Report from Ukraine on the Brink
Editors’ Note
On February 24, six hours after this article was filed, Russia began an all-out attack on Ukraine.
In the spring of 2014, when Russian-backed separatists were seizing parts of eastern Ukraine, I wrote a piece from there for these pages titled “Ukraine: The Phony War?” Well, here we are again: for the past couple of months Russian forces have been gradually massing along Ukraine’s borders. One day in mid-February, as darkness fell over Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, I noticed about twenty people kneeling at the edge of a park on Sumska Street, the central boulevard.
They were silent and were holding their hands as if in prayer. Were they local peace activists, I wondered? In 2014 I had seen a group of people close to the front line in Mariupol who were imploring the Lord to save their city. But this time, as I got closer, I noticed a little placard that said: “endccp.com.” They were Chinese, maybe students from among the thousands of foreigners studying here, demanding, their website explained, an end “to the evil Chinese Communist Party.”
The next day the news was alarming. A Russian attack was imminent, said a US intelligence official. The center of Kharkiv is only a fifty-minute drive from the Russian border, or a bit longer if you’re in a tank. So I went to the supermarket to buy some cans of tuna in case war broke out. It was packed, but the shelves were full. As a dutiful journalist I stood by the checkout with my notebook watching to see if there were any signs of panic buying. But there were none. That night no attack came.
Millions of words have been spewed in the last few weeks about what Russian president Vladimir Putin wants. He wants to destroy Ukraine, say some. No, he craves respect, say others. He wants this…or maybe that. No one knows, and in Ukraine very few people I’ve met think he is about to launch a full-scale invasion.
At the Hoptivka border crossing twenty-five miles north of Kharkiv, a steady stream of people were dragging suitcases toward the Russian side or coming the other way. I asked some if they were worried; everyone in Kharkiv had seen the videos on social media of Russian military convoys allegedly near Belgorod, an hour or so further north. One woman arriving from Russia said with a serious face, “Yes, and that is why I am coming home to fight!” Before I could ask her name, she hurried off, laughing loudly, to catch a mini-bus to Kharkiv.
I asked for permission to visit the border. By a hamlet called Zv’yazok there were three guards in snowsuits and a black Labrador called Lucky on patrol. There was nothing to be seen on the other side of the ditch the Ukrainians had dug in 2014. On both sides the snow lay thick on the fields, and I wondered what the Labrador was supposed to be sniffing for. Tanks? In Washington and in European capitals, leaders kept saying that an attack was imminent. But at least where I was allowed to visit, no preparations were being made for it, and there was no military activity on the main road from Kharkiv, as might have been expected.
People in Kharkiv may not believe much in a Russian attack, but by the time you read this it may have begun. When I started writing it in the Half an Hour café in Kharkiv, there was news that the puppet regime in separatist-controlled Donetsk was evacuating the population, which sounded like a prelude to war. By the time I finished it, Russian troops were reported to be arriving there. Meanwhile they were playing Michael Jackson’s “Heal the World” in the café, which was full of earnest young people poring over their laptops or relaxing.
In my experience it is quite normal to refuse to believe that you are about to be engulfed by a cataclysm that will change your life forever—or kill you.