grateful to find volunteer work. “Better than sitting around reading the news and going crazy,” she told me.

Phone service in Shchastia had ceased days earlier, and she hadn’t been able to reach her husband. When she got to Lviv, she went for a haircut and started to sob in the salon chair. “I was crying for Shchastia, and for my husband, and for the life I had,” she said. “I have this dream that I’ll come back to Shchastia riding a tank, waving a Ukrainian flag.” After a pause, she added, “But I understand that I have fairly rosy expectations.”

I called Serhiy Haidai, the regional governor in Luhansk, who said that Russian troops had reached the outskirts of Sievierodonetsk and were lobbing artillery shells into the city. They had destroyed the roof of a kindergarten. He also told me, “Shchastia in the form you saw it no longer exists.” Eighty per cent of the buildings were damaged or destroyed. And, he added, “It’s occupied.”

War has split Shchastia yet again. Dunets, the civil-military-administration head, was recalled back to the Ukrainian Army, and is fighting with the 128th Brigade. Tyurin, his deputy, stayed on in the city administration, albeit under a new flag. Haidai told me that agents from the F.S.B., the Russian security service, had called to offer him a chance to switch sides. “I told them to fuck off,” he said. ♦