Where the World Splits Apart

Private Viljar Hanssen says there are a few rules on the border, both for a soldier like him and for the hikers who find themselves in this remote place.

If your dog runs away, don’t chase after it.

Don’t throw stones.

Don’t take pictures of the soldiers on the other side.

Don’t make derogatory gestures.

Don’t pee in the direction of Russia.

“It’s not that complicated,” says Hanssen. “Still, sometimes I’m afraid of making a mistake, or missing something.”

For the past 11 months, Private Hanssen and three colleagues have been on duty at the Norwegian Army’s Observation Post 16 in the far north of Europe, where the continent juts rockily out into the Arctic Ocean. Armed with a radio, binoculars and a Heckler & Koch assault rifle, Hanssen spends six hours a day in a wooden watchtower. And so here he is, on a morning in the summer of 2023, with a barren landscape of stone and stunted birch trees below him. No towns, no roads anywhere, just wind and vastness, with the occasional reindeer wandering through. It would be easy to think Private Hanssen was stationed in the most peaceful place on earth, if it weren’t for the border posts between the trees 50 metres away. Sitting on the watchtower, Hanssen has the West, Norway and NATO at his back. In front of him is the East — Russia. There is a tower there too — and someone is sitting in it as well.

Hanssen has a soft face, warm brown eyes and wavy hair. He is 19 years old and has come to a dangerous place on behalf of the whole world. He comes from the Lofoten Islands, where his parents are teachers. “We live right on the edge of the forest,” says Hanssen, adding that his family appreciates the remoteness: “We spend the winters on skis.”

Military service is compulsory in Norway. When Hanssen was called up two years ago, in the middle of the pandemic, he applied for a post as far north as possible, preferably on the Russian border. He imagined himself on a ski patrol, far away from everything. Then Vladimir Putin’s army invaded Ukraine, and when Hanssen was called up and sent to the border last summer, it was very quiet there, but in an eerie way. “My parents had tears in their eyes, and my friends thought I might burn to death in a tank.”

The days and nights at Observation Post 16 pass in a silence that irritates Hanssen because it is in strange contrast to the news. Every morning he mixes a spoonful of fish oil into his blueberry muesli, vitamin D to combat boredom and fatigue. He takes turns standing guard with his comrades, sleeping in a hut at the foot of the tower, lifting weights and cooking pasta from the pantry supplies. He had to give up his mobile phone in the barracks. No Instagram, no Snapchat, no TikTok to distract him. There is only a radio and a television in the hut.

“What I miss most here is my phone,” Hanssen says. “The chance to call home.”

Viljar Hanssen, born in 2003 and barely an adult, is at a personal turning point. He knows that from the tower he looks out over the Kola Peninsula, a restricted military zone, a base for Russian nuclear submarines and probably the region with the highest concentration of nuclear weapons in the world. That’s the direction he has to look, while at the same time making sure that nothing and no one behind him is unnecessarily irritating Russia, no disoriented or urinating hikers.

“You grow up fast here,” says Hanssen.

That’s why we have one big question for him, one that we’ll be asking again and again on this trip: What will his future be like, and what will the world be like in five years’ time?

“As a soldier, I have to think in worst-case scenarios”, answers the young man from northern Norway. “And that would be Putin pressing the button.”

A new Iron Curtain has been drawn across Europe. The world is once again divided into two blocs. Young people like Private Hanssen are experiencing this for the first time, but for older people, history seems to be repeating itself. That’s why the term is back: the Iron Curtain.

On a map where all the countries are neatly separated and often seem to be empty spaces, any one of us could probably draw the new dividing line. It would run along the border that separates Russia and Belarus from the West, and it would be easy to believe that there really is a steel division or a wall there, as there once was in Berlin. But that’s not the case. The old Iron Curtain rose from the ruins after a world war. The new one is rising after three decades of peace, or the illusion of peace, and it has only just begun. Closer to home, in Norway, there are only stakes between rocks and birch trees. The division of the world has so far been mainly administrative. Financial flows have been cut off, trade in goods has stopped, town twinning has been suspended and fears have been reawakened.

What does it mean to live in this time of global rupture? What is everyday life like for people who remain invisible on the maps?

This is what we intend to find out on an expedition along the Russian border. Through Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine to Georgia. We intend to travel by bus, train and car. “We” initially refers to the Finnish photographer Jonathan Terlinden and myself, a reporter from Germany. We have a long journey ahead of us. The summer won’t last forever. It’s time to leave.

The northernmost town in the western world is called Kirkenes, and it lies at the end of a deep fjord in the Barents Sea. Hardly anyone would know its name if the harbour wasn’t largely ice-free — like Murmansk, just across the border. Seagulls scream, ships’ diesel engines roar. There is no old town, nothing cosy or typically Norwegian about it.

The fact that Kirkenes looks as unadorned as an oversized school centre is not just because its 3,400 inhabitants see little point in sprucing up their town for the few weeks of summer each year. Kirkenes was once a frontline town; during the Second World War, the Germans invaded it for its ore deposits and to take Murmansk. Then the Red Army hit back. 

From the first country on the journey, it becomes clear how delicate and presumptuous it is for a German to ask about relations with Russia. In fact, the new Iron Curtain runs along the old scar of the Second World War.

A Russian watchtower, photographed from Estonia © Natalia Kepesz for DIE ZEIT

When the Wehrmacht was driven out of Kirkenes, a boy was born in a nearby village who now unlocks the door to the Fjellhallen, the Rock Hall, opposite the Kirkenes school. The child has grown into an old man, compact and bald. Willy Bangsund is as old as peace in Europe. He speaks with a clear voice and as quickly as someone who wants to get a message across. “My parents used to say: You’re our liberation baby,” he says. “They were happy when the Russians came. That gratitude shaped me.”

To this day, a monument above the town commemorates the “brave Soviet soldiers”. The streets of the town centre are still signposted in Cyrillic. There’s a sense of closeness in Kirkenes that you wouldn’t expect as an outsider. Aren’t Russia’s immediate neighbours particularly concerned? Didn’t they encourage scepticism and demarcation early on?

Actually, it’s more complicated up close. Up close, Willy Bangsund is fighting for his life’s work.

