Your husband voluntarily went under fire
Accounts of the conflict in eastern Ukraine differ so wildly that it is often difficult to see beyond the propaganda and get to the truth. Authorities in Kiev suggest that there are no angry or unhappy locals in eastern Ukraine, merely ‘Russian terrorists’. In Moscow, the Kremlin and foreign ministry insist that brave residents are merely standing up for their rights against Ukrainian ‘fascism’.
The reality, as is often the case, is somewhere in between these two extremes. While there are many locals fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, there are also many ‘volunteers’ who have come from Russia. How these people arrived, what motivates them, and whether they have any official Russian backing has remained a mystery.
But in tracking down the widow of one Russian man who died during the fighting at Donetsk airport, Elena Kostyuchenko, a correspondent for the independent news site Novaya Gazeta, sheds some light onto the murky structures organising the transfer of fighters to Ukraine. She also paints a moving portrait of loss and of the frustration of dealing with Russian officialdom apparently so keen to cover up all traces of those fighting across the border.
Evgeny Korolenko with a dummy machine gun in a photo he uploaded on the social media site Vkontakte.
Border crossing
The driver of the freezer lorry crossed into Russia at the Uspenka border post in the early hours of 30 May. A black Land Cruiser met the lorry; the driver followed. He unloaded his cargo around 4.30am. He was unsure exactly where. A morgue, perhaps on a military base on the edge of Rostov-on-Don.
The border guards on duty at Uspenka that night say three people dressed in camouflage turned up, turned off the CCTV, demanded the border guards switch off their mobile phones and confiscated the handsets while the lorry was crossing the border. The guards did not see any documents for the cargo; they did not check inside the vehicle nor register its crossing.
The freezer section contained the bodies of 31 Russian fighters killed in the battle near Donetsk airport on 26 May. Alerted by the authorities of the Donetsk People’s Republic, journalists followed the lorry to the border. The journalists learned two names: Sergey Zhdanovich and Yuri Abrosimov. Later, two more names turned up in social networks – Alexey Yurin and Alexander Efremov, who did their compulsory military service in the 45th regiment of the special forces unit of Russian air force troops. That’s it.
I phoned all the morgues in Rostov-on-Don even though it is most likely that the ‘morgue on the grounds of a military unit’ is the 1602nd district military hospital in a remote area of Rostov called Voenved. It is a sprawling officers’ town, with military units, loading stations and an airport. The hospital has a centre for receiving and dispatching the dead reconnaissance (RFCD) and a huge body storage facility for 400 people, a reminder of the Chechen war. The RFCD is controlled by the North Caucasus Military District, while the morgue is under the control of the military forensics division (State Forensics Centre No 111, 2nd branch).
Yet when I go to investigate I’m told there are no dead bodies in Voenved. The deputy head of the RFCD, Aleksey (who didn’t want to give his surname), claims, “We only have soldiers from Chechnya here. Both families and paratroopers have come here to ask us, but we’ve let some of them inside to show that we don’t have anyone.” At the military forensics office Elena Volkova, the head of the administration department, says: “I’ve already answered calls from the municipal and regional forensics centre, they’re also looking, they have relatives calling all the time. We do not have the bodies. We receive bodies following court decisions. I would know if we had someone here.”
The press service of the North Caucasus military district tells me military morgues only have military dead and that as I am looking for civilians I should look for them somewhere else.
Two women and three men stand near the entrance to the military hospital at Voenved. They are in the narrow shade of a chapel built out of a construction trailer, scrolling through photos on an iPhone, trying to choose something suitable for a headstone. One of the men – he looks distinctly out of place in their company – with grey hair, tall, with the bearing of a soldier, steps aside to make a phone call on a giant telephone receiver. I ask if they are here to pick up a body. They nod: yes. And yes, he died near Donetsk airport.
“Who are you?” they ask me. When I say I’m a journalist, they immediately ask me to step away, or, better still, leave altogether.
“If you have any conscience at all, you will not take any photos,” says a weary-looking young woman in a long turquoise dress. Her face looks strange. Only later I realise it was not grief but acute fear I saw in her face. They keep their distance, walking from the shadow under the burning sun. The temperature rises past 30º C, there isn’t anywhere to sit down besides some dusty concrete blocks. There is an air-conditioned office with lots of chairs 20 meters further, but they don’t get any closer to the hospital. They don’t leave. I keep my distance.
