Nobody wants to hear this

The authorities​ in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, have been de-Russifying its street names. Instead of commemorating an avant-garde Russian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s, the name of the street where I stayed last month now remembers an avant-garde Ukrainian communist writer who killed himself in the 1930s: Vladimir Mayakovsky Street is now Mykola Khvylovy Street. I’d been reading some of Khvylovy’s stories on the long train journey from Poland. His bitter, hallucinogenic I (Romance), told from the point of view of a Soviet Ukrainian secret policeman in post-revolutionary Kharkiv who executes his own mother, has atmospheric echoes of the wartime Kharkiv of a century later – a city under siege, unreliable electricity, the sound of shelling in the distance – and differences from it. Kharkiv is under no immediate threat of falling to the Russians, and despite the bombardment and boarded-up windows, the city is mainly bright and well-kept. Where Khvylovy’s story resonates with Kharkiv today is in his motive for writing it, his horror that his enemies – Russian imperialism, global capitalism, localist small-mindedness – were as strong as ever, but the causes he believed in (international socialism, Ukraine, art and human kindness) were being undermined by the institutions created to fight for them.

Something like this is happening in the Kharkiv of 2024. Vladimir Putin is still the enemy, and shows no sign of losing; but more and more, the war itself, the instrument that was supposed to deliver Ukraine from Putin’s cruelty, is the enemy too. There is still reverence for the Ukrainian army, for its brave soldiers, as a noble ideal, but the perception has grown that the army is shackled to the selfishness and stagnation of Ukraine’s regressive side, the corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and small-town cronyism that fermented in the 1990s with the combination of late Soviet decay and foreign biznes. That was the first obstacle to progress in post-independence Ukraine, long before Putin came along; it turns out still to be a force, a dead weight.

My visit to Kharkiv coincided with an intensified trawling of the streets for army recruits. The Ukrainian army is chronically short of soldiers to hold back the steady, creeping Russian advance across eastern Ukraine. Checkpoints and patrols, supposedly intended to ensure that people’s military details are up to date in the national conscription database, are widely believed, against the letter of the law, to be taking men straight to medicals, and from there to military training and despatch to the front. As much as they may admire the courage of their army, the men of Kharkiv fear, and in many cases actively avoid, having to serve in it.

After the 11 p.m. curfew on my first night in the city, when I was thinking about going to bed, ignoring, as people tend to do, the air raid warnings, I heard a faint, brief rumble, no louder than the trams in the street outside. The lights went out. The building’s generator kicked in; after about half an hour, mains power was restored. I found out later that the Russians had hit the southern suburbs with a glide bomb, damaging buildings and the electricity distribution system and injuring more than a dozen people. Something similar happens most nights, and the city has a practised response. Emergency services, utility repair crews, housing officials and road repair teams flood the scene. Kharkiv has a group of unpaid volunteers known as Dobrobat who until that night would drop everything to drive out to the scene of a bombing and board up the windows shattered by the blast – helping to protect homes and possessions, especially with winter approaching. That night, nobody from Dobrobat turned up. As Pavlo Filipenko, the founder and head of the Kharkiv branch of the organisation, explained to me, they were afraid that they would be intercepted by agents of the TsiKa – the Ukrainian acronym for the military recruitment office.

Ukraine’s new mobilisation law came into effect in May. Before then, Filipenko said, volunteers on their way to an emergency only had to show their Dobrobat ID cards to be waved through at TsiKa checkpoints. Now they have no such protection. Municipal workers – the engineers who fix power lines, for instance – get a bron, a chit certifying their deferment from the call-up. Dobrobat volunteers don’t. There are some general exemptions, including full-time students, teachers and carers, but otherwise any man aged 25 to 60 is liable (women do serve, but aren’t subject to general conscription). According to the law, men must be given written notification of their imminent call-up: Filipenko, like many others I spoke to, says this doesn’t always happen. Three Dobrobat volunteers have already been lifted by TsiKa on their way to call-outs. All three, Filipenko said, had accepted their lot and are now serving, but the remaining volunteers are wary and resentful.

‘We’ve done more than a hundred thousand hours of voluntary unpaid work in the city and the region, which is a huge amount,’ Filipenko told me. ‘Whenever a rocket or a bomb lands, we head out and seal up broken windows. Volunteers drop their paid work, leave their families, abandon their domestic duties, and go out and help others. And as of today we consider we’re being treated unfairly … We say: “We’re volunteers, we help people, how would you get by without us?” They don’t listen … What this means in practice was shown on Sunday when they attacked Kharkiv. Not a single volunteer went to help. Because they were afraid the TsiKa would take them. It’s not that we’re afraid, in principle, to serve in the army. We think it’s unfair to us. Because you have all these people who as the war goes on haven’t been sitting at home, buying new cars, carrying on their normal pre-war lives, but have been working for nothing, helping people.’

Filipenko is a weary, dapper, prosperous-looking 44-year-old, his beard already silvered. Outside Dobrobat he has a construction business, building large-scale projects like apartment blocks. Unlike most Ukrainian men his age, he isn’t obliged to stay in the country and wait to be called up. As the father of three children, he’s exempt from mobilisation, and is free to leave if he wants. ‘I could have taken my three children at the beginning of the war and gone abroad. And there, abroad, I could have sympathised with Ukraine, gone around with placards, worn an embroidered peasant shirt, sat in Canada or Los Angeles and been a super patriot. But I didn’t. I’ve been here since the war began. I reckon I’ve done my duty to my motherland in full, even without serving in the army.’

