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11 January 2015

A Casualty of Moscow’s Secret War: A Russian Soldier Vanishes in the Ukraine

Joshua Yaffa
January 8, 2015

The Search for Petr Khokhlov
The main road from Donetsk to Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, on the trail of Petr Khokhlov. Credit Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

After their father died and their mother fell into drink, Petr Khokhlov and his brother, Sergey, were sent to an orphanage in Novouzensk, a small, dusty town of low-slung Soviet-era apartment blocks on Russia’s border with Kazakhstan. The two boys had only each other. Petr was quiet and well behaved, scolding other students at the orphanage when they addressed their teachers with the familiar ty, rather than the more formal vy. He played the balalaika in music class and carried himself as a little gentleman, with any number of pretty girls in tow. As they grew up, Petr would consult with his older brother on just about every decision, down to what T-shirts he should buy. When Sergey was courting the woman who would later become his wife, Petr — just two years Sergey’s junior, but with a soft, boyish face that made him look even younger — would tag along on their dates to the movies and fall asleep in the back seat on the drive home.

When Petr turned 18 and left the orphanage school, he was sent away for his year of mandatory army service and ended up at a base hundreds of miles north, in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Nine months in, he decided to sign up for a three-year contract as a professional soldier. Russia’s armed forces are made up of its large conscript army, with 340,000 young men drafted each year, as well as a professional force of 220,000 officers and 200,000 contract soldiers. Petr didn’t see many other ways to get the money to pay for college or one day buy an apartment. Sergey opposed the plan. He wanted his brother back in Novouzensk with him, as always. But Petr was determined: “I should stay here and drink myself to death? Or work on a construction site?” he asked.

Petr came home for a visit, and the two brothers argued. “Don’t sign,” Sergey begged him. “Serve out your time and come back here.”

But Sergey knew there was another reason his brother wanted to stay at the base: Petr had fallen in love with a cheerful student at a local medical college. Anna Komolova was 17, with a gentle smile that curved up at its edges and blond hair that fell over her forehead. She also grew up without parents, a fact that brought her and Petr closer together; it didn’t take long before the two of them were talking of moving in together. After half a year of dating, Petr proposed. They planned to register their marriage in October, after Anna turned 18 and Petr had a chance to take her home to Novouzensk to introduce her to Sergey and his wife, Nazira. Sergey knew that staying close to Nizhny Novgorod was a way for Petr to stay close to Anna, who had several years of medical studies left. It was hard having his younger brother so far away, but he came to understand — respect, even — Petr’s decision. “O.K., so he wants to achieve something, he’s put a goal in front of himself,” he thought.

On Aug. 19, Sergey got a call from a friend in town, who told him that the local draft board in Novouzensk was claiming that Petr had abandoned his post. He was missing. Two officers were on their way to Novouzensk to look for him. Sergey assured them that Petr had not returned home, but he had no idea where his brother could be. “Why would he run off?” Sergey wondered. He was a contract soldier now, not a conscript, and he could quit if he wanted to.

An hour later, Sergey and Nazira arrived at the draft office to find the officers already there. They handed him a stack of fliers that they were posting around town, bearing Petr’s face and birth date, his military ID number, his home address. As the officers talked with Sergey, one received a call from a commander back in Nizhny Novgorod. There is a video on YouTube, the caller said. Petr was in Ukraine.

Nazira rushed to find the video on her phone. Everyone — the two officers included — hunched over the small screen to watch. There was Petr, in rumpled dark green fatigues, his smooth face a canvas of exhaustion and fear. “You could see that he was nervous,” Sergey told me. “He was sighing. Even his mouth had gone dry. He wasn’t himself.”

The video, posted by the S.B.U., Ukraine’s internal security service, showed what seemed to be an interrogation. It began with Petr introducing himself as a “citizen of the Russian Federation.” A green curtain hung behind him, the only visible detail in an otherwise featureless tableau. Under questioning, Petr described his involvement in an act of outright aid to Russian-­speaking rebels, who by then were three months into a grinding war with the government in Kiev. His brigade, he said, was stationed in Rostov, a region of Russia that borders Ukraine. After a month of living in tents, the soldiers received an order from the company commander. They were told to strip 14 armored vehicles of all identifying markings, everything from the license plates to the serial numbers on the gun turrets, and then drive them toward the border. There, Petr told his interrogators in a rushed monotone, “we were told that the vehicles were handed off to some Chechens, and they were to be passed to the rebels.”
A scene from the interrogation video of Petr Khokhlov, posted online by the Ukrainian security service. Credit Image from YouTube

This happened several times, Petr explained, listing the last names of the officers who gave the orders: Sashenko, Polomotov, Dultsev. Sergey noticed that at certain moments in Petr’s account — when he talked of passing military hardware to the rebels or of seeing separatist fighters fire grenades and mortars at civilians — the officers standing next to him in the draft office muttered, even winced. “He knows a lot of information,” one said ominously.