About 40 minutes later a group of tanned men in stretched out and stained vests appears. I overhear one of them speaking to the grey-haired man, “We need an order from someone who knows.” Another one of them approaches me and asks, “How do you know that the bodies are here?”. To some soldiers smoking nearby, he snaps, “She is a journalist. Don’t talk to her.” Quickly, the soldiers get into a car, sweating, not daring to open a door or window. I move out into the sun, a bit further away. The soldiers crawl out for some fresh air, but the relatives still don’t return to the shade.
An hour later, one of the men in stained vests cries out to the family members as he passes by in a jeep: “Go get some lunch. The matter is still being decided.” The family members leave.
Later, I find out that they managed to get the body back. No one from the authorities contacted them: they found their relative by calling to Donbass. Things were then solved via telephone conversations between Donbas and Rostov. The body was returned unofficially.
The following day the body of Sergey Zhdanovich from Elektrogorsk was also picked up, also in secret. For this to happen, Roman Tikunov, the head of the executive body of United Russia, the country’s main pro-Kremlin political party, who also serves as the chairman of the local ‘Combat brotherhood’ chapter, personally travelled to Rostov.
On my request, war veteran organisations meet the leadership of the North Caucasus Military District. The leadership responds in all sincerity: there are no bodies in Rostov; there is nothing to look for. Aleksandr Titov, who works for the regional administration’s press office, has been to many of the offices and expresses his confusion: “I haven’t been provided with any information either. For now, I can definitively say that we’re not handling the dispatch of bodies and we’re not contacting relatives.”
Missing husband
There is a young woman standing near the shopping centre, wearing a uniform t-shirt. She gives me a half hug, leads me up the escalator and then inside the storeroom of the Tsentrobuv shoe store. A young man is about to have his sandwich there, but he quickly leaves.
The woman’s name is Lyana Elchaninova. On her colleagues’ advice, she placed a notice on the Vkontakte social network, Russia’s version of Facebook, with the name of her missing husband – Evgeny (Zhenya) Korolenko, born in 1967.
I had been given his name as one of the people who died in the fighting.
Donetsk authorities confirmed that Korolenko was dead and that his body was shipped to Rostov in that same truck.
Lyana has no more tears.
“I am just glad that he is not lying in some pile. There were many bodies left there. I was told the bodies were decomposing. And that Ukrainian soldiers wanted to burn them.”
Lyana has been looking for her husband for eight days. Briefly, she relays this hellish experience: “Zhenya left without saying anything to me. I came home from work late one evening, I work until 10pm, and there was this note. He wrote, ‘The car is at Andrik’s.’”
“I found out on 30 May that this Andrik served with him in Afghanistan. He’s a friend of sorts. This Andrik saw Zhenya’s surname on the list of the dead, so I rang him. He said: ‘Yes, it’s over. He’s dead though I didn’t see the body, I’ll ring you later and tell you where and when you can collect it’.”
“I waited until 11pm and rang him again. ‘I don’t know where they are, stop asking me these stupid questions.’ Later, he rang me: ‘He’s not in Rostov. He is on one list and not on the other.’ Then he adds: ‘it’s impossible identify anyone. It’s just like it was in Chechnya,’ and starts telling me all kinds of horrifying things.”
“But then my head started working again. I could identify him by his hands or his feet. By his teeth, too – you can’t do anything to the teeth, he had some dentures. I can even bring his dentist along and have him look. I could have someone look at his DNA. But, ‘no, a forensic examination is expensive.’ Then the post about the truck and how they were transported appeared.”
“I went to work but the girls could see the state I am in. They also started asking around the people they know – someone in the police force, someone at the FSB security services, but nobody had heard about so many bodies being transported to Rostov. The director knew a girl who worked at Rostov city hospital No. 2. She confirmed that the truck had arrived but they did not have any space in the morgue and the bodies were rerouted to Voenved.”
“I rang them up. Stupidly, I said it was about a body from Donetsk. The moment they heard about Donetsk, Ukraine, they were all, like, ‘No, no, no…’”
Lyana is calm. Tears appear in her eyes but dry up again. “If I can’t collect him, then I would like to see his body, at least. Or the photographs of the body.”
Combat Brotherhood
I ring the United Russia party member Tikunov. I know that at that moment he is accompanying the delivery of Zhdanovich’s body to Elektrogorsk, and explain to him that right next to me is the wife of a man who died together with Zhdanovich. Tikunov tells me I am mistaken and that our newspaper publishes lies and unverified facts.