Bangsund trains the young wrestlers of Kirkenes, and he was once Norway’s junior bantamweight champion. But the reason many people call him “Superman” is that Bangsund has performed a cross-border miracle. The scale of this miracle becomes clear when he pushes open the door to Fjellhallen: a nuclear bunker blasted into the granite beneath the town, a world of artificial light and jagged walls. A labyrinth whose largest chamber is the local sports hall, complete with grandstand.

In this underground world, the old man begins to tell stories. Even during the Cold War, he used to hold a competition here every autumn for children from all over the world. Because Bangsund uses the Norwegian word for children, barn, his memories sound particularly tender and affectionate. “They came from Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and even Iran.” The guests stayed with Norwegian families, photos were taken, friendships were forged, first kisses were tentatively exchanged. Four years ago, says Bangsund, even Sergei Lavrov stopped by the sports hall.

Today it seems inconceivable that Russia’s foreign minister was once in the nuclear bunker of a NATO country. But Bangsund doesn’t think he was naive. “I don’t see what could be done better today than what we did then,” he says.

Of the eight countries on this trip, Norway is the only one that has not been at war with Russia or the Soviet Union or occupied by its larger neighbour in the past 120 years. The border between the two countries was only formalised in 1826. Even after that, the Sami living in the region were allowed to move freely. Finnmark, as the area around Kirkenes is called, is vast and empty.

This emptiness may have been Norway’s geopolitical luck. But emptiness also means a lack of people and opportunities. In 1960, footballers from Kirkenes took a fishing boat to Murmansk in search of teammates, or at least opponents. They were arrested at sea, interrogated and sent back. A decade later, when the blocs tentatively made contact, Willy Bangsund travelled with a delegation from the swimming club to the other side of the old Iron Curtain. Shortly afterwards he invited people to the first wrestling meeting. A suspiciously large number of people turned up, probably spies as well as athletes. “We lost all the fights,” says Bangsund, “but that was the point: we wanted to learn!”

Even on a globe, Russia looks huge, and from Kirkenes it seems to be all there is. At crossroads you see more signs pointing to Murmansk than to Oslo, some 1,500 kilometres away. After 1989, if you wanted to go to the theatre or the ballet, you travelled to the neighbouring country. The Kirkenes Chamber Orchestra filled its gaps with musicians from Russia, and footballers found opponents on the other side of the border.

All that is gone. Everything is cancelled now. The orchestra is missing Alexander on the viola, Irina on the violin and Olga on the cello. The young wrestler Johannes, nine years old, 24 kilos and the great hope of Bangsund, can no longer find an opponent in the whole of Finnmark. Sometimes Willy Bangsund receives news from over there. A trainer is said to have been killed. Another has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for protesting against the war.

Meanwhile, Willy Bangsund, the child of peace, is also disappointed with Russia and with Sergei Lavrov, who has turned out to be a false friend. But in the rock beneath the city, in the sports hall that is now first and foremost a nuclear bunker, he also blames his own government in Oslo. He wanted to invite young Russian wrestlers back this autumn. “We mustn’t lose sight of each other, especially now,” says Bangsund. He failed. All funding has been cancelled, the Norwegian consulate in Murmansk is closed and it is almost impossible to get a visa. “But they are just children,” Bangsund pleads. Barn.

What does he think the world will be like in five years?

“I hope the young people won’t have forgotten their visits to us.”

From Näätämö in the far north of Finland, a minibus heads south on Route J towards Ivalo. The driver’s name is Kimmo, and for the first few kilometres we are alone with a few parcels and letters, as Kimmo also delivers the mail.

The road winds past glacier-carved cliffs, pine trees and lakes, a landscape so harmonious that it’s as if a bonsai gardener had been allowed to think big. Bright light alternates with the darkness of the forest. Here and there is a settlement with more vowels than houses.

Kaamans.

Pikku-Peura.

Sikovuono.

Vaaranpää.

Judging by the names, this could almost be the South Seas. And indeed, Kimmo is driving his bus through a holiday region, stopping at lodges and camping sites. We almost lose our concentration, the purpose of our trip, because something is different here than in Norway. Nowhere is a Russian town signposted, as if there were no Murmansk or Kovdor nearby. The bus turns right at almost every junction, heading west. To the east, towards Russia, there is a narrower road. Nobody will take you there. I rent a car and drive over gravel to Arola, where there is a farmhouse right on the border, a wooden house. Helena and Eero Seppänen, a couple in their 70s, live there.

A lifetime of milking cows has bent Helena’s back. Time has honed Eero’s eagle-like face.

She has cooked pike and potatoes. He wants to talk about his mother, Lempi, who may have saved their country.

On 30 November 1939, Lempi Seppänen was 30 years old and lived in the house where her son now lives. She had three daughters. Her husband, a woodcutter, had been away for a few days when the dog started barking at seven in the morning. Lempi went outside; she was going to the barn to get some oats to make porridge for the children. “Then she saw figures at the edge of the forest,” says her son Eero. “Mum was lucky. It had snowed the night before. And the soldiers who came out of the trees wore dark grey coats.” Lempi knew who they were. She had a head start of 300 metres, which is still the distance between the farm and the forest. The mother grabbed the girls, put them on a sled and ran west. “Mum ran across lakes that had just frozen over. She didn’t know if the ice would hold, but it did. She was lighter than the men behind her.”

Lempi Seppänen shouted the same sentence at every house she passed. She shouted it again when she reached the first village, where it spread like wildfire and was spoken into the only telephone in the school building: “The Russians are coming!”

Lempi Seppänen was witnessing the beginning of an event that, four months later, gave rise to a phrase that still defines Finland today: the Winter War.

Adolf Hitler had already plunged Europe into war when the Soviet Union claimed parts of Finland in the autumn of 1939. Unlike Spain, England or France, Russia never had overseas colonies; it always grew as a coherent empire by subjugating its immediate neighbours. Finland was also annexed for a time by the Tsarist Empire. Then, in the turmoil of the October Revolution, many peoples fought for freedom. But now the Soviets wanted to expand their influence again. They laid claim to Finland’s east, Karelia, on the pretext that there were “fascists” in Helsinki who might attack nearby Leningrad. That was over 80 years ago. It still sounds so current.

When Finland refused to negotiate and give up land, the Red Army attacked. They travelled the few roads in long convoys, poorly equipped, inadequately dressed, but confident of victory. The rulers had already commissioned a suite from the composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Their plan was to reach the Baltic city of Oulu on Joseph Stalin’s birthday — three weeks later, on 18 December. Two divisions broke through at the narrowest point in Finland, where the Seppänen farm stands.

