Eddy van Wessel's Ukraine War Photos

Photo by Eddy van Wessel, from his Ukraine (2025)

I’ve just finished reading Joshua Yaffa’s absorbing “At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine” (newyorker.com, August 2, 2025. It’s a review of a new photo book by Eddy van Wessel called Ukraine. Yaffa writes, “Most of the photographs in Ukraine were taken on the edges of violence; they are not gory and never prurient but instead are laced with a sense of what van Wessel called ‘the place where life and death touch each other.’ ” 

Yaffa’s piece is illustrated by fourteen photos from van Wessel’s book. They are compelling documents, records of human tragedy and atrocity. Are they more than that? Are they art? Is that a perverse question? They are superb photos. By that I mean they’re beautifully composed, sharply focused, richly detailed. And yet, I feel guilty responding to them this way. Who looks at war photos and sees beauty? I can’t find any precedents. 

Teju Cole touches on the issue in his “A Photograph Never Stands Still” (The New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2017), in which he analyzes his response to Danny Lyon’s “The Cotton Pickers.” He writes,

I hate “The Cotton Pickers.” It’s unpleasant to be confronted with the abasement of these men in the form of a photograph. But I love the photograph for its compositional harmony, which is like the harmony of a chain gang’s song, or like the paradoxical pleasure Northup took in the sight of a cotton field in bloom.

A photograph can’t help taming what it shows. We are accustomed to speaking about photographs as though they were identical to their subject matter. But photographs are also pictures — organized forms on a two-dimensional surface — and they are part of the history of pictures. A picture of something terrible will always be caught between two worlds: the world of “something terrible,” which might shock us or move us to a moral response, and the world of “a picture,” which generates an aesthetic response. The dazzle of art and the bitterness of life are yoked to each other. There is no escape.

Cole supports a binocular response to photos that show “something terrible.” We can be both morally outraged and aesthetically dazzled, he says. I take comfort from his words. They describe my own response to van Wessel’s arresting photos. 

March 3, 2025 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s fascinating “Shadow Warrior.” It tells about Ukrainian spy Roman Chervinsky and some of his audacious exploits. Yaffa starts with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. That story alone makes this piece worth reading. Yaffa writes,

In November, 2023, a suspect emerged. A joint investigation by Der Spiegeland the Washington Post, citing sources in both “Ukrainian and international security circles,” identified Roman Chervinsky, a former Ukrainian intelligence officer, as the operation’s alleged lead organizer. By then, Chervinsky, who had spent two decades directing secret operations for Ukraine’s intelligence services, including assassinations and multiple acts of sabotage, was under house arrest in a suburb of Kyiv. He had been charged in two separate criminal investigations, for extortion and abuse of authority, both of which he denies. Neither case, at least formally, had anything to do with Nord Stream. When I visited him recently, at his apartment, he was unequivocal about his involvement in the Nord Stream attack. “I didn’t do it,” he told me.

Note that “two decades directing secret operations for Ukraine’s intelligence services, including assassinations and multiple acts of sabotage.” Chervinsky is a bold and formidable operative, who, in person, appears to be quite ordinary. Yaffa describes him:

Chervinsky, who is fifty, with a slight frame and a head of thinning hair, wore a loose-fitting polo. An electronic monitor was affixed to his ankle. He made a pot of tea, and we sat at his kitchen table. “You look at him and see this absolutely ordinary person you could imagine standing next to on the bus that morning,” one person who has collaborated with him told me. “Then you come to understand who he is and what he’s capable of.”

Yaffa recounts a number of Chervinsky’s adventures. One of the most memorable is the assassination of a vicious pro-Russian militant named Arsen Pavlov in an elevator in a Donetsk apartment-building. How did he do it? Yaffa tells us:

Chervinsky had another idea. He had enlisted an agent to wear a pizza-delivery uniform and to sneak into Pavlov’s building. The agent reported that Pavlov was usually accompanied by a security guard who stood watch outside Pavlov’s apartment, which was on the seventh floor. But there was one place where the pair were confined and usually alone: the elevator. Chervinsky sent two other agents—a Donetsk local and a former special-forces soldier—to Chernobyl, where, in an abandoned apartment building, they practiced the basics of the operation: prying open the doors to the elevator shaft, jumping down to the compartment’s roof, placing an explosive packet on top and a surveillance microphone in the ventilation slats, and making a quick exit. The whole sequence took about a minute. “They were motivated,” Chervinsky said. “They knew what they were doing and why.”

