March 21, 2022 Issue

What’s it like to live in Ukraine right now? Joshua Yaffa’s “The Siege,” in this week’s issue, tells us in detail after immersive detail. Here, for example, is his description of conditions at Kyiv’s Ohmatdyt children’s hospital:

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.

And here’s his depiction of Kyiv’s International Square, “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.

Everywhere Yaffa goes, he talks with people, noting down their comments. For example:

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.”

My take-away from Yaffa’s absorbing piece is that Ukrainians are an amazing people – united and determined to survive Putin’s brutal invasion. The final paragraph says it all:

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.

Photo by Jérôme Sessini, from Joshua Yaffa's "The Siege"