May 23, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “The Captive City,” a report on how the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol fell under Russian control. Here’s a sample:

The next morning, Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers were in the streets. Soldiers seized city hall, the regional administration building, and the headquarters of the Ukrainian security service, the S.B.U. “Russian units were on the march and, without encountering any resistance, entered Melitopol,” the Russian Defense Ministry declared. The troops posted flyers around town, which included a message from Vla¬dimir Putin to the citizens of Ukraine: “Today’s events relate not to the desire to curtail the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people but to the defense of Russia itself from those who have taken Ukraine hostage and are using it against our country and its people. I call for your coöperation so that we can quickly turn this tragic page and move forward together.”

It takes incredible guts to stand up to the Russians. Anyone who does so, as Yaffa shows, runs the risk of being abducted, tortured, and murdered. Yaffa goes to Zaporizhzhia, the first destination for people fleeing southern Ukraine, and talks with three citizens of Melitopol who refused to cave. One of them is Melitopol’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov, who was imprisoned by the Russians, interrogated, and pushed to transfer his authority to a pro-Russian city-council member. Yaffa writes,

Fedorov took the opportunity to ask what they were doing in his city. They had three explanations, he remembers: to defend the Russian language, to protect Ukrainians from Nazis, and to stop authorities from mistreating veterans of the Second World War. “It was all funny and absurd,” Fedorov said. He told the soldiers guarding him that ninety-five per cent of Melitopol’s residents speak Russian; that he has lived in the city all his life and has never seen a Nazi; and that, by his count, thirty-four veterans live in Melitopol, and he knows just about all of them personally, has their numbers saved in his phone, and tries to visit them often. But his captors seemed to take their imagined picture of an anti-Russian, fascist-¬ruled Ukraine seriously. “They repeated it like a mantra, over and over, as if they were zombies,” Fedorov told me.

An air of menace, even violence, was never far away. At night, Fedorov could hear the screams of people being tortured. The Russian soldiers said that they were Ukrainian saboteurs who had been captured in the city after curfew. At one point, Fedorov listened as a man in an adjoining cell shouted in agony; it sounded as if someone was breaking his fingers. “This was happening one metre away,” Fedorov said. “What would stop them from coming to my cell and doing the same thing?”

But Fedorov holds out. On March 16, he’s freed; the Russians exchange him for nine Russian prisoners of war. 

Yaffa visits the parking lot of a big-box store in Zaporizhzhia, which serves as a “one-stop welcome-and-processing center for those coming from occupied territories in the south.” He writes,

While hanging around the Epicenter’s parking lot, I met the members of a convoy of buses and cars that had managed to depart Melitopol. Space on the buses was so limited that some people rode in the cargo holds of tractor trailers. Just about every car was stuffed with more people than it could sensibly fit; parents had held their children in their laps as they jostled along the road. Many drivers had taped handmade signs reading “children” to the windows.

Bogdan and Yulia Shapovalov, who made the drive with their two kids, were initially from Donetsk, but in 2014, after the Russian-backed militias took over, they fled to Melitopol. They came to like the city’s parks and schools, its European feel. “We didn’t want to leave, but it became hard to breathe,” Yulia told me. They were now planning to head to western Ukraine. “We’re ready to go back to Melitopol,” Yulia said. “But only if it’s part of Ukraine.”

Yaffa’s “The Captive City” is the latest in his series of dispatches on the war in Ukraine. Others are “A Sleepless Night of Russian Airstrikes in Ukraine” (February 24, 2022), “War Comes to Kyiv” (February 26, 2022), “Days of War” (March 7, 2022), “The Siege” (March 21, 2022), and “The Siege of Chernihiv” (April 15, 2022). All are excellent.