Back in Donetsk, the pair took up a position down the street from Pavlov’s entryway. When one of Pavlov’s guards came outside for a smoke break, the local agent—“He looked like the most peaceful guy, you’d never suspect him of anything,” Chervinsky said—caught the door before it closed. He and his partner got into the elevator shaft and out of the building without being noticed. A week later, Pavlov arrived at his building and walked inside. The agent from Donetsk called Pavlov’s cell phone and heard, via the hidden microphone, that it was ringing inside the elevator. Pavlov picked up. “Is this Arsen Pavlov?” the agent asked.

“Yes,” Pavlov replied.

“This is the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper—we’d like to interview you.” The agent pressed a button, detonating the explosives. S.B.U. officers in Kyiv had tapped Pavlov’s wife’s phone, and listened in as she frantically called her husband, who didn’t pick up.

Yaffa tells about other Chervinsky operations that are equally daring. I’m allergic to spy fiction. But Yaffa’s “Shadow Warrior” isn’t fiction. It’s real life. I found it riveting. 

Best of 2022: newyorker.com

Photo by Curran Hatleberg, from Joy Williams's "Curran Hatleberg's Florida, Past and Future"

Here are my favourite newyorker.com posts of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Joy Williams, “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future,” August 5, 2022 ("There was stasis; there was silence. Something happened, and then it was as if nothing had transpired after all. Photographs, by their very nature, can capture this frightening, fulsome dichotomy, and the best photographers can capture it again and again. This is Hatleberg’s talent. His images only appear to be forthright, to lack interiority. The depths are all on the surface. The depths have risen to the surface. The photographs testify not so much to “time’s relentless melt” (Susan Sontag’s phrase) as to time’s immutability, containing at once both future and past. Within each moment rests the aftermath." | "There is beer, and there are bees bearding the faces of men; there is a peeling painted sign offering honey, but there is no honey." | "The photo is beautifully composed—the youth’s slim torso, the light on his face, the young woman’s crisp and haughty profile—but what curiously engages us is the pine-tree air freshener on the rearview mirror." | "The standing water in these photographs is its own signifier. The water reflected in Hatleberg’s eye, in the world he is chronicling, is slack, slick with torpor. It lies on the compacted soil of the junk yard and the cement steps of homes. Its oily sheen coats the alleys and the marshes. Only once does it appear fresh, alive, sustaining the figure borne on the river at peace, as if in a dear dream");

2. Naomi Fry, “The Humans of Daniel Arnold’s New York,” January 29, 2022 ("The photographer Daniel Arnold is eerily adept at capturing perfect moments in his pictures, although “perfect,” in his case, doesn’t mean glossy or unblemished. Arnold’s work often traffics in the quotidian and the flawed, the discordant and the mottled; to him, perfection means locating beauty in what might otherwise be overlooked." | "These figures are not conventionally lovely, and yet Arnold is able to make striking images out of scenes that would otherwise fleet by, unnoticed." | "Each portrait is marked by its own seamless if precariously achieved internal logic: the pate of the old man is ringed by oddly spiky strands of white hair, which glint in the sun like a ghostly halo; the jeweller in the window is observed, as if he were an outsized mannequin, by a bystander outside the shop, and the store’s name—Shine Jewelry—seems to echo the purpose of the cleaning fluid at the man’s side; the puffy lips of the woman on her phone clash visually with the lowered lids of her heavily made-up eyes, making her face a sculptural contrast of protrusion and recession." | "It didn’t take long for him to hone his signature style: street portraits whose often-humble subjects are portrayed with a startling formal prowess." | "Arnold chronicles the interstitial weirdness of the city and the people in it, who are often too caught up in the busy stream of existence to pause and reflect on their lives");