I asked Filipenko why he thought the TsiKa was seizing recruits without going through the motions of serving them call-up papers and giving them a date to report for duty. Was it because they thought the called-up wouldn’t turn up? Some would, some wouldn’t, he said. He reckoned the main reason was that too many recruits, given a few days’ grace, would get in touch with contacts in the army so that they could join a particular unit – one of the ‘progressive brigades’, with officers who treat soldiers fairly, a slick PR operation, good top brass connections and sources of funding and supply outside the official channels. How then would the recruiters find fresh troops for less glamorous units, under-manned, under-equipped, overstretched, clinging grimly to a vital string of trenches? ‘This way, there’s no choice,’ Filipenko said.

Earlier this year one of the principal ballet dancers at Kharkiv’s national theatre was detained on his way to rehearsals. Like half of the theatre’s artistes and production staff, he’d been assigned a bron, but he hadn’t been issued with the official paper version. As the theatre’s artistic director, Armen Kaloyan, told me, the first they knew about it was when the dancer managed to call in an SOS: he’d already had an army medical and was in Kyiv, about to be taken to training camp. After some frantic ringing round, the performer was returned to the dance studio.

According to Kaloyan, the dancer was seized under an earlier system, and the TsiKa’s latest Kharkiv checkpoints aren’t a pressgang, but rather, as the official version has it, an operation to make sure men are keeping their military registration details up to date. I met one young man just after he’d been nabbed by the TsiKa; even though he’d failed to update his address on the mobilisation mobile app, they let him go, pending a medical. Still, he’d retained a lawyer.

I had been struck by the emptiness of Kharkiv’s streets when I arrived. Sure, it was a Sunday, and the city’s population has shrunk from its pre-war figure of 1.4 million, but it seemed extraordinarily quiet. A couple of days later I was sitting on a bench on Freedom Square with the architectural historian Maxim Rosenfeld. It was a mild, cloudless autumn afternoon; through the trees we could see the Derzhprom building, a Constructivist masterpiece (a few days after I left Kharkiv, the Russians bombed it).

I said to Rosenfeld that in spite of everything the city seemed calm, under control.

‘Calm has many factors,’ he replied. ‘A person gets used to certain challenges. Week follows week for a while. And then new circumstances appear.’ He gestured at the deserted square. ‘Do you know why it’s so empty?’

‘No, I don’t know.’

‘There’s a very serious operation of the recruitment office under way.’

‘You say the square is empty, but I don’t know how it should look,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s always like this.’

‘Essentially, right now, most men are sitting at home, so as not to have to go through the checkpoints,’ Rosenfeld said. ‘Just when you came, this began. A week ago it was busy, everyone was strolling around, it was all going on here, people were dancing. That’s how the mind works, it can deal with any situation, it can get used to anything, and as soon as it gets used to it, something else comes along.’

One day​ I went to meet Dmitry Nabokov, a 37-year-old veteran of the fighting in Donbas. As I came out of the metro, I saw a tall, preoccupied man in glasses get out of the car he’d just parked. He walked with a slight limp. I glanced down at his ankle, just visible under the hem of his trousers, and saw it had been replaced by a slender black rod. We were both heading for the same rehabilitation centre. I guessed it was Nabokov. In January he’d been coming to the end of his first year of service in the army’s 58th Brigade when he stepped on a mine. He was with a group assigned to pick up supplies. The path they took was supposed to have been checked and cleared, but the sappers had been careless. The point man of Nabokov’s group passed the mine without seeing it. Nabokov came next, and set it off. He never lost consciousness: he looked down after the explosion and saw part of his foot was missing. He was evacuated to a hospital in central Ukraine. The surgeons managed to save his knee, but he lost his foot and his ankle, and now walks with a prosthesis he’s still adapting to.

The war has left an enormous number of amputees in Ukraine and Russia. So many that, given the much greater difficulty of coping with an above-the-knee amputation, Ukrainian amputees and physios joke that people who’ve lost a foot are faking it. (When Olena Shmidt, from a charity that helps injured soldiers, told me this, Nabokov laughed.) The Western companies that make the best prostheses are working flat out. One of them, the German firm Ottobock, is supplying both Russia and Ukraine, a fact Ukrainians blame for the delay in the supply of spare parts, although I wondered if the Palestinians and Sudanese also have a place in the line.

Nabokov, a Kharkiv native, married without children, worked as a junior supermarket manager before he became a soldier. He wasn’t pressed into service at a street checkpoint. He waited for the process to absorb him. ‘I didn’t sign up when the war began. I was afraid, I suppose. But I was even more afraid of running away. I knew it was going to happen. So I got my call-up papers, I was mobilised, I went, I didn’t hide from the recruiters.’

I asked him how he felt about men avoiding the call-up, and he told me about three Kharkiv friends. The first one was mobilised and ended up serving on the front. One day Nabokov got a message from him: he’d deserted. ‘I’m ashamed to say it,’ his friend wrote, ‘but I can’t take it any more.’ He’s now in hiding somewhere in Ukraine. ‘I know what it’s like there,’ Nabokov said. ‘I know how your nervous system can break. Your mind goes off somewhere and wanders there for a long time. What am I supposed to say to him? That he’s a bad guy? I’m not going to say that. He was there. He went through it.’

The second friend has a metal plate in his skull from a medical procedure carried out before the war. In a well-run recruitment process he wouldn’t be at risk of being sent to the front, but, Nabokov agreed, Ukraine does not have a well-run recruitment process; he couldn’t argue with his friend’s fear that they would take him off to basic infantry training, and from there to the trenches, despite his old injury. So this friend took time off work and is hiding at home, as is the third friend, who quit his job to avoid getting conscripted, declaring that he was ‘not going to die for Zelensky’.

‘In a way I understand each of them, and in a way I don’t,’ Nabokov said. He has two brothers-in-law who continue to serve even though both are, as he put it, going out of their minds, one with a bad commander, the other simply quailing at the death and injury around him. ‘You hear people crying, “I wasn’t born for war!”’ he said. ‘Well, show me one ultrasound scan where you see a baby in the womb with an automatic rifle. Just one. None of us is born for war. We’re all born to live. But we’ve got this situation, and we have to [serve].’