“Would you like to speak to the widow who has been making rounds of the morgues for eight days?” I ask, but he tells me never to call him again and turns off his phone.
We ring around the Combat Brotherhood, Afghan veterans, members of the armed forces. They promise help but tell us not to get our hopes up.
‘I’ll be gone for a bit’
This is a note from inside Zhenya’s notepad:
Sweetheart, I couldn’t say this to you yesterday – I didn’t want to upset you because I care about you.
You can see how messed up everything has got.
It’s very hard for me to be here, without a job. I am not really living, it feels like a dead end. So, I have gone to Donbas. They are waiting for me there. There is a future there.
I will tell you all about it if I manage to come back alive.
I love you.
That’s all.
I’ll be gone for a bit, my dear.
They were together two-and-a-half years, but were not officially registered as married. During the May holidays they discussed finding out how and when they should apply to get married.
“It was absolute happiness. We never argued even once.”
Afghan veteran
Between May 1985 and May 1987, before they met, Evgeny served in Afghanistan in a motorised rifle unit as a shooter. He didn’t talk to Lyana about Afghanistan much.
“He tried to forget as much as he could,” she says. He was once inside an armoured vehicle on fire and spent time in hospital. “While he was in service, his mother received two death notifications and had a heart attack after each one.” His parents are no longer alive. His remaining relatives are some cousins, Lyana and a six-year-old daughter from his first marriage.
By trade, he was a locksmith, and his military papers show he had a previous conviction for something. He used to read a lot, mostly fantasy.
He played World of Tanks, War Thunder, Stalker and World of Warplanes on the computer. Tanks, airplanes, shootouts. Most recently, he worked for his friends’ computer and office equipment repair firm – he picked up and delivered orders. Then his friends stopped paying his salary. He needed the money to spend on his daughter, he needed the money to live on.
Lyana wonders whether the financial situation spurred him on. “People were saying on internet forums that they were being paid. Were they being paid? Why else did he go there? There was no training camp before he left. His phone never rang.”
“Only when Maidan was still going on, in the fall, when there were snipers who could not be found afterwards… Only then he ever said to me, when we were watching the news, that if a war would break out at the border, so close to us, that he’d be first or second in line to be called to the front.”
“Had he then said, ‘I am definitely going’, I would get worried but then my brain would have switched on. We would have sat down and discussed what I should do if this actually happened. But he did everything without saying a word.”
Lyana said he was corresponding with people and discussing his departure on the Vkontakte network. He never logged out of his page.
The correspondence lasts only a few hours on 19 May. For his login Evgeny chose Shiva Shiva, the same as his gaming name, referring to the god of war. His counterpart is Fat Epiphan, one of the volunteers of “Russian volunteers/Donbass” group. In their correspondence, Evgeny refers to a telephone call they’ve had. Epiphan asks him to fill in a questionnaire: his call signal, date of birth, past experience of combat, specialisation, size, city, equipment, telephone.
He also enquires as to when Zhenya can make it to the deployment point in Rostov. The address is not mentioned. “If you have your uniform, bring it”, Epiphan instructs. “We prefer mountain uniforms. Boots are olive cobra. If you have the boots, don’t buy any more. You shouldn’t bring the Russian numeral camouflage uniform either.”
Lyana recalls what happened when she read the conversation: “I wrote back to Epiphan and then Zhenya personally rang me on 23 May. I started yelling at him: ‘Where are you? Why did you leave me like that?’
‘Don’t worry, I am here, at the border with Rostov. We are playing sport, going on runs. Everything will be fine.’
“I said to him: ‘Don’t get yourself into any trouble. Come home. Why did you go there in the first place?’
‘Don’t worry. I will call you. And if I don’t call you, that means we are not allowed.’
That was it.”
The phone was then switched off. Then, on 26 May, they came under fire.
Lyana sent Epiphan a message with Zhenya’s distinguishing features: He’d had an operation on the lens of his eye; he had a crown on one of his top incisors, he had a tattoo on the middle finger of his left hand that he had tried to have removed, there was a mole in his right armpit the size of a pea. “Got it”, Epiphan answered.
Lyana also uploaded pictures of Zhenya’s tattoos.
VKontakte’s Russian volunteers/Donbas group has 10,000 subscribers and excellent security settings. Group managers are anonymous.