3. Alice Driver, “The Impersonal Intimacy of Mexico’s Commuter Buses,” February 18, 2020 ("We begin the journey in a field, looking from afar at two empty buses, their blue-lit interiors glowing against the backdrop of a starless sky. When Cartagena boards his bus, we find ourselves peering out the window at other commuters, who appear trapped under the harsh glare of headlights while they wait for the bus to stop. In these predawn images, the vehicle’s lights cast an artificial lustre over passing people and cars, transforming oranges stacked in a truck bed into a mass of glowing orbs. The photographer shifts his gaze inside, and we’re now nestled among the passengers, like the fruit in the truck." | "As the city emerges, the passengers, stuck in traffic, look out at mobile billboards on the sides of other buses. The advertisements feature light-skinned women selling clothing, shoes, and feminine products. When the sun rises through the window, it feels banal, almost like another billboard");

4. Vince Aletti, “Alec Soth’s Obsessive Ode to Image-Making,” February 1, 2022, ("Soth has often invited us into his process, but, perhaps because it involves obsession, 'A Pound of Pictures' is more revealing than his earlier books. Working on it, he writes, reminded him of when he “first fell in love with photography. The camera was an excuse to wander and dig. | But, once the funeral train idea was put aside, Soth said in the course of a recent walk-through at Sean Kelly, he felt that he could 'liberate' himself simply by “paying attention to what I see”);

5. Kevin Dettmar, "What Drive My Car Reveals On Second Viewing," March 23, 2022 ("Sometimes these intertextual echoes simply provide grace notes. Early in the film, Kafuku is diagnosed with glaucoma in his left eye and prescribed eye drops to reduce the ocular pressure. The first time we see him use them, he’s been driving around Tokyo, staying away from his home, avoiding the talk that his wife has requested—and which he fears will signal the end of, or at least a cataclysmic change in, their relationship. In the parked car, his cassette tape plays, and Chekhov’s Sonya, voiced by his wife Oto, is in the midst of her closing monologue: 'And when our last hour comes we’ll go quietly. And in the great beyond we’ll say to Him that we suffered, that we cried, that life was hard.' And there’s Kafuku, with tears of prescription eye drops rolling down his cheek");

6. Joshua Yaffa, “War Comes to Kyiv,” February 26, 2022 ("It is clear that Russia’s invasion has little to do with the unresolved war in the Donbass, which had been seen as an obvious pretext, and is instead focussed on regime change. To remove Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, and install a pliant, pro-Russia replacement, however, requires taking the capital." | "We pulled up to an apartment block on Lobanovskyi Prospect, a wide boulevard in the city’s southwest. At 8 a.m., a missile strike had torn through the building’s right side, leaving a three-story gash in its façade. Chunks of concrete and iron swayed in the breeze; every now and then, a piece of rubble crashed noisily onto the asphalt below. Glass dusted the street for blocks." | "We came to an overpass not far from the zoo, where Ukrainian soldiers had apparently repelled an attempt by Russian forces to infiltrate an advance force and weapons supply deep into the city. It was, by any measure, a terrible scene. Two burned-out shells of military vehicles stood prone in the street, with burn marks and shards of metal and glass trailing for half a mile. Twisted remains of explosive shells dotted the road. On the pavement, I saw pieces of what I thought might be flesh but tried not to pay too much attention");

7. Keith Gessen, “The One Place in Lviv Where the War Was Never Far Away,” March 29, 2022 ("In Lviv, on the western edge of Ukraine, most of the time the war felt very far away. Its shadow appeared, fleetingly, in the beautiful old cavernous Greek Catholic churches throughout the city, where people filled the pews and wept, and the priests, who perform the Byzantine liturgy in Ukrainian, called for God to protect the nation from its enemies; and in the basements and hallways and underground parking garages where people sheltered during the frequent air-raid sirens, most often at night; and in the old city after 8 p.m., when the curfew was approaching and all the many small restaurants and cafés closed; and in the many schools and nonprofits that had been turned into shelters for the people fleeing the bombing in the east of the country; but, still, most of the time, during the fourth week of the war, people in Lviv followed the bloodshed in the same way that everyone else in the world did: on television." | "At the station, the trains kept coming and people kept spilling out of them: dislocated, terrified, traumatized. | Every hour, a train arrived in the station from the east and disgorged a large group of women and children. It was only women and children, because men were not allowed out of the country, and, anyway, most of the men had chosen to stay home to fight. The names of the places that families were fleeing—Sumy, Kramatorsk, Kharkiv—created a kind of map of the worst fighting, delayed by a couple days, because that’s how long it took them to arrive");