It’s not only the prospect of death and injury that makes Ukrainian men hide from the recruiters, or flee abroad. Footage of the war has taken on an ever more hellish quality, with the tools available to humans becoming more primitive (Russian troops have been filmed riding to battle on electric scooters) and the drones becoming more diverse and elaborate. Drones are now fighting drones; they’re also – a Ukrainian innovation, already being copied by Russia – dropping molten thermite, a substance that melts everything and everyone it touches, on enemy positions. Potential conscripts fear that, despite efforts at reform, the mobilisation system is corrupt, with the rich and influential able to find ways round it; that the army doesn’t value skills, but is only looking for cannon fodder; that if you lose limbs, you can’t count on being looked after.

Ukrainian society is still absorbing the latest revelations of widespread corruption in the Soviet-era medical commissions that certify people, both civilian and military, as disabled. Without the commissions’ say-so, disabled people, including veterans, get neither compensation nor a disability pension. The structure of the commissions offered multiple opportunities for enrichment. Bent officials could sell fake disability certificates, or give them out as favours, to people who would then receive pensions for life. They could also demand bribes from genuinely disabled people for a faster or more favourable determination of their case.

In early October, a senior medical commission official in Kharkiv was arrested and charged with taking bribes of thousands of dollars to give people facing mobilisation fake disability certificates, allowing them to get deferments and to travel abroad. At about the same time, the head of the medical commission in the western region of Khmelnitsky, Tetyana Krupa, was arrested on suspicion of corruption, and $6 million in cash was seized from her home. A photo emerged of Krupa’s husband lying on a bed with wads of $100 bills. It came out that the commission staff were part of a web of mutually protecting officials that encompassed the courts and prosecutors. Krupa’s son was head of the region’s pension fund. Krupa herself represented Zelensky’s party on the local council. Ukrainian journalists found that an unlikely 28 per cent of the region’s prosecutors had been registered by Krupa’s commission as having a class 2 disability, with a corresponding invalid’s pension – the same degree of disability as a soldier like Nabokov whose foot has been blown off by a mine. Meanwhile, ten months after his war injury, Nabokov has received no compensation and no pension, and, since he was demobilised in the summer, no pay. So far the only reward for his sacrifice is cheap travel (in a city where wartime public transport is free) and discounts on utility bills. He’s confident he’ll get his pension and compensation eventually, but the after-effects of the corruption scandal are likely to delay this. The medical commission system is in disarray, the hold-up all the more painful for the contrast with the way Nabokov has been treated by the medical and rehab system since his injury. He’s been well looked after. No doctor demanded he buy a particular expensive drug or asked for a bribe – ‘except the occasional out of pocket expenses, and that was pennies’. Rehab has been carried out in well-equipped commercial gyms and funded by a mixture of foreign and local charity and state money.

The situation is a miniature of the tridentine internal politics of Ukraine since the Orange Revolution of 2004: the archaic, populist, nationalist-patriotic tendency; the geeky, bourgeois strand, people who aspire to what they see as a liberal European ideal of personal freedom, communal fairness and the rule of law; and the cynical, apolitical, transactional, personal loyalty-based matrix of oligarchs, civil servants of varying degrees of integrity, and those who depend on them. Whereas elsewhere in post-communist Eastern Europe the nationalists and the cynics have joined forces, the counter-reaction in Ukraine to decades of Putinist gaslighting, trolling, contempt and open violence has been to unite the nationalists and the liberals and to limit the cynics’ room for manoeuvre. It was the liberal-patriotic impulse that sent Nabokov to war and cared for him when he lost his foot; but the cynics still sit at the table, and play a large role in the way the state is run.

‘The doctors who treated me know my situation better than anyone,’ Nabokov said. ‘They had me in front of them the whole time, all this eight months. They understand very well that I’m an invalid. But they can’t give me the right piece of paper, because this piece of paper has to come from different people, who’ll be seeing me for the first time, and have no idea what I’ve gone through up to then. That’s the problem. I would say it’s a mutated Soviet system.’

As well as​ the men of Kharkiv, most of its children are staying at home. Schools and kindergartens had barely resumed something like a normal schedule after the pandemic when Russia attacked and they had to close again. From the first week of the war, when it seemed likely Kharkiv would fall to the invaders, until today, when Russian forces have been pushed back out of easy artillery range, the city has been subject to daily attacks. The schools have taken a pounding. One lycée I visited, school number 134, specialises in teaching German. The grand 1930s building, with white pilasters on its three-storey yellow façade, survived the Second World War intact. Little more than the façade remains now; it stands windowless and hollow, the classrooms rubble, a shell-hole two metres across punched in one gable wall. When war broke out, it had 635 pupils, aged between six and seventeen (Ukrainian schools don’t split cohorts into primary and secondary). The headteacher, Tatyana Maltseva, said the school’s nominal roll has shrunk to around 470, of whom 20 are elsewhere in Ukraine, 240 in Kharkiv and 210 abroad. The children all study remotely; those living in exile try to fit in extra lessons from school 134 – Ukrainian language learning, for instance – around the school day in their host countries.

It would take weeks to visit every ruined or damaged school. Another one I went to, school number 17, had been hit on three different days. A shell landed while humanitarian aid was being handed out. The last time it was hit, in June 2022, was with a nuclear-capable Iskander missile. A pensioner, the mother of one of the teachers, was killed. She lived nearby and, with a group of elderly friends, had been in the habit of using the school’s bomb shelter to spend the night in; all the windows in their flats had been shattered, they lived on the twelfth floor and nights were frightening. The school director, Irina Kaseko, told me that the victim had been unlucky enough to have left the shelter briefly to sit on the steps when the missile, which flies too fast to give any audible warning of its approach, struck. Her friends, who stayed in the shelter, survived.