At this point in the interrogation, Petr’s tale shifted suddenly from a narrative of dutiful soldiership to one of wild adventurism. With another soldier from the Ninth Brigade, he said, he ran away from their temporary base in the middle of the night and walked across the border. They wanted to join the rebel militia, which he heard was paying 150,000 rubles a month, or roughly $4,000 at the time. After walking for two days through the forest, they swam across a river and were eventually captured by a group of rebel fighters. At their base in the town of Novosvitlivka, the rebels took him into their ranks. Petr said they gave him an ammunition vest, a Kalashnikov rifle and some grenades. He drove off in a Soviet-made Lada with three militants; his friend took off in another direction in a BMW. Before long, the car Petr was riding in was stopped by Ukrainian soldiers, who took everyone into custody. After questioning, he said, “they gave me something to eat and cigarettes.” The video ended abruptly, the beam of a flashlight casting a weak, spectral light on Petr’s face.

The officers immediately called their superiors, who ordered them to stay the night in Novouzensk and return to base the next day. Before they left, they gave Sergey some instructions: Don’t go anywhere. Don’t ask for help from anyone. “We’ll get him back ourselves,” one officer told him, promising a prisoner exchange with the Ukrainians. Nazira began to cry.

Petr’s enlistment in the Russian Army roughly coincided with the beginning of the war in Ukraine, more than 600 miles from where his brigade was based. The conflict grew out of the disorder and fear that arose in Ukraine last spring after protests pushed the president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, from power. Many in the Russian-­speaking east did not trust the new leaders in Kiev, and they formed militias, seizing administrative and police buildings and then waging open warfare against Ukrainian forces when they arrived. They were aided by an opaque assortment of Russian agents and volunteer fighters, inspired by the relative ease with which Russia took over the Crimean peninsula, another Ukrainian region with a pro-Russian majority. Uprisings in Donetsk and Luhansk, the two provinces that make up Ukraine’s easternmost tip, began not long afterward. From the beginning, the Kremlin denied that it was stoking the conflict in the Donbass, as the region is often called. Yet by this point in the summer, it could no longer hide the fact that Russian money, weapons and quite likely fighters were flowing across the border.

Anna recalls that Petr’s first few weeks of service were uneventful, even idle. “We slack off,” he told her. “We don’t do all that much.” But then, near the end of June, Petr and the rest of the soldiers in the brigade were dispatched to the Rostov region for military exercises. As Anna remembers it, Petr’s commanders first told him it would be for a week, maybe two. After a month went by, Petr told Anna that he would be back by September. The last time they spoke was the end of July. “You rarely call,” Anna told him. “I’ve already grown unaccustomed to your voice.” “More often isn’t possible,” he said. “Wait for me. I’ll come back soon.” In that call, he said something about the Donbass, the contested region in eastern Ukraine. Petr and his fellow soldiers were stationed either there or near there on the Russian side of the border — she couldn’t remember exactly.

This last call came at a moment when the war was shifting to a new phase — and as a result, Russia, too, was changing its approach to the conflict. In the early days of the war in April and May, rebel forces routed the Ukrainian Army and the volunteer battalions fighting alongside it in humiliating battles, seizing ever greater swaths of territory. For much of the spring and summer, Russia’s involvement, at least in a strictly military sense, was limited to supplying weapons and equipment to the rebels; to the extent that Russian soldiers were on the ground in the east, they tended to be instructors or technical specialists. But as the war — or what the new Ukrainian president, Petro O. Poroshenko, who was elected in May, referred to as an “antiterrorist operation” — dragged on, the Ukrainian side began to reverse the momentum. By the beginning of August, the government in Kiev had recaptured 75 percent of the territory once controlled by the rebels. Its often indiscriminate artillery campaign had shattered Luhansk, a city whose prewar population was nearly 450,000, leaving it without electricity and on the verge of capture by pro-Kiev militias. Donetsk, the largest city in the rebel-held east and the separatists’ political capital, seemed poised to fall within weeks, if not days.

If the rebels were defeated, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia would lose his leverage in Ukraine. He needed the separatists to hang on, almost certainly not because he wanted to annex the land they controlled but because it was advantageous for the conflict to remain unresolved, an instrument that Russia could use to complicate Ukrainian politics for years to come. Putin warned of “consequences” if Kiev pressed its campaign. He kept saying there could be no military solution, a declaration made not for any humanistic reason but because he didn’t want his proxy force to suffer a battlefield defeat before he could extract a political victory.