8. Joshua Yaffa, “The Siege of Chernihiv,” April 15, 2022 ("On March 3rd, Russian aircraft streaked overhead and dropped at least eight bombs that slammed into a group of apartment buildings on Viacheslava Chornovola Street, in the center of town. A line of people had formed at a pharmacy nearby—with medicine in short supply, the news of an open pharmacy had led dozens to run over as quickly as they could. Those standing outside were left a gruesome pile of flesh and limbs and ash. Cement walls crumbled into pieces; window glass shattered into a mist that left people cut and bloodied in their apartments. Whole floors collapsed, crushing those underneath. Forty-seven people were killed, making the bombing among the most deadly single attacks of the entire war." | "It was a gray, drizzling morning when I pulled up to the site of the attack. What was once the pharmacy was now a burnt-out shell of red brick. One building had taken a direct hit, leaving an entire wall ripped open, with apartments inside exposed like a doll house. I passed the charred hulls of half a dozen cars, and walked into a courtyard. A giant crater, perhaps ten feet across and more than six feet deep, appeared, as if someone had taken a giant ice-cream scoop to the earth. International investigators, including those from Amnesty International, concluded that the Russian Air Force used FAB-500 bombs in the attack—unguided, Soviet-era munitions that each weigh more than a thousand pounds").

9. Luke Mogelson, “Collecting Bodies in Bucha,” April 6, 2022 ("At the end of Havryliuk’s street, a number of corpses had been severely burned beside a garbage pile. It was hard to say how many there were—charred legs and torsos were severed and scattered—but one victim appeared to be a woman, another a child or an adolescent. Orphaned cats and dogs sniffed around the parts. Several people reported that Russians had brought the bodies on a tank, dumped them, and lit them on fire." | "The relentless fighting in Bucha had hindered Matiuk and his team from conducting their work, and he told me that, since the Russian retreat, they had picked up about three hundred corpses. He estimated that at least a hundred had had their hands tied behind their back. When I asked him where in town he’d encountered such cases, he replied, 'Everywhere' ");

10. Keith Gessen, “How the War in Ukraine Might End,” September 29, 2022 (" 'For a war to end,' Goemans said, 'the minimum demands of at least one of the sides must change.' This is the first rule of war termination. And we have not yet reached a point where war aims have changed enough for a peace deal to be possible. | He saw a future in which Ukraine agreed to a ceasefire and then gradually turned itself into a “military hedgehog,” a prickly country that no one would want to invade").

Best of 2022: Talk

Illustration by João Fazenda, from Laura Preston's "Pipe Dreams"

Here are my favourite “Talk of the Town” pieces of 2022 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Laura Preston, "Pipe Dreams," August 22, 2022 (("Duddy, who has a head of white hair and the slow, smooth baritone of a radio broadcaster, was tapping away at the Stentor Sesquialtera rank, then blowing air through the pipes to see how they sang."| "He pries open the lips with a sculptor’s spatula and taps the toe with a tiny hammer. He uses a headlamp to peer down long pipes, and shoves a jeweller’s ring gauge up the toe hole. All the rest is in the ear."| "The sixty-four-foot Diaphone-Dulzian rank is made from enough sugar pine to build a house, and it produces a quintuple low C, a subharmonic tone that sounds like a chopper circling the building");

2. Laura Preston, “Incidental Masterpieces,” April 4, 2022 ("Among the possible masterpieces being prepared for sale at the Found Object Show were a fragment of a birdhouse; a tar bucket; an electrified toilet seat; a piece of wire from a fence made woolly by escaping sheep; a handmade massage device; a braille bingo board; a pouch of nineteenth-century cheese; a hunk of Styrofoam that looked like nineteenth-century cheese; a street sign reading 'Alone Ave.'; a false beard made of real golden hair; a pile of rubber pocket watches; a pork salesman’s pig-shaped suitcase; a magician’s trick ball; a washing-machine agitator shaped like human hands; a hundred-year-old brick impressed with an animal’s footprint; a forgotten softball grown furry with moss; a copper diving helmet that imploded under immense pressure; and a chicken farmer’s handmade wooden shoes, designed to leave spurious bobcat tracks around coops");