Most of the 45-year-old building’s concrete supports and floors are intact, but many of its exterior walls and windows are gone; the interiors have been destroyed, the gym, the canteen, the library, the museum dedicated to the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin. With the full support of the parents, according to Kaseko, the school transitioned from Russian-medium language teaching to Ukrainian in the mid-2010s, but until the invasion Russian language and literature were still taught as optional subjects. Although Russian is still widely spoken in Kharkiv, it is no longer taught there. ‘Parents had no desire for it,’ Kaseko said. ‘Russia bombed our school three times.’

‘Did you know what an Iskander missile was before the war?’ I asked.

‘Of course not.’

There’s a Ukrainian word, prylit (prilyot in Russian), that you hear constantly in Kharkiv. It’s a rare example of a word that not only went from one common usage to another overnight but whose new usage explains the absolute redundancy of the old. It means ‘arrival by air’, and it only ever used to have meaning for Ukrainians as the word on the arrivals board at airports – a signifier of travel in an open world. Since the day the war broke out, there has been no air travel to or from Kharkiv, but the word also means ‘arrival by air’ in the sense of ‘strike of an airborne military projectile’. Three arrivals at school number 17 have left a bare, dusty ruin where 1200 children used to learn. The school specialises in English teaching: among the few remnants of peacetime are cheerful, shrapnel-pocked murals portraying an idealised Britain, a red phone box, Big Ben, the Gherkin.

A 15-year-old pupil there, Dima, was killed at a bus stop by a shell exploding. A former pupil was killed fighting on the front in Donetsk; another, while working as a journalist. Kaseko had seemed calm, cheerful and confident when I met her. She quickly grew absent, serious and tearful when we spoke about the deaths of young men. Her son is also serving at the front.

One of the responses to the bombardment has been to move underground. Some children have their classes in metro stations. Behind a school in the Industrialny district, in the middle of an open space of raked earth where a stadium used to be, a tiny grey hut, no larger than a small garden shed, stands by itself among the maple trees. Through the door, two flights of stairs lead down to a blast barrier, the hum of air conditioning and a long, brightly lit, gleamingly clean white corridor with classrooms leading off it. Yelena Zbitska, the education official who showed me round, wouldn’t say exactly how deep underground it was: I estimated about eight metres. Here, under strong, artificial, windowless illumination, glaring off the white walls, more than a thousand children go to classes in two shifts, safe from glide bombs. The underground school has its own generator and air filtration system. There’s a canteen, a room for children with special educational needs, a computer classroom and a playroom where children are taught to recognise the shells, mines, grenades and cluster munitions they are likely to stumble across. The school was built by the city and fitted out with the help of foreign donors, mainly American. More underground schools are being built, but for the time being, this is the only one, and demand is high. The teachers are proud of their subterranean novelty, but wish they didn’t need it. ‘We want to crawl out from underground and go back to our old schools,’ one of them said.

The menace of Russian bombs, missiles and drones forced the closure of the network of municipal kindergartens, obliging parents to turn to a growing number of private providers. Some simply mind a handful of children in their flats; at the luxury end, the most desirable and expensive private kindergartens come with their own bomb shelters, and corresponding peace of mind. When I met Katya Kashtanova, the manager of Honey Academy, the twenty children in the kindergarten’s care, aged between two and six, were asleep underground. ‘It’s their nap time,’ she said. ‘We always put them to sleep in the bomb shelter. It’s safer and we don’t need to wake them up to move them if there’s an alert. Whenever the air raid siren goes off, we go straight down to the bomb shelter, and it’s equipped for lessons. In fact it’s got everything we have up here on the ground floor. We just tell the children we’re going downstairs and we’re going to carry on learning there … We try to minimise stress for them by taking them down as quickly as possible and carrying on as if nothing was happening.’

I saw a few children out and about while I was in Kharkiv, but there is a general phobia of gatherings, and few opportunities for the children who remain in the country to socialise. ‘We try to make their lives brighter in the hope their memories of childhood will have at least something of warmth and happiness, with the collective life of the kindergarten,’ Kashtanova said, ‘and not just these arrivals, the explosions and so on.’

The national opera and ballet theatre, undamaged – at the time of writing – since the shattering of many of its windows in the first attacks of 2022, has begun staging performances again. Most of its 800 employees returned from exile in the EU this summer. But it isn’t thought safe to use its 1500-seat main auditorium, with its vast stage, the second largest in Europe. When the general director, Igor Tuluzov, showed me round, two enormous clocks were in the wings, props for a season of Massenet’s Cinderella that had just premiered when the war broke out. Nothing has been performed on the big stage since the company danced Giselle on the eve of the invasion. The theatre had been enjoying critical success with bold productions that drew audiences from other parts of Ukraine: a lavish setting of Khachaturian’s Spartak and a new opera, Embroidered: The King of Ukraine, about the early 20th-century Habsburg adventurer and Ukrainophile Archduke Wilhelm, with music by Alla Zahaikevych and a libretto by the ubiquitous Serhiy Zhadan. Now performances have gone underground, to a makeshift stage in the theatre’s bombproof basement, capable of seating as many people as the national theatre had on stage for the culmination of Spartak – three hundred, although Tuluzov said they hope to raise it to four hundred.

‘You felt everyone had hungered for this, that it was very important that full cultural life returned to Kharkiv,’ he told me. ‘We saw the faces of these people, the eyes of these people, tears sometimes, the delight.’ That evening, I went to the first preview performance of an experimental ballet in the underground theatre; because of the 11 p.m. curfew, the show started at five, and when I left two hours later, although the streetlights were bright, the bustle of the centre of a big city, the sense of a night life, was absent.

