An effigy of the Kiev authorities hanging above a barricade, Sloviansk, eastern Ukraine, May 11, 2014
Sloviansk—Every now and then I can hear distant explosions and bursts of gunfire. But most of the time, here in the center of Sloviansk, which since early April has become eastern Ukraine’s separatist stronghold, everything is quiet. Since the small town is chopped up by barricades and many businesses and factories have closed down, there is not much going on, so that when the wind blows you can hear it shimmer the leaves of the silver birches that line the streets. If you were looking for war here, it would be hard to find.
Ice creams are still getting through the checkpoints around town and there is a steady stream of people buying them. As I chose a chocolate bear, Irina, aged fifty, who sells them, told me that she liked being here among people, because the worst thing in this situation was being at home, alone and anxious.
When we come to look back on the Ukrainian conflict, it will be hard, if it moves from its current low-level state to a full-blown war, to say that such-and-such a date marked its beginning. Was it the day that some forty people died, many after being trapped in a building that then caught fire in Odessa? Was it the day that seven people or was it more than twenty or perhaps more than one hundred died in Mariupol, another Black Sea town? For people here the numbers they believe depend on whether they follow the Russian or Ukrainian press and, since both are lying and distorting slivers of truth, it is not surprising that people are being dragged down into a vortex of war.
But while it will be hard to agree on a date, it is already easy to say what is happening in people’s heads. Six months ago everyone here just went about their normal business. They were worried about the things that everyone worries about, and here especially: low salaries, scraping by, collecting money for all the bribes one has to pay, and so on. And then something snapped. The rotting ship of the Ukrainian state sprung a leak and everything began to go down. In people’s heads a new reality has gradually begun to take shape and, in this way, everyone is being prepared for war.
This hit me on May 9. Across the countries of the former Soviet Union this is Victory Day, the day when the dead of World War II are remembered and elderly men and women, dressed in their uniforms and bedecked with medals, are honored. In Sloviansk the ceremonies began in front of the Lenin statue in the town square. The old men and one woman stood in a line while those antigovernment leaders who seized power here on April 12 stepped forward to make speeches to about a thousand people. Given that the Ukrainian army has surrounded the town I was surprised by the emptiness of what was being said.
Pavel Gubarev, a rebel leader who had just been released in a prisoner exchange with the Ukrainians, exclaimed: “Fascism! It is coming for us again!” Then he talked of “New Russia,” the old phrase that Vladimir Putin has revived to describe these lands, which were added to the Russian Empire by Catherine the Great. “Eternal glory!” he said, his voice rising and falling in dramatic cadences, referring to the fallen of World War II. Then as though at a religious service, or as if they were taking part in a mystical experience, the crowd began to respond in unison: “Glory! Glory! Glory!” Then Gubarev said: “Glory to the heroes and victors of the Russian Spring!” by which he meant the anti-Ukrainian revolt in the east. The crowd responded: “Glory! Glory! Glory!”
At this point came a distraction. Five armored cars captured by the pro-Russian forces here drove down one side of the square and then appeared on the other side, but they could not do a victory lap around it, because the roads are blocked by concrete and other barricades. With rebel militiamen sitting on top they drove up as far as Irina with her ice cream, and then clumsily, in a cloud of exhaust fumes, had to back up to get out again. The salesgirls from the Eva cosmetics supermarket and others ran out to cheer on their men, kiss them, and give them cigarettes.
So, victory in 1945 and 2014 ran seamlessly into one another. At the same time Russian television, which many people had on in the background at home or in shops, was showing live footage of the huge military parade in Moscow, and later in the day, of Putin celebrating in newly annexed Crimea.
Now we moved off. Everyone began to walk in procession to the war memorial. Victims of this new conflict, said one man in a speech, “would be lifted to the heavens on the wings of angels.” Then, briefly, flags were dipped for a moment’s silence. They were the banner of the new self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Russian flags, Communist flags, and variations of old Russian imperial and tsarist flags.
Then I spotted a new one that I had never seen before. It was white with a big blue snowflake in the middle. Thinking this might be the flag of a new and significant political movement, I shoved through the crowd to get to the man who was holding it. He told me that it was the flag of “Fridgers of the World” and that from Siberia to the Baltics “they are supporting us.” It took me some time to understand who the “Fridgers” are. They are people in the refrigeration business across the former Soviet Union who have an online forum to discuss issues relating to refrigerators and their maintenance.