The fighting was similar to what is happening in Ukraine today. The Finns, seemingly outnumbered, regrouped in the forests, where every tree became a hiding place and an ally. They attacked the armoured convoys on skis and in white snowsuits. Not far from Lempi Seppänen’s farm, thousands of frozen corpses of Russian soldiers lay on a road called Raatteentie. The Finns did not win the war; March 1940 they accepted a peace treaty and lost large parts of Karelia. But they had stopped the invasion and saved their independence.

Today, if you make it to the Finnish border, the Winter War is everywhere. Trails lead past carefully preserved trenches. Monuments rise from the forest in many places. Books, films and an entire museum are dedicated to one soldier, Simo Häyhä. Häyhä is still considered the most successful sniper in the world, if successful is the right word here. He killed more than 500 Red Army soldiers during the Winter War. When asked what he felt when he pulled the trigger, he later replied, “The recoil.”

Raatteentie Street has become a kind of amusement park, with a cinema and a café. The owner has the war years tattooed on his fingers, 1939 and 1940, and sells steel helmets, bullet casings and T-shirts. The war has fan merchandise here. The fact that the Finns joined the German fascists in 1940 in the vain hope of recapturing Karelia is not a big issue.

Even after decades of peace, Finland has always been a defensive nation. Unlike Germany, it has never abandoned its bunkers to decay. In Helsinki alone, there are 900,000 places in bunkers for 630,000 inhabitants. And now Finland has become the NATO state with the longest external border with Russia, 1340 kilometres.

In the Seppänen house on the edge of the forest is a photograph of Lempi, who saw the Russians coming. She looks sternly around the room. She was awarded a medal, got the farm back in 1945 and gave birth to her son Eero. He went moose hunting with his father, learned to cross-country ski like every other boy in the area, and soon learned that idylls are not to be trusted. When he was 12, he found something that he thought was a pen in the woods. It was a German-made explosive. It blew his left hand apart. Eero was left with his thumb and little finger, a kind of pliers. He could no longer hold a ski pole. In the military, he was sent away after 99 days.

Eero gives the impression that he would have liked to have been a soldier longer. “Without the military we would no longer exist,” he says. “I take my hat off.”

(…) The Seppänen family has a rifle in the house. What will the world be like in five years’ time? They both think long and hard.

“I feel better when I think from day to day,” says Helena. When the photographer takes pictures, Eero hides his left hand.

Evening in Suomussalmi, a municipality in a region with a lower population density than Mongolia. Swamps and mosquitoes. At almost every crossroads, young drivers have drawn black circles with smoking tyres, leaving their mark.

In a car park next to the grocery store, Arttu, 21, sits proudly in his BMW.

“Nice rims, aren’t they?” he asks.

“Especially expensive ones,” says Venni, his girlfriend.

She’s a nurse, he’s a plumber. At night they drive around the city, “hanging out, driving, listening to music.” Arttu recently had to give up his driving licence because he was speeding through the village at 102 km/h. Now a friend drives him. Every now and then another car pulls up to Arttu’s BMW, driver’s door to driver’s door, and they chat through the open window. Sitting, talking, smoking.

Russia?

“In a way I fear it, in another way … I hate it,” says Arttu. “And what will the world be like in five years’ time? How should I know?”

Then Arttu gives us the finger. He shows it to us and to the whole world, which is once again classifying people of soldier’s age, categorising them according to what they can do in the event of war. There is so much of the past in this area, and now so much open future — but Arttu and Venni won’t let the present be taken away from them, their claim to the moment, the right of youth.

(…)

A warm wind blows across Lake Peipus in eastern Estonia, swaying the pines and carrying the cries of children through the forest. Those who don’t see them, but only hear them, imagine they are in a normal holiday camp. Needles rustling, branches cracking, as a small horde runs through the sandy terrain on a scavenger hunt, looking for answers to questions that someone has pinned to the trees:

What do you see around you?

What colours do you see?

What is moving?

What do you hear?

What voices belong to nature?

What is man-made?

The children in the forest wear dark green uniforms, field service caps and black boots. They are to learn to read their surroundings and identify smells. What is man-made?

Anastasia © Natalia Kepesz for DIE ZEIT

Lake Peipus, seven times the size of Lake Constance, is a border water body. Its eastern half belongs to Russia. Every summer, tents are erected on the western shore by the Kaitseliit, a paramilitary volunteer organisation that is more than 100 years old. It has its origins in the Estonian War of Independence against the Tsarist Empire. It is financed by the Ministry of Defence. Its commander-in-chief is the President of Estonia. The Kaitseliit maintains firing ranges and weapon depots with submachine guns, rocket launchers and mortars. The organisation has 28,000 members, and the number has been growing rapidly for the past two years, including in the youth divisions. The boys are called Noored Kotkad, or Young Eagles. The girls are called Kodutütred, Daughters of the Homeland.

At the camp on Lake Peipus, every day begins with a roll call at eight o’clock. The children line up in rows of two for breakfast and a cook distributes buckwheat porridge. This is followed by a programme that alternates between fun and seriousness: Hikes, water games, volleyball, first aid, woodwork, shooting, disco. The instructors call the children together with whistles.

It is hard to tell whether they are still playing scout or being trained as partisans. All over the world children are learning empathy, here they are learning to fight. Everywhere parents try to allay their children’s fears, here they are taught vigilance. Everywhere girls and boys are told to be themselves, here they wear size XS uniforms.

From a German point of view, this must be irritating. From the perspective of a nation that has never started wars and has always suffered them, the picture is different. A few days after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, generators were sold out in Estonia. Citizens asked Kaitseliit for advice on shooting practice, drinking water and dry food. Something has also changed in the daily life of the children at the lake.

There is Karl-Kristofer, 10 years old, shaved neck, eyes like a husky: “Everyone in my class says Putin has brain cancer.”

There’s Mirtel, 11, her hair in a thick braid: “My whole family is in the organisation. My mother used to worry a lot about me. I was seven and I came home late. Then she would say: The world is not all good, Mirtel, you have to be prepared for evil.”

There’s Anastasia, 16, red mane, black painted fingernails, the boys in the camp are looking at her. She comes from Narwa. Her parents, uncles and aunts speak Russian and are pro-Russia. Anastasia says: “War is shit. And Ukraine doesn’t belong to Putin after all.” She is here to learn Estonian. She wants to study and go to America. A girl in uniform who wants peace. A young woman escaping her belligerent environment by joining a paramilitary force.