Requirements for volunteers are strict: only those with combat experience can apply. They must be over 26 years old, only certain specialisations, no criminal record. Right now they are looking for armoured infantry vehicle crew members, portable antitank guided missile launcher operators, anti-aircraft missile system operators, automatic grenade launcher AGS-17 operators, grenade launch operators, flamethrower operators. Also in demand are notionally civilian specialists: mechanics, drivers, command centre staff, logistics specialists, doctors and paramedics.
In addition to online mobilisation, the search for volunteers in Rostov-on-Don was conducted directly via the army recruitment centres. Veterans say that a few days before the May holidays they got phone calls from these centres with an invitation to come in for a chat – but only officers and warrant officers with combat experience were invited in.
At the meeting they were told that people were needed to prevent subversive actions, like those in Odessa. The events in Odessa had just happened. Everything strictly on a voluteer basis. The military recruitment office issued those interested with the phone number of a contact person. In other words, the military recruitment offices were recruiting the personnel.
Many people went, optimistic about the outcome. About half of the people living in Rostov have relatives in the Odessa region. They felt they were going to protect them. The Rostov region is an excellent place for recruiting volunteer; 68,000 veterans of various conflicts are living here – from Afghanistan to Georgia. Practically every local Cossack was involved in the Transnistria conflict.
Pretty much everyone here is immune to the inevitable evil of any war. Rostov residents are aware there are unofficial wars and that these wars can be given very different names, such as counter-terrorism operations, the deployment of limited contingents, peacekeeping missions or they can simply be called nothing at all.
The veterans don’t approve the search for bodies: “Until the authorities come up with a story of how they came to be here, everyone will keep quiet. If it turns out that it’s our people over there – especially the ones that have fought before, the ones with experience, with a military service card and specific skills – then the Americans will send in their army. They’re already claiming that there are Russian soldiers here, but for now they don’t have any proof. If all this comes to light, then other countries will seize the opportunity.” A similar awareness is widespread among civilians – nurses, morgue workers, public officials and their relatives are asked to understand what is called the ‘political aspect.’
The military enlistment office had contacted Zhenya before the New Year. “They sent a letter to his old address, telling him to ‘phone this number, we are gathering information.’ He called and told them he was alive and doing well. They answered, ‘that’s great. We’ll write down this number so we can invite you on February 23. There’ll be a celebration and we’ll be handing out medals.’ That was it. They never sent him congratulations, nothing happened. Maybe this had nothing to do with what happened later.”
Images of the dead
Many people saw this collection of photographs. It was called ‘Images of dead pro-Russia activists, for those aged 18+’. Dead faces on tiles.
The images were published on 31 May by a Ukrainian blogger with an introduction warning about a ‘sickening spectacle’. I quickly scroll through the text but Lyana does not care. She finds Zhenya at number 16. She finishes looking at the rest of the photos and demands to count them. There are 56 faces.
“There are pictures of those here whose bodies have not been removed. Someone still does not know that someone close to them has died.”
She returns to Zhenya’s photo.
“It does not look like him. A chain, yes, I think he had this chain. The ears aren’t sticking out. The head, the face, does not look like him. But the tattoos are similar. Look, these ones are very well defined but his are old and smudged. No, Zhenya’s eyebrows don’t look quite like that… His were smaller. But the hair has grown very long here. Shit, this probably is him. This could be him. The chain.
He did have a chain like that. Nostrils, nose. That’s him. That’s it. That’s him.”
Funeral
Heat. We’re standing by the concrete slab not far from where the other family once stood. In the morning one of the veterans contacted the surgeon of the hospital number 1602 who then promised to issue us with a pass.
It is impossible to get in through the reception – access to the morgue is only on the permission of the head of the hospital. The head of the hospital is not letting anyone into the morgue.
But the surgeon has gone off on business, so we must wait for him to return. Lyana and her friends Dasha and Igor are hovering around the concrete slab. One of them tells her that it turns out Andrik has a lot of the cars from those who have gone away and that he doesn’t want to give back Zhenya’s car ‘until everything has been cleared up.’ “I don’t care,” Lyana says, “I only want to get Zhenya back.”
When the surgeon returns, he is accompanied by a middle-aged man in a uniform who introduces himself as the duty officer, with a nametag that says Rudin. Lyana hardly moves a muscle. The surgeon, pretending they didn’t talk on the phone that very morning, asks: “So what do you want?” In the distance, two security guards are observing the exchange.
“My husband has been killed. I need to see him, to verify that it is him.”