Walking away from children and old ladies weeping as they laid flowers at the eternal flame, I ran into sprightly Anatoliy, who is eighty-six years old, and whose chest was decorated with medals, including one featuring Stalin. He had been too young to take part in World War II, he told me, but had seen action in 1956 in, as he described it, “the war with Hungary.” He described the anti-Communist revolt there as having been organized “by the remains of the pro-fascists,” and thus it had been absolutely right to intervene.
When I asked him about the current conflict he again talked of fascism. “We want a free Ukraine,” he said, “but the Banderas want to take control over the whole of Ukraine. We just want justice.” He was using the term taken from the name of Stepan Bandera, the wartime leader who at times collaborated with the Nazis and later fought the Red Army as it retook western Ukraine, fighting fellow Ukrainians in the Red Army, among others.
Josip Vissarionovich, he said, referring to Stalin, would never have let the country get in such a mess. He had a writing table, a couple of chairs, and a pipe. But “these presidents now surround themselves with gold. They have golden toilets and golden chairs.” He was talking about Ukraine’s leaders in general but I was surprised by his reaction when I asked him about Putin, whom many in the Russian-speaking east see as a savior. In terms of gold, he said, “our presidents pale into insignificance next to him.”
On the sunny morning of May 9 I had seen and heard much of what you need to understand the conflict in eastern Ukraine. The simmering anger at being ripped off by the rich and politicians had melded into a narrative of fighting fascism and playing a part in a grand and glorious story of liberation and victory that was setting much of the east alight.
Anatoliy’s face was smudged with lipstick. As a veteran he had been given flowers by children and kisses by women. I said I hoped I could be like him at his age and he said, “Your wife would kick your ass!” before briskly setting off home.
On the edge of Sloviansk the road was blocked by Ukrainian armored cars. We stopped and got out slowly; the soldiers shouted from a distance of 150 meters that we should put our hands on the top of the car. From the trees there was more shouting. Then they yelled, “Just get out! Go! Go!” We turned and sped away, making a detour through the villages to reach the main road to Kharkiv (Kharkov in Russian), which is Ukraine’s second city.
Here we met Sasha, a garrulous liaison officer with Ukraine’s Border Guard service. Its members look after the frontier while the army is behind and around them. We went to Hoptivka, twenty miles north of Kharkiv, to the frontier of Russia. Here Sasha showed us tank traps and a sandbag position. Then, a couple of miles away, we met soldiers who were keeping an eye on the Russian side of the border across a field. They had an armored car, which they had dug into position, and a mobile armored antiaircraft vehicle, which was under some trees. There is a big Russian base at Belgorod on the other side of the border and the Ukrainian soldiers told me that if Putin decides to invade, their position is only fifteen minutes flying time away. So, by the time Russian fighter jets are airborne, and they find out about it, it will probably be too late for them to do much. Still, the officers at this modest position appeared relaxed. They said they did not believe that Russia was going to invade and that the real threat, according to one of them, was “more from people acting inside the country.”
Back in the historic city of Kharkiv this is certainly what pro-Ukrainians were thinking. I went to see Natalka Zubar, a civil society activist. She said that local polling showed that support for separatist forces was about 12 percent. About half of the people in town were ambivalent, but unlike in the neighboring Donetsk and Lugansk regions far more people here were actually prepared to fight a Russian invasion. As Ukrainian defenses seemed puny, I wondered if people were training and preparing to fight a partisan war after any invasion. “Yes, of course,” she said. “It’s not a secret.” Then she added, referring to the collapse of the police in parts of the east, that unless they started “to act against separatists, people will begin to do it themselves.”
The next day, weaving past the potholes on a suburban road, I found a sports hall where some eighty men were being trained in the arts of street fighting on behalf of Ukraine against separatism. The trainers were former military officers and men with combat experience from the Maidan, Kiev’s central square, where Ukraine’s revolution played out over the winter. Groups of men were charging other groups who were defending themselves with shields. Arms and legs flailed and then they went back to their starting positions. There were no guns here. After it was over, some of the men hung around in the parking lot. They had had a tip-off that a group of their separatist enemies was about to try to seize a building in town, and if they did (which they did not in the end), this group was going to defend it.
Howard W. French is a journalist, author, and photographer. He wrote from Africa for The Washington Post and The New York Times. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee and the recipient of two Overseas Press Club awards. 