Khvylovy​ was a Ukrainian nationalist and socialist, whereas his contemporary Mikhail Bulgakov was a bourgeois who regretted the fall of the Russian empire, was sceptical of Ukrainian pretensions to autonomy and put up with communism because he had to. During the Terror, Bulgakov got a phone call from Stalin that was almost friendly; Stalin publicly denounced Khvylovy by name. This makes it all the more striking that the mood of Khvylovy’s Kharkiv in I (Romance) and Bulgakov’s contemporaneous Kyiv in The White Guard coincide: they share the sense of a great modern city with its complex threads of employment, supply and pleasure having its cosmopolitan existence while vaguely conscious of the war at its perimeter, of the rumble of shelling in the distance, of desperate battles being fought in the infinite green flatlands among towns and villages with their baffling rural points of view. Today, despite the daily bombs, the unnaturally quiet streets and the knowledge that the Russian border is only thirteen miles from the city’s northern outskirts, to arrive in Kharkiv on the direct train from Poland is somehow to feel that Europe has stretched out an arm to place you in one of its urban domains. To make the short journey east from Kharkiv into the countryside, however, is to feel that you are crossing over into another zone altogether, a zone of ruin, uncertainty and erosion.

One morning I left the hotel early and walked down Sumska Street to the University metro station. Kharkiv is, or at least was, a city of students; one of the ways the war has changed it was to decrease its ethnic diversity radically, as thousands of overseas students, many from South Asia, fled the country. On Sumska Street Art Nouveau façades decorate grand town houses built for the wealthy in the remarkable construction frenzy under the city’s first 20th-century mayor, Oleksandr Pohorilko. The destruction of the current war is visible here, but less obviously than in the city’s northern suburbs. An untouched block, then another, an exquisitely restored Art Nouveau house, a damaged building with plywood covering the windows, a building that took a direct hit and is, behind a veil of building wrap, not much more than rubble. I visited one chi-chi café, full of fragile-looking young people pecking at laptops, several times before I noticed the shrapnel scars on the doorframe. Here in the centre high-end commerce persists, albeit with low footfall: fancy boutiques, restaurants, hairdressers, interior designers. The look is trainers, tracksuit bottoms, a puffa gilet, lip filler, or else long black coat and no makeup-makeup.

The dominant note on advertising hoardings is military – recruitment efforts not by the armed forces as a whole, but by individual brigades. ‘Harden Your Will,’ requests a laconic, muscular type in a tightly cinched flak jacket, against the backdrop of a ruined city, in an ad for Kraken, the special forces branch of military intelligence. ‘Everyone Can,’ declares a poster for the 93rd Brigade, perhaps the ideal version of a ‘progressive brigade’. In direct response to the army’s notorious hammering of square pegs into round holes, the ad urges you to ‘Choose Your Own Profession in the Brigade,’ and underneath the main photo of a young soldier with perfectly groomed hair features an equally, if not more, representative serving demographic, an anxious-looking middle-aged man in an ill-fitting helmet, swaddled against the cold. There is one QR code to join up, and one to donate. The biggest campaign, at least by poster count, is for the 3rd Assault Brigade. The ad shows a man with his back to us, in a plaid shirt, camouflage trousers and a back-to-front baseball cap, riding a motorbike towards floodwater and war smoke. Wrapped around him with her face over his shoulder towards us, clenching him in fishnet-clad legs and bare arms, a pistol in one hand, is a tousle-haired young woman. ‘I Love the Third Storm,’ the slogan reads.

It’s six stops north to Saltivska, the end of the line. I came up out of the station into Kharkiv’s thick outskirts, rank on rank of apartment blocks, seemingly never-ending rows of kiosks selling an infinite variety of low-priced Eurasian goods, tram tracks running through weeds and bare earth. In a supermarket car park I met my drivers to the country, Dima and Serhiy. Every day they drive a minibus out to Kupiansk, a town on the river Oskil about 75 miles further east, to help evacuate civilians. Under pressure from the advancing Russian army, Kupiansk is emptying out.

Once we were on our way I asked Dima and Serhiy about the recruitment sweeps.

‘Everyone’s afraid,’ Dima said. ‘But by the time you get to the third year of war you need to prepare yourself for something. Either you pitch in and help, or you fight. You know, you don’t get to sit it out. After three years, the war touches everyone.’

I asked them if they had a bron.

‘We’ve got the bit of paper, but there’s still no confirmation,’ Dima said. ‘You know how it is. Fifty-fifty.’

We drove east along good roads through broad fields, which are still farmed. It was a clear day, and the sun caught the yellow autumn leaves of the trees lining the road – maple, oak, poplar. On the horizon ahead I noticed something quite banal, an aircraft vapour trail, then remembered that there were no civilian aircraft here. At this part of the front, it was almost certainly a Russian warplane. They don’t have to leave their own country to bomb Ukraine: they reach a set height and speed, heedless of Ukrainian air defences, which are, in this area, extremely weak, release their weapons and go home, while the bombs glide thirty miles or more to their targets on flip-out wings.

The journey from Kharkiv took about an hour and half. We stopped in Korobochkyne for a pie. Further on, at the Shevchenkove checkpoint, things still seemed fairly relaxed; the soldiers were wearing beanies. Nearby we passed a woman waiting at a concrete bus stop painted a beautiful aquamarine blue. The traffic was now almost entirely military: fast-moving pickup trucks sprayed dull green, with Ukrainian tactical signs and the prongs of anti-drone jammers on their roofs. At the last checkpoint before Kupiansk the soldiers were wearing their helmets, and the emplacement was covered in anti-drone netting.