3. Adam Iscoe, “Loyalists,” September 19, 2022 ["2:12 p.m. One exchange: Elena Saldana, an apron-clad woman behind the shop’s counter who has worked at the shop for twenty-five years, said, 'What can I get you?' A bespectacled Brit named Harry King, who has been a hairdresser for celebrities and common people in London and New York, replied, 'A tissue.' Two almost-laughs. One Scotch egg bought by King. 'I haven’t had one in years,' he said. 'I’ll sit and have a little cry eating it watching the telly before I go to the gym.' | 2:15 p.m. More than two dozen white roses, hydrangeas, sweet peas, and orchids; lots of Union Jack bunting; a few commemorative plates; and one framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, all placed in the store window—pushing aside a few dozen jars of Haywards Traditional Onions (flavor: Medium & Tangy), Heinz Sandwich Spread (original), Baxters Sliced Beetroot (“suitable for vegans”), Batchelors Bigga Marrowfat peas ('No. 1 in UK'), and Marmite. Not pushed aside: one urn holding Archie’s ashes"];

4. Nick Paumgarten and Sarah Larson, “We Want the Cup,” May 23, 2022 ("One suture on the bowl’s lip was the result of its being dropped last year by a Tampa grinder named Pat Maroon") ;

5. Nick Paumgarten, “Night Off," November 7, 2022 (“The hockey: someone had got the Gizz a box at Madison Square Garden, for a Rangers-Sharks game. That night, about twenty of them—band, crew, assorted friends—came in hot. In the second period, the jumbotron caught them mugging for the camera, a melee of mustaches. Later, back in Brooklyn, the festivities went deep. A cry from the stage in Queens the following eve: ‘New York City, you fucked us up last night!’ The band’s set felt like a retaliation”); 

6. Adam Iscoe, “Incognito,” October 10, 2022 (“The bassist for the band Khruangbin, Laura Lee, who uses the showbiz moniker Leezy, stepped outside her apartment in Brooklyn. Her pink nails matched her eyeshadow and the roses on her flowered shirt, which she wore with cleanish white Converses, Levi’s, and a fifteen-ninety-nine black wig that she didn’t buy on Amazon”); 

7. Joshua Yaffa, “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” March 14, 2022 ("After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow");

8. David Remnick, “Postscript: Peter Schjeldahl,” October 31, 2022 (“He was someone who, after being lost for a time, knew some things about survival. We met more than twenty years ago. I was looking to hire a full-time art critic. I’d read him for years in the Village Voice. And a voice is what he always had: distinct, clear, funny. A poet’s voice—epigrammatic, nothing wasted”); 

9. Dan Greene, “Stunted Growth,” December 5, 2022 (“He’d brought along his fiancée, the production designer and stylist Lux Wright, and their latte-colored service dog, Wendy, who’d walked in docilely on a gray Ultimate Fighting Championship collar and leash”);

10. David Remnick, “First and Last,” September 12, 2022 (“Gorbachev, of course, made mistakes, serious ones. He tried, for too long, to reconcile irreconcilable ideas and power bases. He failed to reform the K.G.B., which led a coup against him, in August, 1991. And so on. Yet he possessed both the idealism and the political skill to generate something in the world that is, at this dark historical moment of global illiberalism and malevolence, exceedingly rare: a sense of decency and promise. Here was someone raised in a totalitarian system who came to believe in democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. Imagine. The hope is that, around the world, his example will prevail”).

October 24, 2022 Issue

Joshua Yaffa, in his absorbing “Arming Ukraine,” in this week’s issue, writes about the weapons that Ukraine has received from the U.S. and other NATO countries – weapons that have enabled Ukraine not only to defend itself against Russia’s brutal onslaught, but also to mount an effective counter-attack. The shoulder-fired Javelin anti-tank missile, the M777 howitzer, the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) – these are three key pieces of weaponry provided by the U.S. Yaffa says of the M77s:

The M777s allowed Ukraine to mount a defense in the Donbas. “In any war, of course, it’s not only about quantity, but quality,” Roman Kachur, the commander of Ukraine’s 55th Artillery Brigade, said. “There’s a difference when you’re fighting with a modern weapons system or one that hasn’t been significantly updated since the days of the Second World War.” For weeks, his forces had faced heavy artillery fire from a fortified Russian position near Donetsk, a Russian-occupied city in the Donbas. “We couldn’t knock the enemy out of there, because we simply couldn’t reach him,” Kachur told me. Then the M777s arrived. “Within three or four days, the Russians had pulled all their artillery out of there,” he said. “It’s a new situation. We are dictating their behavior to a certain degree.”