We should consider it a European privilege to have easier choices.

On the second day, the whistles resound throughout the camp again. The instructors are carrying dark suitcases that look like violin cases. They contain air rifles. Between the trees, like in a biathlon, there are boxes to catch the bullets, and sleeping mats on the forest floor.

“Who wants to shoot?”

Everyone does. Each child is given five cartridges.

Karl-Kristofer misses all. Mirtel hits three times. Anastasia hits twice and is a bit annoyed.

(…)

Andrejs Ierags was waiting for us. In Madona, a two-hour drive from Riga, an avenue of lime trees leads over cobblestones to his secluded farm. He stands at the end of it and waves us over, an 86-year-old man, tall and straight, elegantly dressed in pleated trousers, shirt and hat. A handsome man. A Latvian Clint Eastwood.

Andrejs Ierags © Natalia Kepesz for DIE ZEIT

“Let’s go for a walk,” he says.

Under the scorching sun, Ierags leads us through 15 hectares of land. He shows us meticulously mown pastures. A potato field, beehives, orchards. And trees, and more trees. Here is a forest of 2000 birches, there,a rectangle of 200 spruces, there, a thicket of hazelnuts. Every bush and every tree has been planted by the farmers themselves. “A third of your time is spent sleeping. A third of the time you work for your food. A third of the time you leave something behind,” says Ierags.

His property would stand up at any national garden show, the enormous work of one man. Little is older than 30 years, as Ierags has only owned this piece of land since 1993, but that is only half the truth. The whole truth is that this is a case of reappropriation.

The land once belonged to the Ierags family. Andrejs talks about it after the tour, over a richly laid table in his house. Pancakes, honey, sausages, tomatoes, tea, vodka.

Andrejs was six, the farm his home, when the front came through Latvia in 1943 and the Red Army turned his parents’ house into a military hospital. “We moved into the cellar,” he says. Ierags doesn’t say what happened on the ground floor, only mimes it with sawing gestures: amputated arms and legs, open stomachs. The garden became a graveyard.

Andrejs was eight when there was a knock on the door in 1945 — today Ierags bangs his knuckles on the dining table, hard and unrelenting. His father was arrested, accused of being a partisan. Siberia. His mother, son and two sisters were left behind.

Andrejs was 12 when the knock came again in 1949 — Ierags banged on the table again, the plates bounced. Europe was rejoicing in peace, and once again Soviet soldiers were at his door. They gave the family two hours, for which Ierags is still grateful today: “It allowed my mother to bake bread. Otherwise we wouldn’t have survived.“

Andrejs spent a week in a freight wagon. He only saw the light of day in Tomsk, far beyond the Urals.

The family became victims of the “March deportations”, which the Soviets called “Operation Surf.” In a wave of arrests, they wiped out the old farming structures in the Baltic states. In a matter of days, they deported 94,779 people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Among them were 27,084 children, including Andrejs Ierags. The figures have been preserved because it is in the nature of totalitarian systems to proudly document their terror. The deportations were later classified as crimes against humanity because of the number of people who died of hunger and frostbite.

Is the fate of the Latvian boy Andrej similar to that of the Finnish boy Eero, whose mother fled across the ice? The answer is yes, and sometimes there is power in repetition. A wide corridor of similar fates runs through Europe, across thousands of kilometres, across cultures and language areas. Displaced persons and veterans are to be found in every village; it is enough to ask for them in marketplaces or kiosks. Their biographies are similar. But they are not the same.

The fact that the life of the Norwegian wrestler Willy Bangsund was calmer than that of the Finnish farmer Eero Seppänen, and that his life was happier than that of the Latvian deportee Andrejs Ierags, has a lot to do with Russia and with a few decisive weeks in the war. The Norwegian Bangsund lives in a country that was never attacked. The Finn Seppänen lives in a country that knew how to defend itself. The Latvian Ierags lives in a country that has long disappeared from the maps.

Now Latvia is reintroducing conscription. Lithuania is allowing reservists to buy fully automatic weapons. Andrejs Ierags thinks it’s right for children in Estonia to learn to shoot. “I agree with my mother. She told me, “Dear son, you must be able to do everything if possible. That includes knowing when to use your skills and when not to.”

In exile, Ierags, his sisters and mother were given a house without a roof, which they covered with birch bark and moss. Andrejs hunted squirrels to provide food for the family. After a few years, his mother died from a heart condition. “On her deathbed she made three wishes,” says her son. “Find the way back home. Marry a Latvian woman. Become a doctor so you can help people. I have fulfilled two of her wishes.”

Ierags was allowed to return home at the age of 28, but the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic of the 1960s was foreign to him. “I only knew our house. Now I was in Riga.” The family farm was part of a collective, and he was not allowed to enter. In Riga, Ierags led a Soviet life, digging trenches as a labourer, becoming an electrician and later an engineer developing diesel locomotives. He learnt the last of the Latvian customs: rendezvous bouquets consist of an odd number of flowers, funeral bouquets of an even number. His first wife died in a car accident, his second of cancer. When Ierags got the farm back, he was 56 years old and rebuilt the roof of the house. For months he ploughed through his parents’ land, clearing and burning the undergrowth. He put a cross in the garden where the Russian soldiers’ graves are, as a gesture of reconciliation. The oven in which his mother used to hurriedly bake bread is working again. Ierags has installed four more fireplaces in the house. He never wants to feel cold again.

“To this day, two hands are not enough for me,” says the man who has already created more than one life’s work in half a lifetime and is still planting trees.

Is he afraid that history will repeat itself? “Yes.”

It’s not easy to ask him, but what will the world be like in five years? “My trees will be stronger.”

In the living room, Andrejs Ierags keeps serving new dishes and pouring vodka and Armenian brandy. He won’t let us go. He gives the photographer Natalia an old coffee cup, good china. A piece of him. When we finally leave, he is back at the end of the avenue, under the lime trees, waving.

(…)

On the bus to Vilnius, Lithuania.

(…) Inside sits Ridvars, 17, with the first signs of a beard. He is due to undergo a military medical examination soon. “I hope I’m sick somehow. Crazy, isn’t it?”

(…)

The old Iron Curtain had its fateful places and particularly dangerous points: Bernauer Strasse in Berlin, the Fulda Gap — the place where the Western Allies feared Russian tanks would break through. It would have been the shortest route to Frankfurt am Main and the Rhine Valley.