Kupiansk had a population of about 28,000 before the Russian invasion. There are few left now. More leave every day. The town was entered by the Russian army in the early days of the war. A significant number of residents sympathised with the Putin line on Ukraine, and its then mayor, Hennadiy Matsehora, offered up the town to Russian troops in the hope of preventing death and damage. After a seven-month occupation, a Ukrainian offensive pushed the Russians out. A number of collaborators, including Matsehora, fled to Russia; he was later assassinated there. People I spoke to in Kupiansk were guarded about life under occupation. Many of the most forthright anti and pro-Ukrainians had left, and of those who remained, it was hard to know who dreaded the return of the Russians, who hoped for it and who had ceased to care. Overwhelmingly, the feelings of the diehards were less political or ethnic than domestic: they couldn’t bear to leave their homes.

The Russians were close, on the east bank of the river; their forward positions were less than four miles away. All the bridges connecting west bank Kupiansk to the smaller district across the river have been destroyed. Not long ago the Russians reached the river to the south of the town, cutting Ukraine’s perilous toehold on the east side in half. As in the Donbas, where the pace of their advance has increased lately, the Russians have benefited from glide bombs, the impunity of their air force inside Russia, the Ukrainian shortage of manpower and the reluctance of the West to match its grand rhetoric of support for Ukraine with a serious strategy to train and equip its forces. But more than anything else, the recent Russian success has come down to Putin’s willingness to expend lives in thousands of small-scale infantry attacks that eventually, after enormous casualties, overwhelm the defenders. As Russia advances, and its dead and maimed pile up, the bonuses it is having to pay to find volunteers – it wants to avoid the socially perilous path of mass mobilisation in the big cities – mount in tandem. It is recruiting mercenaries from Africa, as well as inviting North Korean troops to join the fight. For now, with Russia’s deeper resources of money and men, as far as the grim goals of attritional conquest are concerned, the strategy is working. Judged by his actions, Putin deems it worth having several Russians die for every Ukrainian wiped from the battlefield and for every few hundred square metres of territory.

Serhiy and Dima​ had planned for us to pick up evacuees from the east bank, but on the eve of our trip, the Russians hit the main ferry, and although it had been fixed by the time we arrived, civilians weren’t being allowed to cross. We parked in a marshalling area on the edge of town where evacuation parties were coming and going, leaving clumps of old people and luggage in the dust and fallen acacia leaves by the side of the road, waiting to be taken to the coaches that would move them west. There was an ambulance donated by the Brighton and Hove chapter of Stand for Ukraine, still with its British numberplates. Sweating policemen in full combat gear were coming and going in an armoured car, delivering evacuees from the east bank, where they have been living under constant shelling, without water, electricity or gas. Evacuation is well organised and free; those who are ready to leave just have to make a call. But they must leave their homes and most of their possessions behind.

I talked to Lyuda, 64 years old, standing crying quietly to herself by her two bags. She would have hung on in her flat near the town stadium; she had friends who were determined to stay. But her children insisted she leave. Her son moved to Czechia before the war. Lyuda will go and live with her daughter in her son-in-law’s home town, Korosten in western Ukraine, five hundred miles away.

I asked her about the possibility of a ceasefire, of the river Oskil becoming the new border between Ukraine and Russia. ‘It simply doesn’t depend on ordinary people,’ she said. ‘It’s all decided at the top. Whatever they decide, that’s how it will be. All that’s left for us is to deal with things as they are. That’s all.’

We drove into town to find our first batch of refugees. The sunshine and the profusion of bright yellow leaves made it appear prettier than it was, perhaps, but trying to unsee the destruction, I thought it looked to have been a pleasant place before the war, a little worn at the edges, rising up and down over the escarpments before the river, with small factories, clusters of apartment blocks, rows of independent shops. It hasn’t yet suffered the fate of similar towns in Donbas, ruined by constant shellfire, but it is in a far worse condition than Kharkiv. Wherever you look in the city centre there is at least one destroyed or seriously damaged building. The buses no longer run. Trade has sunk to a minimum and the remaining residents, whom you still see walking or cycling around in scattered ones and twos, are heavily reliant on aid packages. Every so often there is the boom of a shell landing – never close to us that day – or the hefty crack of outgoing fire. On the main drag, with the surviving golden domes of a church on the ridge ahead, a merchant’s van with its doors open was parked opposite the shattered remnants of a small shopping centre. ‘CORN’ was chalked on one of two blackboards by the van. ‘CEMENT’ was chalked on the other. Further on, a row of shops, a shoe shop, a phone shop, a kids’ clothes shop, a chocolate shop, a pharmacy, all smashed up. Further on huge billboards with ‘FREE EVACUATION’ and an 0800 number on them lined the street.

The names and addresses on Dima and Serhiy’s evacuation list were in what they call the ‘private sector’, the jumble of mostly old privately owned houses with gardens closer to the river, away from the flats and businesses of the centre. Our van toiled along crooked, potholed lanes with few street signs, past little houses behind green fences and steel gates in gardens with vines and vegetable patches. I could see why elderly people – which is to say, people only a little older than me – clung to these refuges, patched up over time to make mosaics of different kinds of brick and corrugated roof and timber; the houses and gardens had grown with them and around them, a pattern of instances only they could decipher, something like a patchwork quilt and something like an outer skin, something of your own you could pull around you and over you against the madness and din all around.

I helped Tatiana, a 62-year-old living alone, to move her stuff to the minibus. Among her few possessions was a TV still in its original box, with a sticker boasting that it was ready to screen the 2018 World Cup from Russia. I asked her why she was leaving now. ‘The shelling is very loud. We get a lot of arrivals round here. Drones flying. It’s too frightening even to go to the pharmacy. And we’re that age, we need medicine. I can’t sleep at night, to be honest.’