In August, days after Petr’s disappearance, separatist forces began a counteroffensive against the Ukrainian Army. But mounting evidence suggests that the decisive role in this attack was played by Russian military units, which for the first time in the war were directly participating in battles inside Ukraine. For Russian officials and the country’s state-run media, the direct involvement of Russian soldiers in the war — and especially the fact that dozens, maybe hundreds, were killed in the fighting — was a taboo subject, ignored or denied by all levels of the state bureaucracy. But the difference on the battlefield was palpable. Ukrainian forces could hope, with just a bit more time, to defeat a rebel insurgency, but they had no chance against the Russian Army and its weaponry. The West was not going to come to Poroshenko’s rescue, making clear that any further efforts by Kiev to keep the fight going would risk total defeat. Days after the counteroffensive began, Poroshenko went to Minsk, Belarus, where he agreed to a cease-fire that ceded wide authority to the rebels, in effect creating a frozen conflict zone in eastern Ukraine propped up by Russia.

Throughout late August, Sergey and Nazira held out hope that the Russian state would find a way to bring Petr back. The day after seeing the video, they traveled 130 miles to Saratov, the regional capital, only to be rebuffed by both the military prosecutor’s office and the regional headquarters of the F.S.B., the successor agency to the Soviet-era K.G.B. A week later, they took a grueling 12-hour overnight bus ride to Petr’s base in Nizhny Novgorod. The officers greeted them warmly — feeding them lunch in the canteen, touring them around the barracks — but Sergey and Nazira left that evening with little information other than promises that people “above us” were taking care of it and that Petr would be freed within a month or two.

Officers at the base had also been in touch with Anna. Not long after Petr disappeared, she received a call: “Are you the girlfriend of Petr Sergeevich Khokhlov? Do you know where he is currently located?” She thought it was a joke; in any case, she told me, she had no idea of Petr’s whereabouts and hadn’t heard from him since his disappearance. She was worried and angry. “They beat into my head that he ran away, like he was the worst kind of scum.” Then the calls from the base turned menacing. “We don’t know where he is, but if he shows up, things are only going to be worse for him,” his commander told her. He said they might charge Petr with desertion, which carried a possible prison sentence of seven years. A woman who said she was the resident psychologist at the base sent Anna the video of Petr’s interrogation and told her that he had willingly deserted to the side of the rebels. The next day, the commander called. That was my wife, he told Anna. “Delete the video, delete all the messages. Don’t tell anyone anything, don’t show anything to anyone.”

By the fall, a sense of futility had crept in. When the various arms of the Russian state machine retract and fold in on themselves, stretching them back out becomes nearly impossible. Sergey wrote a letter to Russia’s defense minister, Sergey Shoygu, and Anna wrote her own letter to Putin through the presidential website. Neither heard back. When I visited Sergey and Nazira at their spare one-room apartment on the outskirts of Novouzensk, their communication with the commanders in Petr’s unit had also fallen apart. I sat in the kitchen with them, snacking on thick, oily slices of pink sausage wedged between crusty slices of bread, as Nazira called a lieutenant colonel in charge of brigade security. A stiff male voice answered. Nazira said she was calling about Petr.

“Do you have any news about him?” she asked.

“I don’t have any information,” the man replied and then promptly hung up.

“What hurts the most,” Sergey said, “is that if something happened to me, Petya wouldn’t sit at home. He would figure something out. But here we are. We don’t know what to do.” All he and Nazira could think of was selling their apartment and using the money to go to Moscow and hire a lawyer. So far, everyone they approached had “laughed at us like fools,” Sergey said. “We don’t know the law. We don’t know anything. So we’ll show up someplace, and they’ll tell us, ‘So what do you want?’ ” It had become obvious that a Russian soldier in Ukraine was a deeply inconvenient person to bring home.

For all the official silence on the subject, the role played by Russian forces­ in the conflict has become increasingly impossible to deny. Among other pieces of evidence, journalists found Russian military documents and equipment on the battlefield, and a number of secret or suspicious burials of Russian soldiers back home belied the claim that no Russian servicemen were in eastern Ukraine. Independent websites have cropped up to collect stories from families and friends about Russian soldiers being captured or killed in Ukraine, and one of them puts the possible tally in the hundreds.

‘What hurts the most is that if something happened to me, Petya wouldn’t sit at home. He would figure something out.’

The story of one unit, the 331st Airborne Regiment, based near the city of Kostroma, is particularly telling. On Aug. 25, the Ukrainian security services announced that they had captured 10 paratroopers from the regiment about 20 miles inside Ukrainian territory. In a series of videos made during their detention, a number of the prisoners from the 331st spoke of being ordered to drive their armored vehicles in the direction of certain coordinates; they realized they were in Ukraine only when they saw a tank with a Ukrainian flag on it, at which point they came under fire. Asked about their capture, Putin explained that the paratroopers had “just gotten lost” on an unmarked stretch of the border.