The Suwałki Gap, named after a town in northern Poland, was considered the most dangerous place on the new Iron Curtain. At the Suwałki Gap, the Baltic states and Poland are connected by a narrow corridor of just 65 kilometres. To the east of the gap lies Belarus, to the west the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, armed with supersonic missiles, fighter jets and nuclear bombs. Military strategists are scratching their heads over how to prevent an attack or, worse, a partition of NATO territory.

(…)

Berlin-Paris is 878 km as the crow flies.

Berlin-Suwałki, 656 km as the crow flies.

What may be emotionally distant is sometimes geographically very close. The Suwałki Gap is similar to the area around Berlin. Sandy soils, pine forests, lakes. Children squeal with delight at the beach. Boats bob gently in the marinas. It might actually need to be said again: here, too, the world is colourful and the sun is warm. Europe’s east is more than just a grey mass of negotiations, as it sometimes sounds on German talk shows.

(…)

We are used to the fact that when masses of people gather, it is usually men who dominate the sound and vision — in football stadiums, at party conventions, at international conferences.

It’s different in Medyka. Here, where railways and motorways from all over Western Europe converge at the checkpoint between Poland and Ukraine, you hear mostly high-pitched voices. Ukrainian women and children who have fled and want to return home briefly to visit their husbands and fathers, who are not allowed to leave the country. Rolling suitcases. Floral dresses. Teddy bears. And all those high-pitched voices talking to border officials, on telephones, in currency exchange offices.

Rusty minibuses wait on the other side of the border. The trip to Lviv costs 170 hryvnias, four euros. In the city, many soldiers are taking a break from the fighting in the east. And their families are not refugees in the West for a few days.

On the bus, in the penultimate row, sits Olga, 32, who has installed the Air Alert app on her smartphone. It works like a rain radar but shows Russian rocket fire. People in Ukraine have long since stopped wondering if it might rain.

The app says that the sky is clear, at least for now. The bus starts to move, shaking. Olga shows photos on her phone.

On 14 February 2022, skiing in the Carpathians. On 24 February 2022, war.

Olga is a programmer. When the Russians came, she fled to Prague and continued working from there. “I still earn money. I have a flat. I’m better off than most,” she says. Her father had cancer. Her cousin’s husband died. Petro, her fiancé, is a dentist in Lviv. They have postponed their wedding, there is hardly anyone to celebrate with, their friends are scattered across the continent.

The first hour passes on the bus, a second begins, the app continues to report the all-clear. Churches with domes pass by. Gardens full of vegetables. Unfinished buildings that could symbolise a beginning or an end. Stops in villages again and again. Two girls with pink make-up get on. They are going to the cinema to see Barbie.

Then the villages merge into a town. Furniture stores, supermarkets, a bus station. Olga lifts her head. Where is Petro? He’s waiting with a bouquet of white roses.

In the centre of Lviv, the fountains are busy, everything looks rococo and postcard-perfect in a city that could be the subject of a hundred novels. Lviv, Lemberg, Lwow. Sometimes Polish, sometimes Habsburg, sometimes Soviet. Now the windows of the Dominican Cathedral are once again protected by sandbags. A soldier leans on a stick in front of the opera house. Twenty-year-olds in olive drab are everywhere, on leave. Their girlfriends nuzzle their necks. Couples cling to each other on the many park benches. These are images from a century gone by. They tell of an awareness of the value of every second. Of a lust for life on the brink of death.

Nastja and Ivan, a Soldier with his girlfriend in Lviv, Ukraine © Natalia Kepesz for DIE ZEIT

Somewhere in the city, Olga is with Petro.

Two girls are watching Barbie.

Children play with their fathers.

The buses return in the evening.

Asked what the world will be like in five years, Olga said at the station: “Putin won’t be around forever.”

(…)

The next state bordering Russia is already Georgia, a flight, a leap to where Europe and Asia meet. Like Ukraine, about 20 percent of Georgia is occupied by separatists or directly by Russian troops. In 2008, they invaded the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from the north.

(…) It is less than 70 kilometres from the capital Tbilisi to the village of Khurvaleti. The landscape is Tuscan, gently undulating. The plums are ripe, autumn is here. Two men from the Georgian border police, armed with Kalashnikovs, lead the way. They know the way, parts of the area are said to be mined. The photographer’s name is now Daro Sulakauri, and she is carrying a bag of medicine. Sometimes you take sides.

Once again, we reach the new Iron Curtain, the border with the Republic of South Ossetia, which is only recognised by Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria and Nauru. A five-minute walk past dilapidated farmsteads, then barbed wire stretching across a pasture, several rolls as high as a man, full of sharp blades. Beyond it is a walnut tree, an orchard, a house with a wide overhanging roof and shady verandas.

Minutes pass before an old woman steps out and slowly approaches the fence with a walking stick. “Visitors,” she says in a frail voice, “how nice.”

Walia Valishvili, 88, ended up behind the Iron Curtain without ever having moved. She has been living for more than 60 years on this piece of land now divided by barbed wire. She married a young farmer, Data, in an arranged marriage that turned into love. The couple started out in a mud hut, and later Data built the house, which in Walia’s eyes is “the most beautiful in the village.” Neither Data, a Georgian, nor Walia, an Ossetian, cared that an ancient border, marked only on faded, often long-forgotten maps, ran right through their property.

Others did care.

After the Russian invasion 15 years ago, soldiers came to the Valishvili’s house and said a fence was being built. The couple were given 72 hours to leave. Data and Walia stayed.

The new Iron Curtain materialised in their garden. The Valiashvilis resisted Russian expansion, and on a small scale they rebelled against the big land grab. They refused South Ossetian passports. During the Georgian elections, Walia’s husband sneaked over the fence and was arrested several times by the occupying forces for allegedly violating the border. On holidays, the Walischwilis would cross the barbed wire to collect candles and flowers from displaced neighbours and take them to the old village cemetery. Like their house, it lies on the other side of the fence.

Two years ago, Data died and was buried there. Since then, Walia has been alone. “Data asked me to hold on,” she calls over the fence. “I’m so afraid of dying alone. But I can’t go, I don’t want to. If I die on the other side, I won’t be buried next to Data.”

