1. Begins in Kyiv, at St. Michael’s Monastery, then flashes back to Paris, where Mogelson’s Ukraine journey starts (“Two days later, in Paris, at 7:30 a.m., I arrived outside a Métro station near the Place d’Italie, where people were loading boxes of food and other provisions into the luggage compartment of a commercial bus”). He travels with his friend, Anastasia Fomitchova, who, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is returning home to Kyiv to participate in the war. On the bus, they meet Petro, a thirty-three-year-old construction worker, who had lived in France for eight years, and who is now bound for his home town, Ivano-Frankivsk, to report for duty. Mogelson writes,
As we traversed Luxembourg and Germany, the driver stopped at a gas station every four or five hours, to let us use the rest room and buy food; Petro neither ate nor slept, and his anxiety seemed to increase as we neared Ukraine. He had never fired a weapon. “I don’t know where they’re going to send me,” he told us midway through Poland, his hands trembling. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.” Embarrassed by the tears welling in his eyes, he explained, “Not everyone is ready for this.”
2. They arrive in Kyiv and go to Anastasia’s apartment on Andriyivsky Descent, “a steep cobblestone road, lined with cafés, bars, and art galleries, near the Dnieper River.” Anastasia is a medic. In 2017, she trained with the Hospitallers in southern Ukraine. Now, she plans to re-join them. But first, she visits her parents in Kyiv and unsuccessfully tries to persuade them to go abroad. Then she visits St. Michael’s Monastery. This is where the piece began. Mogelson writes:
Uniformed men with Kalashnikovs patrolled the perimeter and guarded the gate. Anastasia approached a fence, through which we could see the cathedral. She bowed her head; when she lifted it, she was crying. I asked her what she had prayed for. “My country, my city, and my family,” she replied.
3. The next day, Anastasia learns that the Hospitallers are mustering at St. Michael’s. She and Mogelson go there:
Inside the monastery, everything was in a state of frenetic metamorphosis. Men and women in combat fatigues hurried in all directions; priests in black robes unloaded boxes from trucks and vans; in a lecture hall where seminary students normally underwent theological instruction, a soldier provided basic firearms training to volunteers who had just received Kalashnikovs. Shouted commands rang through hallways adorned with oil paintings of church patriarchs from centuries past.
They meet Yana Zinkevych, the leader of the Hospitallers. Mogelson describes the scene inside St. Michael’s:
Bandages, gauze, saline, syringes, litters, splints, and other medical equipment were piled on a set of stairs. Donated food—sacks of potatoes, jars of pickled vegetables, preserved meat, canned goods—crowded the corridors. The refectory had been converted into sleeping quarters, and dozens of mattresses covered the dining tables. In the kitchen, medics waited in line for bowls of borscht and kasha. I would get to know many of them: an economics professor, a dentist, a cellist, a cryptocurrency trader, a knife-fighting coach, a ballet dancer, numerous students, a filmmaker, a farmer, a therapist, several journalists. Fearing Russian reprisals, they all used code names.
Mogelson accompanies a Hospitaller medic, code-named August, on a mission to Irpin. He describes what he sees:
To prevent the Russians from penetrating Kyiv, the Ukrainians had destroyed the main bridge over the fast-moving Irpin River. Several buildings on the south side of the river had been hit by Russian shells, which had also killed some fleeing civilians. To the north, explosions sounded and smoke filled the sky above another nearby suburb, Bucha. Russian forces had stalled there, and waves of residents were now arriving—abandoning their vehicles at the edge of the caved-in bridge, clambering down a high embankment, and crossing the icy currents on a treacherous walkway composed of pallets and scrap lumber. Passenger buses idled, ready to bring displaced Ukrainians to downtown Kyiv. People advanced single file, lugging bags and suitcases; some hugged dogs, cats, or babies to their chests. Elderly men and women with canes and walkers staggered haltingly over the rickety planks.
4. In the first week of March, he goes with two medics to the edge of a neighbourhood called Horenka, where Hospitaller is scouting out a location for a new stabilization point:
Horenka, which bordered Bucha to the east, was the scene of fierce Russian shelling—on our way, as we passed Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles, a mortar exploded on the road ahead of us, rocking the ambulance and obliging us to turn back for a while. It was dark when we finally reached our destination, and bright trails streaked across the night sky. Rockets launched by the Ukrainians flashed in the woods.