But on Sept. 2, a soldier from the regiment, Sergey Seleznev, was buried in his hometown, Vladimir, a medieval town of 12th-century cathedrals just a short drive from Moscow. Local military officials said he died during exercises in Rostov. Around the same time, another paratrooper, Andrei Pilipchuk, was buried in Kostroma, as officials remained silent about the circumstances of his death; administrators at the cemetery in Kostroma told reporters from the Russian newspaper RBC of three more soldiers from the 331st who were recently buried there — killed “in Ukraine,” they said. Then, on Sept. 4, the state-controlled Channel One broadcast a report showing the funeral of a 28-year-old paratrooper from the regiment, Anatoly Travkin. Over a shot of a wooden coffin draped in a Russian flag, an anchor explained how he died: “A month ago, he left for the Donbass without telling those close to him. The commanders of the unit emphasize that he took a vacation to leave for the war zone.” Taken at face value, these mysterious episodes suggest that the 331st had a summer full of surprising and dangerous misadventures: In the span of one month, some of them became lost and wandered into Ukraine, others were killed while on training exercises near the border and at least one died fighting as a volunteer.

When Putin lit a memorial candle at Moscow’s Holy Trinity Church on Sept. 10 in the name of “those who suffered in defending people in Novorossiya,” the czarist-era term for southeastern Ukraine that had been resurrected by pro-Russian separatists, it was seen as a tacit gesture to those Russian servicemen who were killed or injured in Ukraine. (Putin’s spokesman rejected this interpretation.) But the official position of Putin and other Kremlin officials has remained the same from the beginning: No Russian soldiers were ever ordered into Ukraine. At a news conference on Dec. 18, Putin again denied that Russia sent its forces into Ukraine over the summer. “We’re not attacking anyone,” he said. “We’re not warmongers.”

Two weeks after my visit to Sergey and Nazira’s apartment, I traveled to Kiev for a meeting with Sergii Koziakov, then a corporate lawyer who sat on the public chamber of the S.B.U., a posting that made him a sort of distant ombudsman for the security service. He told me that few people were worried about Petr’s fate, which could either save him or put him in special danger. If Ukraine were holding “a colonel in the F.S.B., well, such a person is interesting,” Koziakov said. “You could exchange him for 10 Ukrainian soldiers. A general, you could probably get Nadiya Savchenko” — a famous Ukrainian military pilot who ended up in Russian custody under mysterious circumstances and is now awaiting trial in Moscow. “But who is this Khokhlov?” An inconvenience to both sides, he pointed out. For Russians, his presence in Ukraine contradicted the Kremlin’s repeated protestations that no Russian soldiers were sent to the fight. For Ukrainians, who wanted the war to be over, Petr represented a truth about Russian involvement that might force action they didn’t want to take. Koziakov said there were “a hundred possibilities” as to Petr’s fate: “He could have been released and has stayed somewhere in eastern Ukraine because he knows a criminal case awaits him back home, or he could have been returned to the Russians and is being held someplace. Or even worse, he simply was a bother to them, and so they got rid of him.”

A Long, Strange Trip | Petr Khokhlov, who grew up in Novouzensk and was stationed at a base in Nizhny Novgorod, crossed the border into Ukraine while participating in military exercises in the Rostov region.

As with the ill-fated 331st Airborne, there was compelling evidence — albeit more circumstantial — that Petr’s brigade was indeed involved in the war. When Sergey visited Nizhny Novgorod, commanders told him that Petr was just one of six soldiers in the Ninth Brigade who disappeared during their summertime exercises in Rostov. In July, the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article about two other soldiers from the brigade, Armen Davoyan and Alexander Voronov, who were killed “on the border with Ukraine” in the Rostov region. According to the report, they came under fire while escorting a column of refugees. The article soon vanished from the paper’s website.

I spoke by phone with the 74-year-old grandmother of Voronov, who was 23 when he died, a soldier in the special forces. He had lost both his parents at a young age, and his grandmother raised him for most of his life. In June, he told her he was headed to Rostov for exercises. On the morning of July 14, a small group of military officers showed up at her house in a rural village outside of Nizhny Novgorod and told her, as she remembers, “Your grandson no longer is.” She doesn’t know the details of his death; all she was told was that it was “due to military circumstances.”

Ruslan Garafeev — the fellow soldier with whom Petr claims, in the video released by the S.B.U., to have crossed into Ukraine — is most likely another fatality. A number of the independent websites that track cases of Russian soldiers in Ukraine list Garafeev as dead, although without confirmation. (Garafeev’s social-media accounts have been deleted, but before they were, his status read, “I’m rubbing out khokhly” — a disparaging Russian term for Ukrainians — “in Rostov.”) A former soldier who served with Garafeev told me that, according to what he was told by friends still in the unit, Garafeev had indeed been killed. (He said he was told of a zinc coffin containing Garafeev’s body.) This friend said it seemed believable that Garafeev would do something like join up with the rebels in search of easy money. “It wasn’t that he was a bad guy; he just didn’t think seriously about the consequences of things,” he told me. “Wherever the wind is blowing, that’s where he’ll fly. He heard he could get some good money, the wind blew in that direction and so he flew over there.”