Author: Natalia Kepesz

Last winter, Walia fell and lay in the house for several days, possibly breaking her hip. No doctor can see her, she has no running water, the garden is drying up and the fruit is rotting. Relatives and helpers regularly bring her food and drink over the fence. Photographer Daro has brought her painkillers and blood pressure medication.

Walia Valishvili has often received high-level visitors. Envoys from NATO and the EU, heads of state from Eastern Europe, Annalena Baerbock. No one could do anything. The Georgian president cut his finger on the fence.

Walia herself has no time for politics, she is busy surviving. After half an hour, she no longer had the strength to stand and speak. She turns to leave, waves once more and says: “I wish the people all the best.”

Walia Valishvili, 88.

Viljar Hanssen, 19.

An elderly woman at a barbed wire fence in Georgia.

A young man on a watchtower in Norway.

There is only one country between them.

Many thanks to the great photographers Jonathan Terlinden, Natalia Kepesz and Daro Sulakauri. Many thanks also to Christopher Aloe, Ilva Līduma and Mariam Kiasaschvili for translations.

One Night in Bakhmut: Civilians Wait for the End as Russia Draws Closer

The original publication of the project is embedded below. Underneath, find the full text.

BAKHMUT, Donetsk Oblast – Moments of quiet are few and far between in the near-empty city of Bakhmut. Not only is the sound of incoming and outgoing artillery fire constant, but the variety in volume and texture of the sounds shows just how much firepower is being brought to the battle on both sides.

At times, long bursts of rifle and machine gun fire ring out from the eastern outskirts of Bakhmut.

Just two kilometers from the center, Russian Wagner mercenaries continue to inch forward toward the city in costly but methodical squad-sized assaults.

As we swung into a nondescript courtyard behind a Stalin-era apartment building in central Bakhmut, we found Hryhorii Ostapenko right where we had left him three days before. Sitting on a bench next to the garage, he was hacking away with a little axe at broken window frames, salvaged to fuel the wood-burning stove inside his home.

We had met residents Ostapenko, 63, and Valentyna, 59, who declined to give her last name out of fear, on a previous trip into Bakhmut a few days earlier, asking for permission to stay the night in their building’s basement with those residents who remained.

After having exchanged seasons’ greetings and handed over a bag of food and hygiene products we brought from Kramatorsk, our accommodation was confirmed.

“Not a problem at all,” said Ihor Selenov, a 50-year-old neighbor with a boisterous manner and a Cossack-style haircut, coming out the front door to greet Ostapenko. “Pop in later and we’ll have some tea.”

As we headed back to the car, promising Ostapenko to return before sunset, a Ukrainian soldier came out from behind a gate, walking slowly and deliberately toward us with arms crossed in front of his rifle. We told him of our plans to spend one night here with the remaining residents.

“You can if you want, I just wouldn’t stay with these people,” he replied quietly, directing a contemptuous glance over our shoulder.

“Most of them say openly that they’re waiting for Russia.”

We thanked the soldier and went on our way. There was little time to find a new host. The sun would be going down in just a few hours and our colleagues were taking the car with them back to Kramatorsk. Walking the city aimlessly while shells and drones flew ahead was unwise at best.

Besides, if the people in Ostapenko’s building were waiting for Russia, whose artillery worked day and night turning their city into rubble and forcing them into a cold and dangerous life in and out of basements, I wanted to understand why.

Russia’s invasion overwhelmingly united Ukraine against the aggressor, sweeping aside the old pro-European/pro-Russian divide that dominated politics before 2014, and was still present to a lesser extent after.

A September 2022 Gallup poll conducted across Ukraine showed that only 0.5% of the population viewed the Russian leadership positively.

Absurd as it seems, it is often places like Bakhmut, the very settlements which have endured the most suffering from Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine, where people belonging to this rough 0.5% can be found.

In Ukrainian slang, these people are sometimes called zhduny, meaning “those who wait” in Russian.

For older generations here, nostalgic for the area’s flourishing industry in Soviet times, and who largely voted for former president and Kremlin ally Viktor Yanukovych, the reality of months of brutal war can be difficult to process.

According to Ukrainian police, around 5,900 civilians are understood to still be in Bakhmut as of Feb. 2, including over 200 children.

Starved of any information on the outside world, and with no savings or connections to help them if they evacuate, the remaining residents of Bakhmut are frozen in inaction as the fighting draws closer.

Whether out of apathy, hopelessness, or dreams of the made-up propaganda idea of the “Russian world,” many make the simple but often deadly choice: to wait.

Last bastion

Before settling in for the night, we pay a visit to the local fire station, officially the headquarters of the Ukrainian State Emergency Service in Bakhmut. With barely anything else working in the city, this proud white building just off the central square is one of the few functioning arms of the civilian state left in Bakhmut.

With a large wood burning stove and generator, the sunken main hall of the fire station is a refuge of warmth and relative comfort.

Christmas lights and a signed Ukrainian flag do more to lift the mood, while a large dog, jokingly named Skabei after the Russian propagandist Olga Skabeyeva, greets visitors with enthusiasm.

Deputy commander Artur Spytsyn, 31, and his colleagues complete various chores around the building while waiting for the next call.

“Our first task is to protect the lives of the team and the residents,” he said, “and by now there is little reason to care about property.”

“We don’t cross the (Bakhmutka) River anymore, there is very little left unruined on the other side.”

Almost if not all the first responders still working at the fire station are locals, from Bakhmut and the surrounding villages.

When not on shift, they return to home lives which often differ little from that of the other residents.

In homes with blown-out windows, there is no water, electricity, or gas, only a choice every night between the relative comfort of the apartment or the relative safety of the cellar.

Volodymyr Hruienko, a 42-year-old fire truck driver, took me around the back of the fire station to an apartment building that was hit on Dec. 26. Several apartments were burnt out in the place where the shell hit, and only a handful of windows remained unbroken: nothing out of the ordinary for Bakhmut.

A group of half a dozen residents, mostly of pension age, were milling around the entrance: some chopping firewood, some cooking on makeshift brick stoves, and some just standing in silence.

A younger man approached Hruienko, asking for urgent help finding water. Hruienko advised him to take a large plastic tank that still stood behind an abandoned supermarket about half a kilometer away.

“It fits around half a ton of water, four of you should be able to carry it over,” Hruienko said. “If you can do that, we can fill it up for you.”

Maintaining regular contact, and trying his best to help with basic necessities like the water, Hruienko has gained the trust of many of the residents on the block, but not all. As we returned to the station, a middle-aged man in a black leather jacket passed opposite.

