CRASHING

On July 17, 2014, Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine. The flight had been traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, and many of the passengers were going to the International AIDS Conference in Melbourne; I recognized the names of two of the victims.

Hundreds of corpses lay bloating in the sun. Armed separatists, along with journalists, volunteers, and others, walked through waist-high wheat and sunflowers, contaminating evidence, if not stealing it. A New York Times reporter described watching a group of separatists picking through the crash victims’ possessions: one of the men had never seen a boarding pass and asked what it was. One of the first photographers to arrive at the scene found a naked body that had fallen through the roof of a dilapidated house with faded blue woodwork, the kind you saw all over Ukraine and that seemed to have been there forever, remnants of a pastoral life.

Ukraine released a recording of three phone calls it said it had intercepted. In them, separatists expressed some dismay at the fact that MH17 was a passenger flight rather than a Ukrainian military plane, as they’d thought when they took the shot. But not all of them felt guilty. Igor “Strelkov” Girkin promoted the theory that the plane had been loaded with frozen corpses and flown over Ukraine on autopilot, part of an incredibly elaborate setup to frame the separatists and Mother Russia. This conspiracy theory, along with several others, made the rounds of Russia’s state-controlled media.

The corpses were put on a train that sat in the station of a small coal-mining town, emitting an unbearable stench. This process was supervised by armed masked men, some of whom seemed to be drunk. The Donetsk billionaire mining tycoon Rinat Akhmetov (who some believed had financed the separatists, only to lose control of them, much to his own detriment) ordered his miners to join the Ukrainian police on patrol, and a local boss sent his miners to help clear the corpses.

For many Ukrainians, and for many others, the shooting down of MH17 was the decisive moment in which the separatists and their supporters lost any remnant of humanity and became monsters, excommunicated from the civilized world. A Ukrainian blogger wrote, “No, these aren’t people, they’re some kind of vampires.... Now there is truly no compassion. See a Colorado—kill him.”

The term Colorado was a recently coined slur for pro-Russians. It was inspired by the Colorado beetle, which destroys potato crops and has stripes that resemble the black and orange St. George ribbon, a symbol of Russian patriotism. Calling people Colorados made them into pests, insects to be crushed underfoot. The term’s most notorious usage occurred on May 2, 2014, when forty-eight anti-Maidan protesters were killed and some two hundred wounded in Odessa’s Trade Union building. After attacking a pro-Maidan demonstration, apparently with the blessing of at least one police officer, the anti-Maidan protesters fled to the Trade Union building and barricaded themselves inside, as a throng of pro-Maidan protesters stood outside, shouting threats. The building caught fire, most likely from one of the Molotov cocktails being thrown from both sides. The police stood and watched, and firefighters took an hour to arrive. Maidan protesters had been burned alive in Kiev’s Trade Union building in February; now, in an eerie parallel, anti-Maidan protesters were burned alive inside Odessa’s Trade Union building.

On Ukrainian Independence Day in August 2014, Kiev proudly displayed the weapons with which it was bombarding its eastern regions. Donetsk held an “anti-independence” parade, marching Ukrainian POWs down the street at bayonet point, past the statue of Lenin, then hosing down the street behind them. “Fascists!” bystanders shouted at the prisoners. Iryna Dovhan, a pleasant-looking blond woman accused of being a Ukrainian spy, was wrapped in a Ukrainian flag, made to hold a printout that said SHE KILLS OUR CHILDREN, and tied to a pole in a traffic circle. In a widely circulated photo, she squeezed her eyes closed as a middle-aged woman in sandals and a glittery black spandex top kicked her, smiling like a goblin. (Under pressure from journalists, Dovhan was released by the separatists a few days later.) Both sides fired on civilian areas, and towns lost electricity and access to medicine, food, and drinking water.

When the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics held general elections in November 2014, voters were greeted at polling stations with plates of pierogis and huge mesh sacks of potatoes and cabbage, welcome gifts at a time when food was increasingly hard to come by. People scrounged for coal in abandoned mines, desperate for something to sell. When the shells and artillery fire started, they took refuge in their basements and in World War II–era bomb shelters. Some of the elderly women who sat in the shelters had survived that earlier war, or even fought in it.

Though it continued to fight for its eastern territories, the Ukrainian government chose to treat the regions as enemy ground. Kiev stopped funding government services (including hospitals and clinics) and providing social benefit payments in separatist-controlled areas. This meant that residents had to travel to government-controlled areas to receive their pensions, which were often their only source of income. In January 2015 the Ukrainian government placed limits on travel, requiring civilians to get a special pass to allow them to move between separatist- and government-controlled areas. Many of the people who needed government pensions and social benefits were unable to travel; they didn’t have the money, they were sick or disabled or very old, they couldn’t wait for ten hours in line, they had to care for family members. Some were simply too afraid to travel or even to leave their basement shelters—which was reasonable, considering the frequent bombardment of civilian areas. The travel permit system caused interruptions in supplies of medicine, including HIV and tuberculosis medications. Hospitals started running out of gauze and bandages.

The Ukrainian government’s logic was that anything sent to eastern Ukraine would only help the separatists survive longer. As for the civilians who would starve alongside the separatists—well, if they were still in the east, they were separatists, too: sausage people, pests, filth. Let Russia feed them. (But Russia didn’t feed them.) In keeping with long tradition, the people of Donbas were once more considered an infection, a barbarian horde. A pro-Ukraine police official in the Donetsk region later wrote, “I call on public organizations and activists in Kiev to block the movement of buses between Donetsk and Kiev, which allow for the spread of the terrorist plague and filth across the territory of Ukraine. If I had my way I’d just shoot these tourists to the Donetsk People’s Republic, these lovers of referenda and parades of Ukrainian prisoners of war.” Never mind that some of these “tourists” were bringing food and other supplies to relatives and friends unable to leave the region.

IN WHITE GUARD, Aleksei Turbin dreams about a fellow officer, Zhilin, who died in the First World War. Zhilin explains that his regiment was allowed to march into heaven with its armor, horses, and comfort women. When he learned that there was a starry crimson mansion awaiting even the Bolsheviks who would be killed in the civil war, he asked God how atheists could have a place in heaven.

“So they don’t believe—what can you do?” God shrugged. “Somebody believes, somebody doesn’t, but you’re all at each other’s throats. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the same—men killed on the battlefield.”