Perhaps no one knows more about how post-Soviet Russia prosecutes its wars than Valentina Melnikova, the head of the Union of the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia. Her organization came to prominence during the first war in Chechnya, in the mid-1990s, which began with a disastrous series of clandestine exercises in which scores of Russian soldiers were killed. Yet President Boris N. Yeltsin spent months denying that there were any Russian troops in Chechnya. In Moscow this fall, I went to visit Melnikova, a forceful 68-year-old with arched eyebrows and a short, tousled mop of red hair. The amount of paperwork stacked on every surface and spare corner of her office testified to the deadening complexity of the Russian bureaucratic machine. Every request for information she files requires letters and documents with official stamps; the answers, when they come, pile up in precarious towers around the committee’s one-room headquarters.

What had her the most confused and depressed was how mothers of servicemen deployed during the war in Chechnya would wait in lines as long as 200 people to get into her office. They wanted to know where their sons were and how to get them back. Now she gets a handful of inquiries from family members about Ukraine. “It’s like they don’t want to believe, or can’t believe, that it’s real life, that it’s really happening,” she said. Society had become passive again, too fearful or timid to take on the state: If the powers that be said there was no war, then there wasn’t.

Sergey was one of the few who had asked Melnikova for help, and she agreed to make some calls and put in official requests for information to see what she could learn about Petr’s fate. But despite her connections with military sources, Melnikova, who had been looking into the case for more than a month, still didn’t have any concrete answers. An official at the Defense Ministry told her that Petr was the subject of a criminal case for desertion; although, oddly, he added that it was the Russian state’s position that Petr went to fight not with the rebels but with the Ukrainian Army. Her appeals for information were circulating from one office to another. The state had decided to “play the fool,” she said, shuffling her requests from desk to desk in an endless loop. “It’s a dead end.”

She thought it was possible that Petr had been recaptured by Russian officers and was being held somewhere on Russian territory to keep him from talking. There was precedent for such a situation: In 1999, during the second war in Chechnya, Melnikova was called to an airport in Moscow to meet a group of Russian soldiers who had been captured by militants and then freed. But the soldiers never showed up; they were taken away by a special counterterrorism unit at the arrival gate, and it took Melnikova two weeks of calls to track them down. “We found them alive, but that was a different time,” she said. As for Petr, she said, “I don’t understand what kind of condition we’ll find him in, or if we’ll find him at all.” She shook her head. “It’s like it was in Chernobyl,” she said. “Everything has been covered by a giant sarcophagus.”

After a few days in Kiev, my own search for Petr finally yielded a lead. An S.B.U. official and representatives of the rebel forces all agreed that on Sept. 21, just before dusk on a stretch of highway outside Donetsk, Petr — along with 22 others suspected of being rebel fighters — was handed over from Ukrainian custody to the control of the separatist leadership. It was one of a handful of prisoner exchanges that took place this fall, as called for by the cease-fire accords signed in Minsk. I watched a video of the release, filmed by a member of the “politburo” of the rebel defense ministry. It all happens quickly: A bus pulls up and then Petr and the others get off and are lined up by the side of the road. A few minutes later, with the sun dipping below the horizon, they step onto another bus and head into rebel territory.

At a minimum, this meant that Petr left Ukrainian custody alive. The rebel official who confirmed Petr’s release and handover suggested that he might have joined one of the separatist militias fighting in the east. When I told that to Melnikova, she replied, “If he’s alive, then he will show up sooner or later.” But that, she went on to clarify, was the optimistic scenario. “If he really is fighting with the rebels and ends up in battle and is killed somewhere, then how will we ever find him?”

In the middle of November, two months after the cease-fire that nominally ended the fighting between the rebels and the Ukrainian Army, I set off for Donetsk, the effective seat of the would-be separatist government, to search for traces of Petr. Although the shooting and artillery fire were far more sporadic than they were during the most active part of the war over the summer, occasional battles still flared up throughout the contested areas. I took a train from Kiev to Konstantinovka, the last train station under the control of the Ukrainians, on a comfortable and modern high-speed line built at great expense and fanfare leading up to Ukraine’s hosting of the Euro 2012 soccer championship. It once ran all the way to Donetsk, though that last bit of track had been inoperable for months now. Instead, I hired a car to drive the 60 miles to Donetsk, past a handful of Ukrainian military crossings that have, in effect, established a new internal border with the rebel-­held territories, and then through a line of rebel checkpoints on the approach into Donetsk. The city, once a regional capital of nearly one million people, now felt hushed and empty. The town center was spared the worst of the war’s bombardment, but it wasn’t rare to come across a building with a scorched, blown-out facade or one that had simply been burned to ruins. The few lively places in town were the handful of hotel bars that remained open. They tended to draw a crowd of rebel commanders, wearing fatigues with pistols fixed to their waistbands, with any number of made-up local beauties in high heels at their side.