“Thank you,” he said, sarcastically, looking Hruienko in the eye and pointing at the building’s devastated facade. “Thank you for this.”

“Some certain percentage of people left probably love Putin,” said Spytsyn of the so-called “zhduny” living in Bakhmut.

“Personally I had nine friends before Feb. 24 who thought ‘it wouldn’t be bad’ if Russia arrived, but now there is only one such person left.”

Unwanted

The winter sun was already setting by the courtyard where Ostapenko, Selenov, and Valentyna lived when we returned. Nobody was outside and the doors were locked shut. Circling around to the front of the building, we got the attention of a blurred face, dimly lit by candlelight, sitting by the window.

It was Iryna Ostapenko, Hrihorii’s wife. Coming outside to meet us, she called Valentyna up to let us into the basement.

We quickly realized there had been a misunderstanding. There was a place to sleep for us in another, empty basement, but not where Valentyna and her son, Dmytro, were staying.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I want to help you but I hope you understand it’s very hard to trust strangers here,” she said to us.

Valentyna lit a candle and led us down to where we would be staying. Clean and orderly, the cellar had two beds, a table, and a shelf with some stored food supplies. Lacking a stove of any sort, the space was cold, and the bedding available damp throughout.

Frightened and emotional, Valentyna declined to show us her basement or introduce us to her son, but before she left, we spoke by the flickering light of her candle.

Before the full-scale invasion, she lived with her son in Yakovlivka, a village 15 kilometers northeast of Bakhmut that was taken by Russian forces in December. The area was the scene of heavy fighting, the prelude to the assault on Soledar, Russia’s first capture of a major Ukrainian settlement since summer 2022.

“Friends from my village tell me, crying,” Valentyna recalled, “’Valya, we would go back to our ruins, if only just to kiss the bricks, but let it be home, we only want to go home’… but there are no homes left.”

Valentyna did not come straight from Yakovlivka to Bakhmut, instead first spending several weeks in the central Ukrainian city of Kropyvnytskyi, where she says she was treated with suspicion because she was from Donbas.

“Everyone was looking at us like wolves,” she said.

“My friend told me how when she went to the hairdresser’s and told them that she was from Donbas, they kicked her out angrily, saying ‘Our guys are dying because of you, go back, you can be killed instead’.”

The discrimination in Ukraine of people from Donbas due to language or political prejudice is a cornerstone of the propaganda narrative used by Russia to justify the invasion of Ukraine.

While frequent Russian claims of a “genocide” of the people of Donbas or bans on speaking Russian in Ukraine are complete fiction, the full-scale war has raised some internal tensions.

Valentyna’s case, of having fled to safer parts of Ukraine only to return to an active war zone, is not a rare one.

According to the latest UN figures, 5.9 million people have been internally displaced within Ukraine by Russia’s invasion. Many of these people have been able to settle and begin to build new lives in cities all over Ukraine.

But with meager monthly government assistance of only Hr 2,000 ($54) per person and Hr 3,000 ($82) for a child or person with a disability, those without any savings or support networks often find it impossible to make a new start.

“I am afraid, but now I feel that judgment must come on my own land,” she said. “May whatever happens happen, we are not wanted anywhere else anyway.”

Sobbing and overwhelmed, Valentyna politely excused herself, taking the candlelight away and wishing us a good night.

Those who wait

Locked up alone in the basement, we were deciding on our next move when someone started shouting at street level.

“Press! Where are you?” came the male voice, followed by “ratatatata!” a poor imitation of a rifle burst. It was Selenov.

It was hard to tell what kind of mood he was in, but we had little choice but to come out and meet him.

Energetic as ever, Selenov dragged his wife Olena, drunk and half-asleep, out of a parked black 4×4, and together the four of us climbed to his second-floor flat for tea.

Plastic plates and cutlery, some adorned with leftover beetroot salad, were cluttered in between shot glasses on the family’s living room table. The apartment was homely, but had seen better days, with the windows blown out and no water or electricity to speak of for months.

Olena, calling for more to drink, was in a provocative mood, making expletive-laden requests for us to leave.

“Tell me,” she said with a snarl, “how much are the Americans paying you?”

In Olena’s worldview, any journalist working in Ukrainian-controlled territory must be on the payroll of Washington.

Embarrassed, Selenov manhandled her to bed, where she stayed.

With a rough but loving touch, Selenov stroked a young ginger cat as we sipped black tea by the light of a portable LED lamp. Outside the window, the sounds of artillery and rocket fire rolled on.

“If you are sober, maybe you start thinking that’s the end,” he said of the constant shelling of his city, “you wonder where you can hide, but if you’ve had a few, you can sit back and enjoy the ‘concert’.”

Selenov was open from the beginning about his position on the war.

“We are one nation, we are all Slavs,” he said of Ukrainians and Russians, repeating one of the most popular narratives of Russian propaganda. “They (the U.S.) are training us to kill each other like rats, making Ivanov, Petrov, Sidorov (Russian surnames also common in Ukraine) fight against Ivanov, Petrov, and Sidorov.”

With soldiers and civilians situated close together as the urban warfare intensifies, tension naturally builds between those defending the city and those watching their homes being destroyed in the battle.

“At first we got on well with the soldiers,” Selenov said, “and now they look at us, speaking Russian, and ask openly, ‘why did we travel a thousand kilometers to fight for you?’”

“I answer them, ‘Why are you fighting for me, why are you destroying my city?’”

Civilians here are repeatedly encouraged to evacuate and given the means to do so.

Those who choose to stay are caught in a world where laws, trust, and social norms quickly start to crumble, together with the buildings themselves.

Selenov holds that Ukrainian soldiers tried to loot the apartments in his building, thinking they were abandoned.

“The day after they first came, we were hit closer than ever, my garage was destroyed,” he said, “and then they checked again to see if we had gone yet.”

Imitating the soldiers, Selenov, who like most residents of the area is a native Russian speaker, tries with difficulty to speak Ukrainian. “’We are searching… clearing the area, we know that the Muscovites had a secret weapons dump here,’ they said to me.”

“Then they broke down my neighbor’s door and started looking for gold and other valuables.”

In almost any war, soldiers often have to use empty dwellings as frontline accommodation, sometimes breaking in forcefully.

