Danilo Mandić spent the summer of 2022 in Ukraine interviewing forced migrants. Below he shares a few destinies of people enduring the Russian invasion. Respondents have been pseudonymized.
The Underground
When I met 40-year-old Irina, she had spent two months and three weeks sleeping underground. She was among seven families— christened by one onlooker as the “last partisans”—who lived inside the Tsentralnyi Rynok (Central Market) subway station, a few stops from the center of Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, from late February to as late as mid-May 2022. These people were considered stubborn. Hundreds of other displaced families had decided to give up on life beneath the earth’s surface after the first few weeks of the Russian invasion. Those remaining were old-age pensioners, women, children, and pets—including three cats and a rabbit who had made itself comfortable in the bosom of its owner. Many of them had not seen sunlight for months. Irina spent her time during the daily artillery storm above Kharkiv with her teenage daughter, an elderly neighbor, and an even more elderly mother who was in diapers.
When the war broke out, she initially refused to budge from her apartment, but did everything she was supposed to. Following government orders, when air raid sirens crowed, she turned off all lights in her apartment and always made sure to draw the curtains so as not to attract Russian bombs. With other volunteers from her apartment complex, she knitted camouflage coverings, donating them to the Ukrainian military along with cigarettes. Her daughter was in charge of making Molotov cocktails. Irina even convinced her ex-husband, a taxi driver and “good-for-nothing,” to drive refugees from the village to the railway station free of charge so that they could board evacuation trains headed for Kyiv, Lviv, and Warsaw. At first, he sulked and complained, but when he noticed dozens of abandoned cars at the railway station’s parking lot, his solidarity kicked in vigorously. He printed signs reading “WE ARE COMING BACK” in Cyrillic, waterproofed them, and placed them on all the abandoned vehicles. Men between 18 and 60 are forbidden from crossing the border out of Ukraine. This rule is nonsense, Irina argues, because the women refuse to leave their men behind and therefore stay and get killed for no reason. Still, she is proud to have rescued every single ба́бушка (grandma) from a nearby village, personally escorting them in her ex-husband’s taxi, before returning “into the fire.”
But then the bombardment escalated. The sky turned red from incessant aerial strikes. The streets turned red with blood. Clinics, schools, markets, and residential buildings started burning like matches. The ground shook from artillery rain. She saw corpses on the streets and all over television. “At the beginning, I prayed that nobody dies. That our clown [President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy] finds a way. That they stop with the politics. Now, I just pray somebody put a bullet in Putin’s forehead.”
With less than a suitcase, Irina and her family ended up freezing night after night in the subway station, often without water. “Like Ninja Turtles in the sewer,” her impish daughter remarks wearing an oversized, dirty sweater. “Turtles?” her mother shouts, as if delivering a verbal slap, “Rats! We lived like rats down there. And now nobody wants to come out!”
They did not reemerge voluntarily. The Kharkiv municipal authorities, in the thralls of an unexpected defensive victory, were interested in urgently displaying a return to normalcy. No whining allowed, either. This is why the subway, which was closed from the beginning of the invasion in February, was ordered to be reopened immediately. All the displaced families had to evacuate so that sanitation teams could clean up after them—a thankless task, because what was created underground across two subway stops was a veritable refugee camp. Tents and hamlets, toilets and kitchens, libraries and gyms, barricades and barbed-wire fortifications. Journalists visited them like tourists visit a zoo. Littered around the makeshift settlements were posters and flyers anticipating Russian street-fighters: “This is our land, and you will be under it.”
The Cavalry with a Dog
Practically all the males walking outdoors in Kharkiv are either uniformed or sporting military insignias and guns. But one of them stands out in the cafe of the city’s beautiful botanical garden. A tall Swede whose face appeared 20 years older than the rest of his commando-toned body. Erik has a tatoo for every war he has fought in. The largest, dedicated to Ukraine, earned an honorary placement across his entire left arm. Around his right arm is a leash to an expensive military dog in an even more expensive antiballistic uniform adorned with a Swedish flag, a Ukrainian blue-yellow ribbon, and the name “Diesel.” Diesel can sniff out mines. Erik trained him personally in Afghanistan, where they were both decorated with medals for their work fighting the Taliban. He brought the canine to Kharkiv expecting urban guerrilla combat, his speciality. “A pleasant surprise,” he mutters half-suspiciously, skeptical of his own luck. “We managed to push them out of the city and surrounding villages in two weeks.”
We drink coffee together barely a few hours after he returned from the frontline, five kilometers away. When the waitress refuses to pour whiskey into his espresso because, as she explains, she cannot serve alcohol to uniformed individuals, Erik mumbles a protest. “I’m not even on duty anymore,” he rolls his eyes. On that day, he lost six soldiers and 17 were injured. When he talks about his dead “boys,” a childish sorrow appears on his coarse face while his muscular hands twitch, as if stung by a bee (or by guilt?). He is especially heartbroken over Dimitri who, hours earlier, barely survived shrapnel penetrating his ribs and left kidney. “I told him to put double layers of the antiballistic plate on his side. He said, ‘Who needs it?’ I said, ‘Double!'” Dimitri listened. If he had not put the extra plate, he would have lost much more than his kidney. The photo of the injury is gruesome. As Erik displays it to me, using two fingers to zoom on his phone screen, he stops. He drops the phone to the table, thumb and index finger remaining in the air. “With these two fingers, I was just pulling metal from his body. And now I’m touching it again with the same fingers on a fu*** screen.”