One cold, windy night, with the streets dark and still, I met up with Vanya Kuznetsov, a 28-year-old who worked as a security guard at a supermarket in the city before he joined the rebel militia in late April. His father fought in the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. “He fought for someone else’s land, and I decided to defend my own turf,” he told me. We were sitting in one of Donetsk’s few functioning cafes apart from the strange hotel-lobby scene; after 8 p.m., it was hard to find a cup of tea, let alone dinner. A woman in the rebel leadership had given me Vanya’s number: He had been captured by Ukrainian forces, held in the city of Kharkiv alongside Petr and released in the same prisoner exchange. Since then, he has worked as a driver for a high-ranking rebel military commander in town.

Vanya had the build of a wrestler, with thick shoulders set above wide, muscular arms, and a round face that brightened when he smiled. He told me that for 28 days, he and Petr shared a cell at the S.B.U. building in Kharkiv — 13 detainees in all, in a cell built for five. Vanya said he was arrested by Ukrainian forces in July. Petr joined him a month later. “When they brought Petya in, his clothes were ripped, his pants hanging loose,” Vanya told me. “It looked like he was wearing a skirt, like a Scottish guy.” The two became close. Vanya told stories of vacations with his two children; Petr spoke of Sergey and his boyhood years at the orphanage.

According to Vanya, Petr insisted that he had come to Ukraine of his own volition. His unit, he said, went to the Russian side of the border for exercises. From there, his story tracked roughly with the second part of the tale he told on camera: One night, Petr got drunk with a friend and fellow soldier — Garafeev, presumably — and swam across the Donets River, eventually joining the ranks of rebel fighters in Luhansk before he and some others were captured.

This part of Petr’s story mystified me, perhaps because it mystified everyone who knew him. When I asked Anna about it, she replied, “He simply couldn’t have done that.” Sergey was positive that Petr would have asked for his advice. “His goal was to marry his girlfriend,” he said. “And to throw all that away to run off to Ukraine, so as to never come back?” An official at the S.B.U. told me that he doubted that Petr crossed the border on his own and that his superiors most likely fed him this explanation. “I think he was asked to tell this story to us: If you are captured, then say this and this,” the S.B.U. official said. It certainly was the talking point of Russian officials faced with questions about Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine; Putin himself said last month that such soldiers were simply answering “a call of the heart.”

‘His goal was to marry his girlfriend. And to throw all that away to run off to Ukraine, so as to never come back?’

But Vanya, perhaps predictably, believed that the first part of Petr’s confession — about the operation to deliver vehicles to the rebels — was the part he fabricated under duress. Once Petr ended up in Kharkiv, he said, “they put psychological pressure on him. They wanted to use him to prove that Russian soldiers were fighting in Donbass.” Meeting Petr came as a revelation, he told me. “I never expected this,” he said. “Our generation is full of bums on the couch. I respect him for what he did, that he carried out such a feat, the feat of a hero.” Vanya hadn’t heard from him since they were freed. “If I ever see him again,” he said, “I’m ready to get on my knees.”

Vanya told me that after they were freed on the highway, nearly all of them were taken to a dormitory building that once housed students at Donetsk State University, now taken over by the rebel administration and used as a sort of rest house for separatist fighters and their families. They ate, slept and were looked after by 58-year-old twin sisters, Galina Mitrukhina and Valentina Esmanchuk, who were volunteering for the rebel cause.

I went to pay them a visit one morning in Donetsk. The dorm hallways were busy with fighters moving supplies in and out; like much of the rebel-held east, the whole place had an improvised, jury-rigged air to it. Galina and Valentina’s room was on the eighth floor, a small space containing not much more than two narrow beds and an electric teakettle. They greeted me warmly, telling me how good it was that I had come, that I must sit and talk and eat more of the biscuits they kept putting in front of me. Galya and Valya — as everyone called them — wore their reddish-brown hair cut to their shoulders and, despite the crudeness of their current accommodations, made a fuss of putting on lipstick and blush in the mirror after I arrived. As we sipped instant coffee made sweet with condensed milk and several spoonfuls of sugar, our chat was occasionally interrupted by the rumbling of artillery fire. Rebel forces and the Ukrainian military were still fighting over the Donetsk airport, now a monstrous jumble of burned-out concrete and steel just five miles from the center of town.

Galya and Valya were from Yenakievo, a battered industrial city of 85,000 people and the hometown of former President Yanukovych, which fell under rebel control in the spring. Valya had worked at a mine, Galya at a metallurgical plant. Both had long been aggrieved by the many injustices they and their town had suffered since the Soviet collapse: the rapid loss of jobs, of the placid dependability of life under communism, of local wealth they believed had been sucked up by politicians and oligarchs in Kiev. For them, the fall of Yanukovych was nothing less than a putsch carried out by nationalists from western Ukraine, who disdained everything Russian and looked at people in the Russian-speaking east with suspicion, if not condescension. As with so much about the war and its causes, this narrative was both partly true and woefully incomplete. Nonetheless, like many in eastern Ukraine, Galya and Valya saw the success of the revolution and the ascendancy of its leaders as a direct, even existential threat.