When she said drones, did she mean the little ones?

‘The little ones, yes. They fly them at people.’

Her daughter and grandchild had been smuggled out of Kupiansk during the Russian occupation. Now they’re in a flat in Poland, too cramped for Tatiana to stay with them. Her grown-up son spent the occupation hiding in their house. The Russians were present too briefly to spread their security net into that part of town and never knocked on their door, but many men were arrested. Passing the Russian police station, Tatiana saw a crowd of women bringing food for the men held inside. After the liberation of the town – although the people I spoke to used the word ‘de-occupation’ – her son joined the Ukrainian army.

The most heartbreaking thing being left behind in Kupiansk was the evidence of fresh, hard work, which was, in turn, evidence of the hope for a swift return: a wall of newly sawn firewood, with a bicycle leaning against it, or, in Tatiana’s case, the recently, skilfully turned black earth of her vegetable plot. ‘I’ve brought everything in. I put the harvest in the cellar, the potatoes, the preserves, the tomatoes, it’s all there,’ she said. I asked her about a deal with Russia, about concessions in exchange for peace. ‘You can’t trust the Russians,’ she said.

Away from the private sector, at a block of flats overlooking the river – which looked, to my eyes, alarmingly narrow and easy to cross – we collected Victoria. She seemed upbeat, but I was getting used to a certain way of being in permanent crisis, where you swing between the possibility of being interested, even excited, by each new change of situation, and awareness of the encompassing abyss. I asked her what prompted her departure and she turned and pointed up at the block. An enormous shell-hole had taken out much of the wall of the seventh floor, where she lives. The impact was on the stairwell, and the outer wall of her flat only shook, but she felt it was time to go. On the same night, the food and tobacco shop where she worked was burgled. She has no children or siblings and her parents are dead. During the occupation, she bonded with some of the ordinary young Russian soldiers who bought cigarettes from her, and even exchanged social media messages with them after they left. It was the possibility, even the likelihood, of their deaths that saddened her when I asked her about how the war might end.

I had to push to get her to voice an opinion on making concessions to Russia to end the war; like so many Ukrainians, she resisted the fact that in her country at least an individual vote is a means of making a collective decision and is a collective responsibility. What if you were faced with a choice of two candidates, I said, one who was ready to make concessions to Russia to end the war, and one who insisted Ukraine fight to the end? ‘Not fight to the end,’ she said. ‘Because that would be for ever.’

Back​ in Kharkiv, Tuluzov took me up to the roof of the theatre to show me the Russian rocket that had landed there, without doing much harm. The city lay twinkling in the sun before us, stretching to the horizon in all directions. From up there you couldn’t see the damage. As we talked, we realised we had an acquaintance in common: Yakov Eisenberg, the late head of an enterprise called Hartron, which, in Soviet times, made the guidance systems for nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, the big, world-destroying ones. Before he became a theatre manager, Tuluzov was a management consultant, and before he was a management consultant, he was a theoretical physicist. He worked with Eisenberg, whom I’d interviewed in 1993, on my only previous visit to Kharkiv. At that point, newly independent Ukraine still had possession of a number of nuclear warheads it had inherited from the Soviet Union. I had wanted to talk to Eisenberg because Hartron was strapped for cash and Eisenberg had an idea: he and his team could install a dual-control key into Ukraine’s nuclear weapons so that Russia couldn’t use them without Kyiv’s permission. I’d asked him if they’d be able to hack the weapons so Ukraine could use them alone. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘We are professionals.’

Unsurprisingly, Eisenberg’s idea was never taken up. Ukraine dutifully handed the weapons over to Russia. A document, the Budapest Memorandum, signed by, among others, Russia, the US and the UK, promised to respect and protect Ukraine’s territorial integrity. When Russia seized Crimea in 2014, then prevented Ukraine regaining control from separatists in Donbas, Ukrainians realised that the memorandum wasn’t a treaty, just a legally breakable promise. ‘Russia simply betrayed us on the Budapest Memorandum, and the West has not behaved entirely correctly, because there were, after all, obligations, that we would give away the nuclear weapons and they would give us security guarantees,’ Tuluzov said. ‘These guarantees were violated. And there were certain moral obligations …’

President-elect Trump and those around him, and, it seems likely, those who voted for him, don’t believe Ukraine being invaded is any of America’s business, especially if it costs America money. Trump’s aversion towards Ukraine, and empathy for Vladimir Putin – like him, a rich, acquisitive, anti-woke, nominally Christian nationalist white man who loathed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and regards the EU and Nato with scorn – is well known. The Trump Republicans share the notion, widely propagated by Western pundits across the political spectrum, that it is Ukraine, and the Western backers who supply it with money and arms, who are prolonging the war in the hope of total victory – a return to the country’s 1991 borders – and the humiliation of Putin. The corollary of this idea is that if Putin were offered a chance to keep what he has already conquered and Ukraine renounced membership of Nato, the war would end and there would be peace. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, put his party’s view a few weeks ago when he said: ‘I don’t have an appetite for further Ukraine funding, and I hope it’s not necessary … I believe that [Trump] actually can bring that conflict to a close. I really do. I think he’ll call Putin and tell him that this is enough.’