5. On March 16, he goes to Kharkiv:
Shelling had laid waste to several square blocks downtown. Offices, shops, restaurants, cafés, university buildings, and an iconic pub named after Ernest Hemingway were in ruins, some encased in ice from broken pipes. An enormous crater yawned outside the regional administrative headquarters, a six-story monolith that had partially withstood the blast. A second missile had destroyed a kitchen in the basement, killing several women. The top of a skull lay nearby. Firefighters with shovels were still digging through the rubble, searching for bodies. A Territorial Defense soldier, code-named I.T., said that twenty-four corpses had already been retrieved. I.T., who had been inside the building during the strike, told me, “I should be dead.” He’d worked as a computer engineer in Kharkiv before the war, and he shared Anastasia’s astonishment at the sudden onset of havoc. “Two weeks ago, I was arguing with my wife, telling her I was bored with my life,” he recalled, with rueful irony. Looking around at the collapsed buildings, the charred husks of vehicles, and the mountains of wreckage, he seemed unable to process it all. “I feel like I’m in a video game,” he said.
The following morning, he’s eating breakfast in the lobby of his hotel when a huge explosion shakes the building:
Its glass façade warped in and out as we all jumped from our chairs. The target had been a government academy for civil-service employees. It wasn’t far, and we arrived there at the same time as a team of rescuers. A whole section of the institution had been reduced to smashed slabs of concrete, bent I-beams, and twisted rebar. A dead man lay next to the building. Another man, caked with dust, was climbing out of a ground-floor window.
6. On March 20, he accompanies Anastasia to a stabilization point in an abandoned maternity hospital in Horenka:
Outside the maternity hospital, there was a statue of a stork, a bundled baby dangling from its beak. An artillery shell had lodged in the pavement; shrapnel had pocked the hospital’s walls and shattered its windows. The ranking Hospitaller was a fifty-two-year-old neurosurgeon code-named Yuzik. A grenade in the Donbas had given him a limp. He walked with a cane and wore a lanyard from which dangled a wooden crucifix and a miniature handgun. Yuzik showed us an examination room that he’d converted into an emergency first-aid station. In a lobby lined with photographs of infants, heart-shaped balloons were still filled with helium; on February 26th, when the Russians first shelled Horenka, six women had given birth in the basement.
7. One night at the maternity hospital, Yuzik, the neurosurgeon, shows Mogelson his “Right Sector” tattoo. This leads to a discussion of Ukrainian far-right groups such as the Azov Battalion and Right Sector. Mogelson writes, “There was no question that leaders of the Azov Battalion and Right Sector championed a chauvinistic, illiberal ethos. Some had openly espoused anti-Semitism, homophobia, and racism.” But he concludes,
Over all, however, such views were more marginal in Ukraine than in Russia—or, for that matter, in the U.S. Yarosh ran for President, in 2014, but received less than one per cent of the vote. In 2019, Right Sector and veterans of the Azov Battalion allied with other far-right groups to field parliamentary candidates and failed to win a single seat. That year, Volodymyr Zelensky, a Russian-speaking Jew whose great-grandparents had died in the Holocaust, was elected President in a landslide.
Valery Zukin, director of the maternity hospital, is also Jewish. When Mogelson mentions depictions of anti-Russian fighters as neo-Nazis to him, he replies, “It’s very big bullshit.”
8. In early April, Mogelson visits Trostyanets, a city in northeast Ukraine, from which the Russians had recently retreated after occupying it for a month. He encounters a middle-aged man, named Oleksandr, walking his bicycle through the mud. Oleksandr mentions to Mogelson that toward the end of the occupation, Russian soldiers had taken refuge in abasement under the train station. They decide to have a look together:
I turned on my phone’s light and followed Oleksandr down a flight of stairs, into a dank network of rooms cluttered with Russian uniforms, boots, and ration packs. Socks were draped over pipes, playing cards lay on tables, and a shocking number of empty vodka, wine, and whiskey bottles were scattered everywhere. I was taken aback by the evidence of heavy communal drinking—this was the fourth war I had covered and the first time I’d ever seen that—but many residents later told me that one of the first things the Russians did in Trostyanets was plunder its supermarkets for booze.
9. A few days later, Mogelson visits Bucha, another village that the Russians occupied for a month before retreating. He describes what he sees on Ivana-Frank Street:
During the month-long Russian occupation, the street, which was close to various Ukrainian-held neighborhoods, had become a front line, and now burnt-out Russian tanks and trucks listed among the remains of splintered houses and overturned or pancaked vehicles. The few people who were around wandered amid the debris with dazed expressions, resembling the survivors of a natural catastrophe.