They started by going to anti-Kiev demonstrations last spring — after the revolution but before the conflict in the east took shape — and each had sons and daughters who joined the militia. “They are fighting for a different life, so there are no oligarchs, so we have stability,” Galya told me. “Stability” was a word I heard repeatedly in eastern Ukraine, a term that combines nostalgia, frustration and the idea — however illogical — that the country’s leaders in Kiev, and especially those who took power after the revolution, are responsible for all the disappointment and unrealized promise of the post-Soviet transition. Now, Valya said, unlike in Soviet days, “if you want to go to the Urals, you have to work for half a year, sit at home and not drink anything, and then you’ll have saved enough for the trip.”

They said they remembered Petr, of course. He was quiet and sweet and didn’t make much of a fuss over himself. He came late at night after his release, Valya said. The next morning, Petr told her simply that he was leaving for Luhansk, before heading off with five other fellow former prisoners. In Luhansk, she said, Petr broke off from the group, along with Asya Arutunyan, a 28-year-old woman from Kharkiv who was imprisoned for aiding the rebels.

I reached Arutunyan by phone a few days later. She told me that over the course of the summer, as the war’s ferocity increased, she began driving her car several hours into the Luhansk region — where the fighting was most intense — to deliver food and supplies to the older residents stuck there and help bring out those who wanted to leave. She told me she made the trip every day for two months, driving hundreds of people from the conflict zone into the relative safety of Kharkiv. One day in September, she was detained by Ukrainian soldiers in Izyum, a kind of garrison city for pro-Kiev forces. They put a bag over her head and took her to the Kharkiv S.B.U. building, where she was interrogated.

“You’re a separatist, a terrorist, you must have ties to the rebels,” she recalled Ukrainian officers yelling at her. When she asked to call relatives to tell them where she was and that she was alive, she said, the answer was no: “You’ve seen too many American films, you have no rights, you’re in a ghost world.” She was the only woman held at the S.B.U. building, and after a while the guards asked to her to help distribute food to the other prisoners. That was how she met Petr. “He has a very kind heart,” she told me. “He’s young, but is a real hero, with a very brave core.”

After Luhansk, Arutunyan told me, they headed to Stakhanov, a mining town 40 miles away under the control of a separatist Cossack brigade. She didn’t stay long, wanting to get back to her family. The last she heard — although this piece of news was some weeks old already — was that Petr stayed to join the rebel militia there.

Two days later, I set off from Luhansk to Stakhanov, along with a driver and a local fixer. The road was quiet and deserted, lined on both sides by fields of brown grass. Occasionally, metallic gray dunes, waste from coal mining in the 1980s, rose up from the flat landscape like strange geologic formations on some faraway planet. Our car was stopped at a few rebel checkpoints, but more often we drove through abandoned ones — pieces of concrete pockmarked by bullets, some camouflage netting flapping in the wind. On the outskirts of Stakhanov, we came to a checkpoint manned by Cossack militiamen; they rule over Stakhanov, having fought on the side of the pro-Russian rebels, but as an autonomous force within a force, the way the Kurdish pesh merga might fight alongside the Iraqi Army but look out for their own interests. These Cossack fighters in green fatigues looked older, more weathered, but also more serious and composed than the jumpy 20-somethings who guard most of the checkpoints in the rebel-controlled east. A few had salt-and-pepper beards

In the center of town we found a woman named Katya, an energetic young correspondent for Cossack Radio, a pro-rebel news and propaganda service that broadcasts in the towns under separatist control. The radio network was started several months back, at the very beginning of the war, and airs everything from traditional Cossack songs to talk shows that debate various points of Russian Orthodox practice. I barely had a chance to greet her before she hopped back in her car and sped off, signaling for us to follow.

Katya had called ahead to help us get past the guards at the checkpoint, and now she offered to show us around. The center of Stakhanov looked like many other depressed industrial towns across the former Soviet Union: weather-­stained apartment blocks, an empty and windswept central square far bigger than what this half-­populated town merited. We drove behind her past another checkpoint and came to a stop in front of the town’s municipal police headquarters, which had been taken over and converted into the local Cossack military garrison.

Inside, Katya led us down a hallway, exchanging cheerful greetings with the rebel fighters as we walked. She motioned me through an open door. Here, she said, is your hero.

Khokhlov, 19, disappeared in August from his temporary base in the Rostov region of Russia. Credit Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

I immediately recognized Petr. Sitting on a narrow bed pushed up against the wall, he had the faint outcroppings of a honey-colored beard, and his face had been burned pink by the cold wind. But as his head turned, there was no mistaking him. He let out a weak smile. I sat down and introduced myself; the idea that an American reporter had come all the way to Stakhanov to find him, of all people, struck him as strange, but also intriguing enough to talk with me. “Nice to meet you,” I said. “Hello,” he answered. As it turns out, Katya had found him in his barracks and walked him over to meet me — as simple, in the end, as that.