He says of the HIMARS:

The first batch of HIMARS appeared on the battlefield late in June. Within days, videos circulated of Russian equipment and munitions depots outside Donetsk exploding in clouds of fire and smoke. Reznikov announced that the military had used HIMARS to destroy dozens of similar Russian facilities. In response, the senior Biden Administration official said, Russian forces “have had to adjust their tactics and maneuvers,” moving command posts and munitions depots out of range—which also diminishes their utility in battle. “They are very mindful of the presence of HIMARS,” the official said.

If you admire the gritty fighting spirit of Ukraine, as I do, you’ll likely appreciate “Arming Ukraine.” It shows the crucial role that Western arms supplies have played in Ukraine’s success on the battlefield. 

On the Terror of Shell Fire

Photo by Tyler Hicks, from The New York Times

Joshua Yaffa, in his recent “The Fight to Survive Russia’s Onslaught in Eastern Ukraine” (newyorker.com, June 7, 2022), writes, “The war has become, as one soldier told me, a game of ‘artillery Ping-Pong.’ ” This line is used as the piece’s tagline: “The war has become, as one Ukrainian soldier put it, a game of ‘artillery Ping-Pong.’ ” To me, this is a woefully inadequate description of eastern Ukraine reality right now. According to The New York Times, “Russian forces are firing about 60,000 artillery shells and rockets each day in the Donbas fighting” (“Shortage of Artillery Ammunition Saps Ukrainian Frontline Morale," June 10, 2022). I know what Yaffa is trying to get at by using the image: the constant back-and-forth exchange of fire. But “artillery Ping-Pong” belies even that, because what Russia is using for a paddle is about the size of an iron skillet, and what Ukraine is using is the equivalent of a plastic spoon.  

To be shelled by massed artillery is absolutely terrifying. E. B. Sledge, in his classic WWII memoir With the Old Breed (1981), wrote,

To be under heavy shell fire was to me by far the most terrifying of combat experiences. Each time it left me feeling more forlorn and helpless, more fatalistic, and with less confidence that I could escape the dreadful law of averages that inexorably reduced our numbers. Fear is many-faceted and has many subtle nuances, but the terror and desperation endured under heavy shelling are by far the most unbearable.

Yaffa, in his piece, conveys this terror when he recounts the experience of a young Ukrainian paratrooper named Vladislav, who’d fought in a battle near Sievierodonetsk:

It was eleven at night when the Russian barrage started. Vladislav was lying in a trench he had dug in the forest floor. Shells from a 152-millimetre artillery gun started to land around him—large-calibre munitions meant to destroy armored vehicles and groupings of infantry. Vladislav described the experience of finding himself under a cloud of fiery metal. “It starts with a loud whistle and you feel something fly past. Then comes the explosion, followed by the blast wave. Last is the shrapnel, which swarms through the air like flies: thpht thpht thpht,” he said, mimicking the sound. “All you want to do is hide, not breathe, dig deeper in the ground.” The earth heaved and branches snapped as shrapnel ripped through the forest. A tree fell and covered Vladislav in his trench. The blast knocked him unconscious. When he came to, he was plagued by nausea and dizziness, which only got worse when he ate his Canadian-supplied M.R.E.s. After two days, he was evacuated to the hospital and treated for a concussion.

“All you want to do is hide, not breathe, dig deeper in the ground” – this, to me, gets us closer to the hellish reality of shell fire. “Artillery Ping-Pong” doesn’t cut it, unless you’re attempting irony. Maybe that’s the effect Yaffa was aiming for. 

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. 