He cherishes his war trophy images: destroyed and abandoned Russian tanks with white “Z” paintings. He caught two deaths on camera. In the middle of scrolling the catalogue of horrors from the trenches, his wife’s incoming call from Stockholm interjects a photo of a goofily posed, colorfully dressed woman smiling from a radiant, tropical beach. He rejects the call. “My family is not the happiest that I came here,” he says melancholically as he pets the dog’s backside, as if seeking reassurance, “Not! Happiest! Right, Diesel?”
In his less modest moments, he describes himself as a “high-ranking officer” and “one of Sweden’s best instructors.” He has trained hundreds of Ukrainians, as well as some Americans, to fight. But unlike most instructors, he insists on accompanying them to the frontline. Born in Uppsala, his grandfather was Polish and met his demise in the Nazi-Soviet clash of the 1940s. He came to Ukraine because he was sick of the hypocrisy he was seeing. “They all put blue-yellow pins. They think protests in front of Russian embassies are going to change something. No. I came to do something real.”
He explains artillery sounds, which are shrilly audible every 20 minutes or so. “You here that? That’s our guys. A few days ago, I was three hours under this. Nonstop. Waiting to die.” He is revolted by civilians who ignore air-raid sirens. Alas, this includes most of Kharkiv. He slams objects onto the table—a bottle, a sugar container, his phone in a metal casing—denouncing “these cretins” who are sitting here as if they could not die at any moment. They should, in his view, “stop drinking coffee and move.” After pounding the table, his howling turns into contemplative whispering. “A few days ago, I woke up in a total sweat. It never happened to me. You can be lucky once, twice. When you hear that sound, you will die. Sooner or later, they will hit civilians again.” He was prophetic. The week after we met, nine pedestrians were killed on a downtown boulevard.
Unbroken Saltivka
“Beautiful, right?” the sarcastic Raisa asks about the metal wreckage that was once her car. When her building was bombed, a sizable chunk of it crashed into her windshield and front wheel, creating a minor crater in the sidewalk. Like many of the shattered cars in her neighborhood, Saltivka, it had a paper sign reading “Child” on the back window.
Nowhere was life under Russian siege in Kharkiv more deadly than in Saltivka district, the epicenter of war crimes and resistance. Khrushchev-era skyscrapers up to 15 floors, along with the children’s playgrounds and markets in between, were all targeted by Russian bombs. More than 80 percent of the residential buildings were severely damaged, and a third were irreparably destroyed. The middle classes and the young fled first; then, everyone else. But Raisa stayed. Initially she sheltered in basements, but then summoned the courage to remain upstairs. “If I’m outside, the building is going to fall on me anyway, right? So, I might as well sit at home.” Local government employees promised renovations, financial support, rebirth. To no avail. But, to their credit, specialized anti-explosive squads, with the help of volunteers from the local alpinist club, climbed the neighborhood wreckage to remove missiles from windows, rooftops, and trees. Cylinders, concrete blocks, collapsed lampposts, shattered glass were scattered throughout.
Like many people in eastern Ukraine, Raisa grew up in two worlds. On the one hand, she is a stubborn Russophone. She voted for Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovych for president of Ukraine, as well as for a pro-Russian mayor. She remembers the USSR nostalgically, “when we lived together in peace.” She denounces Americans for “first cutting off an arm, then leg, then another arm. Why? We don’t have enough land for everyone?” Many of her cousins are in Belgorod, Russia. On the other hand: “Glory to Ukraine!” she yells, a standard wartime salute. She uses the phrase “Putin’s Ruscists” (“Russian” + “fascists”), the Ukrainian nationalist retort to Kremlin propaganda calling for the “denazification” of Ukraine. She severed all communication with her family across the border when they tried to convince her on the phone, first, that there was no bombing of her city and, second, that she was bombing herself. “They are completely brainwashed,” she puts a finger to her head simulating a gun, “They would rather believe their TVs than me when I tell them my building is on fire, that my whole world is on fire! I let them hear it through the telephone. Nothing. They trust the TV. I then realized that I have no family [in Russia] anymore. I have nothing there.” When will she go to Russia, where much of her life and career were made? “Only dead.”
The dead are on her mind. As one of the few remaining residents, she joined community actions to locate and remove corpses from the neighborhood ruins. “It’s all women, children. One of my neighbors, who cannot walk, was burnt alive just because he had a problem with his legs.” She uses her lighter to point to every entrance in her neighborhood, one by one. “Some families do not even care if their bodies are found. They just don’t care.”
Raisa stayed, among other reasons, to help an 80-year-old woman next door. Most of the woman’s apartment had been demolished; the pipes and water supply were gone but, thankfully, electricity and the elevator continued to function. Her entire kitchen and bedroom were covered in glass shards. Malodors from open sewage and rotting refrigerators spread from the hallway, infiltrating the furniture, carpets, and clothing. Though they were never close, Raisa attends to her like a relative. She brings humanitarian aid from downstairs every Monday and Thursday. Raisa looks at her with pride as she insists on standing to see us out the (unhinged) door, a courtesy to her guests. “You see how she doesn’t give up?” Raisa points to her, “When I see her, I know Saltivka is not broken.”
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