Though it is possible that what Selenov described was the truth, there have been next to no documented and verified instances of Ukrainian soldiers looting homes or businesses for profit, one rare example being the Kyiv Independent’s own investigation into alleged misconduct in the International Legion.

In contrast, practices of mass looting have accompanied the advance of Russian forces throughout Ukraine, with countless well-documented cases of theft of Ukrainian property, from washing machines to entire museum collections.

For people like Selenov, existing biases against Ukraine are often made worse by the situation.

Failing to connect the destruction of their city exclusively to the Russian invasion, conclusions are instead made based on what they can see.

“When the battles started for Popasna and Lysychansk, our city started to get hit from our side, from Chasiv Yar,” he said. “Later of course, the Russians started shelling as well, but at first, this city was messed up by our own.”

Russia’s assault on Donetsk Oblast has practically destroyed dozens of settlements with artillery, rocket, and tank fire. In over six months on the front line, Bakhmut has joined the likes of Volnovakha, Popasna, Sievierodonetsk, and most famously Mariupol, as cities ruined beyond recognition by Russia’s war.

“There are people who just don’t have the intellectual capacity to understand what’s going on,” first responder Spytsyn said of beliefs like this.

“Propaganda has destroyed any ability to see what is happening in front of their own eyes, which cannot tell who is shelling their city.”

City of the living

Excusing ourselves from Selenov’s apartment, we returned to the freezing basement Valentyna had opened for us, and quickly decided it was no place to spend the night.

Reluctant to bother any more of the residents at this hour, our only option remaining was to return to the fire station.

On foot and wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, walking around Bakhmut in the evening was a dangerous prospect, with Ukrainian sentries likely on the lookout for suspicious activity. Luckily, the fire station was only three blocks away.

The streets were empty, but lit brightly by a near-full moon through the clear skies. Sticking to the shadows, we hurried.

Just as we stepped onto the central square, the sound of incoming Russian Grad rocket launches made us crouch close to the wall. The sky briefly glowed orange as the rockets thudded in not far behind the Palace of Culture.

We arrived at the fire station to find it empty and locked. Only Skabei answered our banging on the large doors.

For 20 minutes, we sat on the steps like children waiting to be picked up after school, listening to the Battle of Bakhmut. Finally, the noisy Soviet-era fire truck lurched into the driveway, back from an evening job.

Acknowledging our presence, the helmeted silhouettes emerging from the truck walked past us and opened the door. Within minutes, the truck was back inside, and the firefighters had undressed, bathing with a bucket of hot water left on the stove.

The crew had been out fighting a fire near Ivanivske, a settlement on the way to the recently captured Klishchiivka to the south, that has since become the next target for Russia’s advance. One elderly woman reportedly died, her home burnt to the ground.

As the firefighters decompressed, a middle-aged man with a puffy red face paid an unannounced visit. Funeral services worker Oleksandr, 57, who wished to keep his full identity private, was no stranger, greeting the men with a familiar smile.

Having spotted the fire himself, Oleksandr had come to alert the team, only to find they had already done their job.

Oleksandr did not wish to speak about his profession. “What do you think it’s been like? I’ve worked alongside the first responders, I’ve pulled corpses from the rubble,” he said. “Ask me about anything else.”

Oleksandr’s children are living safe in a village near the city of Dnipro, where he said they are treated with respect and care. Still, he was also saddened by the treatment he has faced personally in other parts of Ukraine.

“I don’t understand, they all shout all the time in the west that we are a united Ukraine,” he said, “but when you arrive and say you are from Donbas, they can call you a separatist without knowing anything about you.”

“I am Ukrainian, we all live in Ukraine, there needs to be this human understanding.”

Oleksandr eventually left for home, and the others slowly retired to their quarters. Only Hruienko remained, fixing something under the gearbox of the truck.

“Check this out, I found this song just yesterday on (Russian social network) VK,” he called to me.

The track from 2012 was an amateurish but warm ode to Artemivsk, the old Soviet name of Bakhmut, before decommunization returned the city’s original name.

Entitled “City of the Living”, the song’s optimistic Russian-language rap lyrics rang out through the empty hall of the Bakhmut fire station:

There are fewer troublemakers these days, culture is developing;

Everything is being sorted out, but some people are stuck in the previous century;

They sit in their chairs and never change anything, but at least the rest of us are thriving!

People, let’s show them our city of the living!

Don’t hide in your apartments, it’s time to show our city to the world;

Not just a spot on the map but the pride of our country.

Approaching storm

Protected from both cold and shelling in the basement, the night at the fire station passed calmly.

As we waited to be picked up by colleagues the next morning, small teams of journalists and volunteers mingled in front of the fire station building. In one van, two British volunteers were traveling with a Ukrainian priest.

I spoke briefly to one of them, a softly-spoken forty-something man who introduced himself as Andrew. He had been working for months in and around Bakhmut, evacuating dozens of civilians from some of the most dangerous front-line areas.

A few days later, the news broke that British volunteers Andrew Bagshaw, 47, and Chris Parry, 28, had gone missing in Soledar, caught up in Russia’s assault on the town while on a mission to evacuate an elderly woman. Photographs matched the face of the Andrew I had briefly met.

On Jan. 25, their families confirmed that both men had been killed, though the exact circumstances of their deaths remain unknown.

On the road out of Bakhmut, excavators could be seen digging fresh trenches on the western edge of the city.

The fate of Bakhmut is far from predetermined. Russia’s reported losses are staggering, with the Ukrainian military estimating around 150 are killed and as many wounded on an average day of Russia’s grinding attacks on the city.

Even with heavy casualties, Russia has so far failed to make significant inroads into the urban area of Bakhmut.

To the north and south of the city, the picture is very different. The mercenary Wagner Group’s capture of Soledar in mid-January has brought the northern highway into Bakhmut under Russian control, while the capture of Klishchiivka in the south has placed the last main Ukrainian supply route under serious threat.

While the battles rage for the territory of Donbas, stories like those of Valentyna, Oleksandr, and even Selenov show that a separate struggle continues, no less difficult, for the hearts and minds of its people, even in the face of Russian brutality.

While most of the first responders plan to leave if Bakhmut is occupied, Hruienko vowed to stay in his hometown.

“I won’t go anywhere, even if they come,” he said, smoking a cigarette in the winter sun.

“I was born here and I will stay. Who will help people here if we all leave? I’ll take my car and start bringing people water… maybe I’ll even fight some fires.”