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"

March 14, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter,” an account of his overnight visit with journalist Kristina Berdynskykk in an underground space of a Kyiv metro station. Every night, Yaffa says, Kyiv metro stations “fill with as many as fifteen thousand civilians, from young families with inflatable mattresses to babushkas who remember wartime stories from their parents many decades ago.” He says of Berdynskykk,

Along with her sixty-seven-year-old mother, Galina, and seventeen-year-old niece, Nastya, she had secured a place inside a train car, which tends to be a few degrees warmer than the concrete platform. On every surface, several dozen people lay in various angles of awkward recline, surrounded by rolling suitcases and plastic shopping bags.

Yaffa puts us squarely there, in the makeshift bomb shelter, when the lights go down for the night:

After ten, the lights in the station dimmed. People packed up their food and rolled out sleeping bags, the white glow of phone screens casting flickering shadows on the walls of the train car. I crawled into my folded-up blanket, and felt the cold floor beneath me. The muffled rumble of nearby snores felt almost reassuring, a reminder of all the humanity gathered so tightly together. A woman offered me a pillow.

That passage is inspired!

Photo by Emanuele Satolli, from Joshua Yaffa's "Kyiv Dispatch: Bomb Shelter"

March 7, 2022 Issue

A special shout-out to The New Yorker for its “Days of War,” a portfolio of Mark Neville’s photos, in this week’s issue. Neville’s portraits catch the remarkable strength of Ukrainian character in the face of Russia's vicious invasion. Joshua Yaffa, in his accompanying text, quotes Neville as follows:

“What I find most remarkable is the resilience of the people there,” Neville says. “As a photographer, I’ve been in many places where people are going through incredible trauma. They would reach out to me for help, for money, to get them out, and I would say, ‘The only way I can help is to take your picture and tell your story.’ But with Ukrainians, and with some of the many hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced, no one—not one—has asked me for anything. The only thing they want is to sit me down and tell me what’s happened to them. They have lost people, seen people wounded terribly, seen their streets obliterated. All I want is for people who are looking at these pictures to recognize a version of themselves. Schoolkids taking gymnastics lessons, people just going about their lives despite the shelling and more. For eight years! Can you imagine?”

Mark Neville, "Days of War" (2022)

January 17, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s “The Great Thaw.” It’s about the impact of permafrost thaw on climate change. What I like about it is that it’s set in Siberia. That’s where two-thirds of the world’s permafrost is located. Yaffa visits Yakutia, in northeastern Siberia. His opening paragraph is terrific:

Flying over Yakutia, in northeastern Russia, I watched the dark shades of the boreal forest blend with patches of soft, lightly colored grass. I was strapped to a hard metal seat inside the cabin of an Antonov-2, a single-¬engine biplane, known in the Soviet era as a kukuruznik, or corn-crop duster. The plane rumbled upward, climbing above a horizon of larch and pine, and lakes the color of mud. It was impossible to tell through the Antonov’s dusty porthole, but below me the ground was breathing, or, rather, exhaling.

A bit later, he follows that up with this beauty:

At the moment, though, I was mainly concerned with the stomach-turning lurches the plane was making as it descended in a tight spiral. We had dropped to a few hundred feet above the ground so that Maximov’s colleague, a thirty-three-year-old researcher named Roman Petrov, could take the final sample, a low-altitude carbon snapshot. The plane shook like a souped-up go-kart. Petrov held his stomach and buried his face in a plastic bag. Then I did the same. When we finally landed, on a grass-covered airstrip, I staggered out of the cabin, still queasy. Maximov poured some Cognac into a plastic cup. A long sip later, I found that the spinning in my head had slowed, and the ground under me again took on the feeling of reassuring firmness—even though, as I knew, what seemed like terra firma was closer to a big squishy piece of rotting chicken.

That detail of the plastic cupful of Cognac is excellent; it totally hooked me on the piece. I also relished its first-person perspective:

To get a sense of how permafrost thaw is changing the landscape, I took a drive out of Yakutsk with Nikolay Basharin, a thirty-two-year-old researcher at the Permafrost Institute. 

Three days later, I caught a flight on a propeller plane leaving Yakutsk for Chersky, a speck of a town on the Kolyma River, near the delta where it empties into the East Siberian Sea. 

One day in Chersky, I visited a site along the river managed by a German research team from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. 

Earlier in the summer, I visited Yamal, a peninsula that juts into the Kara Sea like a crooked finger.