I asked how he ended up here, in a forgotten mining town run by Cossacks — or in Ukraine at all, for that matter. He started by saying something obviously not true: that he finished his mandatory army service in May and was in Nizhny Novgorod — not a soldier, but a civilian — when he began to follow events in eastern Ukraine. He spoke in many of the same generalities I heard throughout eastern Ukraine among the rebels and their sympathizers: The new government in Kiev was behaving like the Nazis, the ugly face of fascism had returned and so on. “I read an article about how somewhere in Luhansk region, the Ukrainian National Guard found a World War II veteran, put a uniform on him and slit his throat,” he said. He told me he made his own way to the border. Everything he said on camera about exercises in Rostov and passing equipment to the rebels was a fiction, he said, forced upon him by his Ukrainian guards. “They sat me in the chair,” he said, “and told me to read what they had written.”

After the clear falsehood — his brother, his fiancée and even his own military commanders all agreed that Petr was an active-duty soldier sent to Rostov this summer — he continued with a story that more or less coincided with what he said on the video and to Vanya. He and Garafeev walked through the forest, found some rebels and managed to join up with them. Not long after, Petr was captured; he, too, had heard that Garafeev might be dead. The first days of his detention, he was shuttled around various cities under Kiev’s control: Izyum, Kramatorsk, then Kharkiv, where he spent nearly a month. After he was released, he knew he wanted to rejoin the rebels. “How could I not stay?” he said. “I didn’t come all this way to leave right away.”

Khokhlov at a rebel checkpoint in eastern Ukraine. Credit Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

As Petr talked, he seemed nervous but not panicked, and it was hard to say whether his short, clipped answers were a normal teenage tic or an attempt to mislead me. He pulled from his coat pocket a laminated card bearing his picture and the insignia of the “Luhansk People’s Republic.” His job in the militia in Stakhanov is to stand watch, to keep an eye on things at the front, where the fighting is most active. He hasn’t seen battle yet, he said, but he’d like to. Petr was vague about his plans, saying in one moment that he wanted to stay until the rebels defeated the “fascism” of the Ukrainian state once and for all, but in another that he missed Sergey and Anna and would like to rejoin them. He had found a way to contact both of them, and Sergey had urged him to come home. But Petr told me he would keep fighting here until it was over, “so it will be like it used to be, when it was quiet.” He went on: “So that people lived with conscience, so that innocent people won’t be killed, children. So that veterans don’t have their throats cut.”

We weren’t alone as he spoke. His Cossack commander was sitting in the room, a man in his 40s with a silver beard and tough, pockmarked skin stretched over delicate features. “He’s a very good soldier, dependable,” he said of Petr. “He came here to fight fascism and the Nazis.” The presence of this commander as Petr told his story was, of course, another reason he might not be forthcoming — and in any case, faced with a foreign journalist who showed up out of nowhere and would be gone in another couple of hours, Petr had little incentive to tell any truths that might make his situation more precarious.

He started to talk again of his brother and Anna. “Whatever happens, I’m going to survive and make it back. Whatever it costs me.” His voice had become soft. Outside, a gray sky slowly turned darker; the distant thuds of artillery shells rolled across the glass window with a faint rattle. It was impossible to know how much of our conversation was a performance, or how much everything about Petr’s life was now a performance, a confused attempt by a 19-year-old orphan to figure out how to get home to a country that claimed it would put him in prison for seven years. It’s clear that contrary to what Petr told me, he was an active-duty Russian soldier sent on exercises this summer. Maybe he did do something silly, going over the border on his own in search of money or adventure. Or maybe Petr, along with others from the Ninth Brigade, was ordered into Ukraine as part of an unofficial mission that will never be acknowledged. It was just as Melnikova had said: The true story of the war was like a leaking nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, something that could only be sealed off from the rest of the world to prevent further contamination.

Khokhlov and fellow fighters at a dormitory in eastern Ukraine. Credit Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Since Petr disappeared back in August, the conflict has moved on. The rebels have neither gained nor lost ground; their territories are neither wanted nor needed by Moscow. As falling oil prices, a sinking ruble and Western sanctions have brought the Russian economy to the edge of crisis, the Kremlin has shifted its attention from eastern Ukraine to its own affairs back home. That means, too, a heightened effort to control information, especially when it might reflect poorly on Putin. The country that Petr wants to return to is one that may have less need for him than ever. He is “excess,” as Koziakov, the lawyer in Kiev, had put it to me.

Before I left Stakhanov, I asked Petr if he wanted me to take any message to Sergey and Anna. Yes, he said. “Tell them I’ll come back, and everything will be O.K.” We walked out into the cold, wet air and said goodbye. Petr was headed back to his barracks; he had a shift standing guard later in the evening. I stood for a moment and watched as he and his commander climbed into an old minibus and drove off toward the front, toward a sloping hillside of grays and browns, toward the sound of faraway artillery fire echoing off the damp earth of the Donbass.

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