The assumption underlying this view seems to be that Ukraine would be forced to rein in its ambitions without Western arms, and if it did so, Putin would be content to stop fighting. But why would he? He’s eliminated political opposition at home. Tank-counters say he’s running out of tanks, but they keep coming. On paper, at least, the Russian economy is strong. If he was conscience-stricken about Russians dying, we would have found out twenty years ago in the carnage of Grozny. He has the active or passive support of governments representing most of the world’s population, who seem to see Ukraine, as he does, as an American invention, a place whose suffering is, somehow, not quite its own. Stopping where he is would leave Putin far short of his oft-stated goal (though not put in those explicit terms) of making Ukraine a Russian vassal. Without Ukrainian resistance and the continued supply of Western, and in particular American arms – without, indeed, an increased supply – there is no pressure on him to stop. While there are Ukrainians at all levels of power who cling to the hope of total victory, the engine of the war’s perpetuation at present is Russia, together with its allies in North Korea, Iran and China. It is for the peace-seeking side to stop advancing, yet it is Ukraine that is on the defensive, being forced to retreat by a Russia that goes on taking more territory, has declared it must have more territory, and continues to insist on a crushing level of control over the whole of Ukraine as a condition for peace.

There are no known negotiations under way at present; there has been leaked information about talks between Ukraine and Russia – denied by Moscow – on a mutual pact to stop attacking each other’s energy infrastructure. It’s hard to believe that back-channel soundings about peace talks ever really stopped, but the sides’ public positions are far apart. Zelensky, whose presidential term has expired but who is so far under little pressure to hold new elections, may have unrealistic aims, and Putin may have repellent ones, but it is also a problem that the EU and the US have gone along with Ukraine’s maximalist hopes without giving the country the means to realise them.

One possible route for peace in Ukraine is the country’s complete capitulation and subjugation. That possibility is a long way off, but it is the current direction of travel. For peace with at least a measure of justice for Ukrainians, however, there are three necessary preconditions. One is that Russia must accept less than it has declared it wants: less territory, and less – i.e. no – control over a free Ukraine. There is no sign of this happening. The second is that whatever supposedly temporary but actually permanent ceasefire line is agreed on, the West must commit to defending it properly, with more expensive and more systematic support for the Ukrainian military than now – perhaps even its own air power. There is no sign of this happening either. The third is that Ukraine’s people must accept they will lose some territory for a long time, perhaps for ever. Judging from my time in Ukraine just before Trump’s victory, there is every sign that this is happening. ‘As a citizen, I’m against it,’ Tuluzov said. ‘As a manager with forty years’ experience, I understand that sometimes you’re in a situation with no way out, and it’s hard to make the right judgment. I don’t have complete information. I can’t fully understand to what extent the country’s resources are exhausted, to what extent the West is really ready to help us … of course the most important task is to keep Ukraine as a state. If we can do that, it will already be a victory.’

I heard two visceral metaphors making opposite cases. One, from Dima, the evacuation volunteer: ‘You don’t say to a mad dog: “Bite my arm and let the rest of me go in peace.”’ The other from Max Rosenfeld. ‘You can be raped, and live with this rape. You have to live on. It’s not a reason to end your life.’ Filipenko, the head of Dobrobat, said: ‘We all hope the moment will come when the authorities will agree on some kind of ceasefire, even temporarily. That’s the main thing for us. Because the way they’re bombing Kharkiv with bombs and missiles, it’s not war, it’s pure terrorism … Final victory, with the resources we have today, and with such an enemy, is impossible.’

Nabokov, who lost his foot, struggled to comprehend the enormity of his country’s leadership advocating the acceptance of a loss of territory. But he had already described to me how desperate the manpower situation in the army was, even when he served in 2023. ‘When I joined the brigade, they’d just pulled out from the vicinity of Bakhmut. They were going through reorganisation and getting new recruits. And there were so many in the brigade that were like Gogol’s Dead Souls. They existed, but they weren’t physically capable of fighting. Nor could they be struck off the roll, or transferred to another unit. But they were counted as fighting men.’

The 3rd Assault Brigade’s crass poster is more than a recruitment effort: it is a campaign gesture. Although it is supposedly integrated with the Ukrainian armed forces and is regarded as a good unit militarily, its commander, Andriy Biletsky, is a former hard right activist who has espoused white nationalist causes. Its existence is a reminder of the internal political obstacles to Ukrainian concessions. But for all its powerful PR, what is striking about the 3rd Assault, and the hard right in Ukraine in general, is how isolated it is. None of Ukraine’s other ninety-odd brigades has the same extremist taint; one that did, the 67th, was recently disbanded, with little fuss. Would the army as a whole rise up against a government that made territorial concessions to Russia? Perhaps. But the more widely the recruiters spread their net, the more the army reflects a society that is starting to talk openly, if bitterly, about swapping land for peace.

I talked to serving soldiers. One of them, Yegor, from the 93rd Brigade’s drone unit, told me that ‘the people who’ve seen with their own eyes what war really is, not on TV but for real, are ready to stop and make a deal, because they’re tired of losing their friends, their acquaintances. And they’re tired of being surprised that they’re still alive. Those who say otherwise do not know what war is. It’s easy to say come on, forward, to battle, if you’re just watching it all on the screen. Of course there are going to be lots of people shouting that we have to go on to victory, to the borders of 1991. But the actual soldiers in the trenches are ready to stop and make an agreement. Still, nobody wants to hear this.’

I left Kharkiv early one morning, when it was still dark. The streetlights had been switched off to save power and there was a light fog. I ordered a taxi hours before the train was due because the fear of recruiters had drastically cut down the number of taxi drivers on call. Kharkiv had become, as one old driver told me, ‘a city of dinosaurs’. So I was surprised when a man in his fifties came to pick me up. He got out to help me with the big bag that contained my flak jacket and, noticing he walked with a limp, I asked if he was a veteran. He was. He’d stepped on a mine near Izyum. When we were driving through the clammy, empty streets, he pulled up his left trouser leg to show me his prosthesis: he’d lost ankle and knee.

We drove on. I didn’t want to launch into a new round of questions. Just before we reached the station, he said, unprompted: ‘I lost my son.’ His son was killed in action last year. He was very calm. I suppose he wanted me to know. I paid him, and went to wait for my train to the West.