“Well, we definitely don’t have him. Could he be at the forensic medical examination centre?”
Rudin answers before Lyana can, “I asked the forensics team, they also said they don’t have anyone.”
“Well then I want to see the lists.”
“I don’t have any lists.”
“We need to get into the morgue somehow. Please.”
“Get into the morgue? What do you mean, get in?” The doctor acts surprised.
“Okay, who is responsible for letting people enter the morgue then?”
“Enter the morgue?” Rudin asks.
“Well, who is it? The head of the department? Because he’s definitely not here. There’s no one here. I asked.”
“Only those who died in the hospital are taken to the morgue. Patients, just patients. Ordinary patients.”
The surgeon adds, “I’m not a pathologist. I don’t have any information on the deceased. If they were wounded, then I’d know them.”
“But they’re dead,” Lyana says and bites her lip.
“Anyway, the laboratory technician isn’t here either, I called his home. He says there isn’t anyone here.”
“Can we go in?”
“Well, I can’t order a pass for you. The head of the hospital, if they give you his number, call him. Ask him.”
“Let’s move out of the sun,” Dasha says.
We move into the reception office and sit Lyana down on a chair. We make calls to the RFCD, to the head of the hospital. Nobody picks up. An older lady next to us is asking if she can visit the church that is on the hospital grounds. The duty officer says no, “everything has changed because of Ukraine. We don’t let outsiders onto the grounds now, those are the orders.”
“Can’t we just climb over the fence?” Lyana asks quietly. Her eyes show that she is serious.
“They’ll ask for your pass at the entrance to the morgue,” Dasha answers, “they’ll put you in a cell, Lyan, and you won’t be any closer to finding his body.”
Two security guards start talking to the duty officer while keeping an eye on us. One of them asks Lyana, “How come we have been told that we cannot, under any circumstances, allow you to go in?”
“You bastards!” Lyana shouts, while Dasha holds her back and tries, to no avail, to calm her down.
The security guards start quietly talking to the duty officer again.
Then he asks, “are you girls from Donetsk?”
“No we’re locals.”
Eventually he says: “We’ll give you a phone number for the FSB. Give them a ring and resolve the issue. Because we have been told not to let you in. Give them a call…”
“What’s with this attitude?” Lyana is shouting again, “if he’s dead already, what do they need him for?”
“Just calmly explain to this FSB guy what’s going on, so he can instruct the head of the hospital. I would like to help you but I can’t. I was told not to let you in.”
Four digits of an internal phone number on a piece of paper. The name on it is Stanislav Alexandrovich Kuznetsov. We are trying to calm Lyana down.
She stops crying. In a calm voice she speaks into the receiver. She says that her husband has gone missing, that she has information that the bodies are here, and that she needs to bury her husband. That she at least has to see him, see that it is him. And that the head of the hospital has given orders not to let her in.
“And so what do you want from me?” I can hear the voice in the telephone receiver say, “I am not even in the military, so what do you want from me? Goodbye.”
“You said ‘head of the hospital’,” the duty officer remarks, “you shouldn’t have said the ‘head’, but rather the duty officer.”
So we call back and try again. We get the same response.
Three hours after we arrived at Voenved and 10 minutes after the call to Kuznetsov, Lyana gets a call on her mobile.
The man introduces himself as Sergey.
“Your husband is dead. His body is hidden at a certain place…”
“Is it at Voenved?” Lyana says quickly. “I am here now.”
“Yes, he is here. But they won’t let you in, Lyana. They have made it into a military secret, do you understand? But we are removing a body tomorrow. We’ll remove yours, too. Someone will ring you regarding the funeral. We’ll help you with everything. But the casket will be closed.
“I want to identify him.”
“It will be a closed casket. But this is definitely him. We verified by the images of the tattoos you’ve sent.”
After two hours ‘Sergey’ rings back and says that he can bring out the body today. Lyana wants to take the body immediately and store it in a morgue in Rostov for safe-keeping while she makes funeral arrangements. Lyana also wants to open the casket and identify her husband.
No morgue in Rostov, not even the two private funeral parlour morgues, will receive the body. Initially, all goes well, the morgues name the price, they ask about the documents. ‘Sergey’ mentioned that Korolenko’s death certificate was issued in Ukraine, so we pass that information to the morgue employees and funeral agents. Then, they respond, “is he from that truck? We won’t take him.”