At the end of Ivana-Franka Street, an elderly woman in a down coat and a shawl beckons to him. He follows her:
I followed her up a steep berm to a set of railroad tracks. They ran parallel to an open culvert where, at the bottom, two male bodies were tangled together, half buried under weeds and trash that had collected during recent rains. The woman said that the victims were brothers, adding, “Everybody loved them. We don’t know why they were killed.”
The brothers, Yuri and Victor, had been in their sixties and had lived in adjacent houses. Locals had referred to them as Uncle Yuri and Uncle Victor. While Bucha was occupied, Yuri had worn a white cloth around his sleeve, to signal neutrality, and baked bread for hungry neighbors. Both men had been shot in the head. Empty beer bottles lay in the grass.
Mogelson sees more victims:
A Ukrainian soldier approached me to say that he’d found another victim. I followed him into the basement of a yellow house, where a rail-thin teen-ager was crumpled on the floor. Blood had leaked from his mouth and nose. The soldier crouched and felt under his skull. “He was shot in the back of the head,” he said.
Outside a small two-story home, Russian soldiers had constructed a makeshift checkpoint from pallets, cinder blocks, and empty ammunition boxes. In the back yard, three more men had been executed. One, shot through the ear, lay on his back against a fence. Another, beside a woodpile, wore a sheepskin-and-leather jacket that was speckled with unmelted snow. He, too, was on his back; a T-shirt covered his face. The third man was prone. Half of his head had been blown off, and his brain had spilled into the dirt.
10. Still in Bucha, Mogelson sees more atrocities:
Down the road from Havryliuk’s place, charred corpses lay beside a garbage pile. Locals said that Russians in a tank had dumped them and lit them on fire. (Later, police would tape off the scene and place yellow markers identifying six victims.) One appeared to be a woman, another a child—though they were so severely mutilated that it was hard to say for sure. Orphaned cats and dogs sniffed around the burned and severed legs and torsos.
He reports, “According to the chief regional prosecutor, more than six hundred bodies were found in the district.”
He views a mass grave behind a church:
Bulky black bags were still heaped in the third pit, and limbs protruded from the mud. The priest, Father Andrii Halavin, was in the nave, repairing windows shattered by projectiles. “It’s not just here,” he told me. “People are buried all over Bucha.”
The priest wants to show him a park:
On the way, we passed a street where Ukrainian drones had wiped out a convoy from the first Russian unit to enter the neighborhood. The turrets, engines, cannons, and tracks of dismembered tanks were strewn across a four-hundred-yard stretch of road. The destruction was extraordinary. Several residents told me that the conduct of later waves of Russian soldiers had been much worse, perhaps out of vengeance for the first.
Curiously, the park is littered with horse manure:
Father Halavin explained that a stable had been bombed. The horses that survived had run wild through the suburb, crazed by the incessant shelling. When I asked where they were now, Halavin shrugged.
Mogelson sees two more bodies:
On a small street across the tracks from Ivana-Franka, an old woman lay face down in her doorway; a trembling dog stood at her shoulder, barking over and over. When I opened a can of tuna, the dog ravenously devoured it. I went inside and found a second woman, also elderly, lying dead on the kitchen floor.
Mogelson writes,
A Russian tank had plowed through the yard across the street. A sniper had occupied the attic of a house next door. Amid such brute lethality, what chance did the sisters have?
11. On April 6, Mogelson is in Bucha, attending a ceremony at the mass grave conducted by Metropolitan Epiphanius, head of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine: “Walking the length of the trench, Epiphanius sprinkled holy water, from a silver basin, over the heaped-up corpses.”
12. The day before the ceremony, Mogelson is in Bucha observing a team of volunteers collect bodies and load them in a van for transport first to the morgue and then to the church. He reports that one of the volunteers, Sergey Matiuk, “estimated that he and his colleagues had picked up about three hundred corpses, at least a hundred of which had had their hands tied behind their backs. ‘A lot of them were tortured,’ he said.”
13. April 7, Mogelson and Anastasia are back in Kyiv. They walk down Andriyivsky Descent. She tells him that the Hospitallers are being sent east. He asks if she’s going with them. She says, “I have to think about it. There is a high chance of being killed.” She returns to Paris. The piece ends, “After going to Paris, Anastasia went back to Ukraine. When we last spoke, she was visiting her family in Kyiv. The Hospitallers were moving out of St. Michael’s. She planned to join them in the east.”
What a great piece! My summary fails to do it justice. It’s one thing to read the news reports about Bucha, Irpin, Kharkiv. It’s quite another to read Mogelson’s first-person account of his visits to these places. He puts us there, on the ground. “The Wound-Dressers” is the best piece on the war in Ukraine that I’ve read so far.
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