One day in Chersky, Zimov showed me a site where he had tried to mimic the result of a fire on the permafrost. 

Zimov and I were each carrying a long metal probe, the permafrost scientist’s classic field tool. 

Yaffa is in Ian Frazier country. Frazier wrote one of my all-time favourite books – Travels in Siberia (2010), excerpts of which appeared in The New Yorker (August 3, 10 & 17, 2010). In that book, Frazier visits the Academy of Sciences headquarters in Yakutsk, where he views, among other things, a mammoth leg, “with its well-preserved long hair.” Yaffa, in his piece, also views (and actually handles) a mammoth leg. His mammoth leg is in Yakutsk’s Mammoth Museum, so I don’t think it’s the same leg that Frazier saw, but you never know. How many intact mammoth legs can there be? In my favourite scene in “The Great Thaw,” Yaffa writes,

Fedorov brought me to a large walk-in freezer, where lumps of flesh and fur were piled on metal shelves; the crescent bend of a tusk was unmistakable. As Fedorov explained, these mammoth remains, dug up across Yakutia, were being stored at zero degrees Fahrenheit, awaiting further scientific study. The space was cramped and frigid—so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought. I picked up a leg that once belonged to the Maly Lyakhovsky mammoth, a thick stump with reddish-brown hair. “Look, its footpad is very well traced,” Fedorov said. “You can see its toenails.”

That “so this is what it’s like to be locked in the permafrost, I thought” is inspired. The whole piece is inspired! I enjoyed it immensely.

October 16, 2017 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Joshua Yaffa’s absorbing “House of Shadows,” an exploration of the rich, tragic history of an old Moscow apartment building called the House on the Embankment. Yaffa writes, “No other address in the city offers such a compelling portal into the world of Soviet-era bureaucratic privilege, and the horror and murder to which this privilege often led.” The House on the Embankment is massive, “a self-contained world the size of several city blocks.” Yaffa describes it as “a mishmash of the blocky geometry of Constructivism and the soaring pomposity of neoclassicism.” Yaffa speaks from personal knowledge of the place; he lives there. In his piece, he describes his apartment (“Successive renovations had left the place without much of the original architectural detail, but as a result it was airy and open: less apparatchik, more IKEA. Tall windows in the living room looked out over the imperious spires of the Kremlin”), talks to friends and neighbors (“We spoke about the atmosphere in the building back then, what Tolya’s grandparents must have been thinking as the bright and just world they thought they had built began to cannibalize itself”), and recounts the building’s nightmarish history:

Volin, I learned, kept a suitcase packed with warm clothes behind the couch, ready in case of arrest and sentence to the Gulag. His wife burned an archive of papers dating from his time as a Bolshevik emissary in Paris, fearing that the work would brand him a foreign spy. They gave their daughter, Tolya’s mother, a peculiar set of instructions. Every day after school, she was to take the elevator to the ninth floor—not the eighth, where the family lived—and look down the stairwell. If she saw an N.K.V.D. agent outside the apartment, she was supposed to get back on the elevator, go downstairs, and run to a friend’s house.

Interestingly, even though Yaffa lives in the House on the Embankment and is intensely aware of its traumatic history, he’s not weighed down by it. When a former tenant says to him that the building “stands on mournful ground, and its residents are doomed to carry a very difficult sorrow,” he writes,

I, like many of my acquaintances in the building, don’t necessarily feel the burden of such heavy symbolism. A friend of mine, Nina Zavrieva, a consultant and tech entrepreneur, grew up in an apartment that first belonged to her grandfather, a lawyer who worked in the Politburo secretariat. Nina, who is thirty, told me that from a young age she was familiar with the building’s rich history. “I knew all this in theory, but I never really felt it,” she said. “I never internalized it.” I asked her if anything about the building felt different after all these years. She said that she wasn’t sure, then remembered something: the color of the façade had changed. “At some point, it was pink, then it became bright gray, but really I don’t think I notice anymore.”

I never really felt it. I find this detachment from the traumatic history of the building they live in fascinating. Unlike, say, W. G. Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn, immersed in melancholy contemplation of the past (“Everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life,” etc.), Yaffa and his friend Nina show a tonic pragmatism. The House on the Embankment isn’t a ruin; it’s a functioning apartment building. Life goes on.