Some are sympathetic. “You have to understand,” one tells Lyana, “this is a Russian citizen that has been killed in combat operations. But our country isn’t involved in any combat operations. I’ve been working at the morgue for 25 years, let me give you some advice. You need an official identification, with a certificate. Do not open the coffin yourself. You do not know who is in that coffin. What have they been saying? ‘No bodies have been received’? You might as well go ahead and just bury what you’ve been given. We won’t hold it here, it is a very risky business. The FSB guys appear from nowhere in stories like these.”
An employee of one of Rostov’s city morgues provides Lyana with the phone number of a guy that could help her bury the body without documents. Someone else advises her to contact an agent in Azov, just in case they aren’t aware of the situation yet.
Then, a funeral agent called Oleg calls Lyana. He tells her that some unknown people have given him money to organise Zhenya’s funeral, and promised to bring him the body. Lyana asks Oleg to make sure that she can open the casket.
Soon afterwards, Lyana gets a phone call from someone who introduces himself as a ‘kommissar’.
“We have bodies which have been lying near the airport since 26 May, and we are unable to collect them. But we managed to pull him out and we delivered him to Russia. After all this, do you really want to open the casket?
“Will this be ethical towards your husband, towards his legacy? I think not”, he says.
“They used heavy ammunition over there. Do you understand what I am saying? But you can get a red velvet casket; everything will be packaged up nicely. We have a death certificate. He was identified by his fellow soldiers. Of course, all this during military action. But he had been identified.”
“You are an adult. Russia is not conducting an organised military action.”
“Your husband voluntarily went to the street where shots were being fired.” “We will help you with what we can with the location of the burial and the body. We have sponsors in Russia who are helping. You have to understand that we get no state support. But we will take care of the funeral.”
(Here the kommissar takes a pause, apparently expecting to hear words of gratitude in response. Lyana does not say anything.)
“Goodbye,” says the kommissar. “I am sorry it all happened this way.”
“Of course I want it all,” Lyana screams at her friend. “I want the medical examination. I want to identify him. I want to make sure this is him. But how?”
They do not manage to find a morgue in Rostov for the body. They have nowhere to take it. There is no place to open up the casket. The temperature in Rostov is +35C. They will receive the body only just before the funeral.
Another one of Lyana’s friends is searching for someone who can guarantee that the body will be handed over. They find a general who promises that, if the body isn’t given to them after all, he will personally accompany them to Voenved. “But only for the one body, is that clear?” the general asks, “I can only take one body out for you, not for any other relatives.”
The funeral was due to take place on Monday. Lyana and Dasha go to pick up a funeral wreath. Lyana is looking at a video of the volunteers. Branches scarred with shrapnel, someone is pulling a wounded man by his coat, a woman with her legs torn off is trying to get up. “He saw all of this in real life, not on a TV screen, do you understand this? He knew what it looked like. He could not but go there.”
I go to another town for a meeting and return late at night. There are two funeral wreaths decorated with roses and black ribbons standing on the balcony. Lyana is sitting on the sofa, her face raw.
“They will not give Zhenya to me. I got a phone call in the evening. They said they wouldn’t give him to me because I have spoken to a journalist. Because I have spoken to you.”
I break off all contact with Lyana. I spend two days walking around the city. I do not ring my sources, do not interview anyone, make no plans, and do not go to the border. I am afraid to frighten off the people hiding the bodies. But I cannot leave. I eat berries at the market, dodge kids on their roller-skates. There is thunder.
At the Paramonovsky warehouse – a derelict building with no more roof – water emerges from under the building’s fundament. Teenagers are jumping from the top of the walls, into the building, into the water, like little soldiers. Afterwards they lie on the girders to dry.
Men in the antique shop talk about Poroshenko’s inauguration and how nothing has changed. They talk about a rat that will get eaten by worms as it gets weaker, and how “Ukraine will go the same way, just like Darwin said.”
Refugees from Slavyansk, both with a child on their arm, talk on the city bus: “I was talking to my mother on Skype and I heard bzh-bzh-bzh – it went on for sixteen hours.”
“But you live on top of the hill, so the sound travels all the way to you.”
“No they went all the way to the filling station.”
“Who did?”
“Well, the ones who are shooting. They blew up the tanks.”
Girls at the church are talking about Putin. They say the stars will be in his favour for two more years, that America knows this and that that is why they are giving the Ukrainians bullet-proof vests, but no money.
Two days later the news reaches us: Zhenya’s body had been released.
They buried him. •