ROCKET CITY

The first time I traveled through the Dnipropetrovsk region, which lies between Kiev and Donetsk, it was the winter of 2007. The landscape was half charred and half aflame; farmers were burning the fields to make them fertile again.

Dnipropetrovsk, the region’s capital, was once nicknamed “Rocket City.” As a center of the Soviet arms and space industries, it was closed to visitors. Today Dnipropetrovsk still seems to negate human presence: the streets feel too wide and too empty, and the heavily ornamented buildings on the main stretch, Karl Marx Avenue, are designed to intimidate.

When I visited Dnipropetrovsk in January 2015, Vitaly, the husband of Olga Belyaeva, one of the harm reduction colleagues I most admired, met me at the train station. I hadn’t seen Vitaly for years, except in the pictures he’d posted on Facebook. In December he stood on the Maidan barricades, wrapped in a Ukrainian flag. In February he posed in Kiev in a military helmet, and posted pictures of burnt-out stairways and Molotov cocktails. In June he stood in front of a tank in a sunny green field, dressed in camouflage, holding a big gun; I deduced that he had joined up. Now he was going to show me around Dnipropetrovsk’s war operation, along with a vivacious, orange-haired journalist named Marina Davydova. Apart from his camouflage and a new tightness around the mouth, Vitaly looked the same as he had when I’d first met him eight years earlier: tall and well built, with dark, friendly little eyes.

As separatism had gained momentum after Maidan, the local oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, who was worth an estimated $1.6 billion, had been governor of Dnipropetrovsk. He soon started funding volunteer battalions—among them the Dnipro Battalion, which was to defend Dnipropetrovsk (and Kolomoysky and his business interests) from separatism. Dnipropetrovsk borders the Donetsk region, and Dnipropetrovsk, like Donetsk, is a primarily Russian-speaking city with a distinctly Soviet feel. Dnipropetrovsk might therefore have been expected to harbor separatist sympathies, but it remained firmly pro-Ukrainian. Marina, an avid patriot, told me that Dnipropetrovsk had once been full of “cotton,” a slur for pro-Russians (who had cotton for brains), but now all the separatists had gone back to their “burrows.” There were rumors that Kolomoysky’s antiseparatist tactics had included marches to the woods and summary executions.

Vitaly and Marina took me to a “logistical center” where volunteers collected supplies for the fighters being sent to the east. The official story was that the Ukrainian army, now under the command of a new, more honest post-Maidan government, was struggling to recover from decades of corruption, and ordinary Ukrainians were doing their best to fill the gaps with donations and volunteer work. Volunteers were even welding metal plates onto vans—makeshift tanks—and learning online how to build drones. I’d decided to visit the logistical center partly because of an article I’d read in the New York Times, a feel-good story about how volunteers, mostly women, were using their knack for handicrafts for the good of Ukraine. A certain Natasha Naumenko, a travel agent who organized the center, was quoted as saying, “Our guys, our men, are defending the country, our country, and everything depends on them. They need a strong spirit. We want to give them the warmth of home, let them feel they are not standing there for nothing.

The New York Times article glossed over an important question: who was in charge of the fighters who were receiving assistance from these plucky volunteers? Homegrown ingenuity was supporting not only Ukrainian soldiers but also the fifteen to twenty thousand fighters in the volunteer battalions: Dnipro, Donbas, Azov, and all the rest. The donations were not simply bolstering an impoverished army and bankrupt government; volunteers were running a war that was largely independent of the state. The Maidan movement, President Poroshenko, and Western politicians and pundits in favor of arming Ukraine referred, over and over, to Ukraine’s commitment to “European values.” But a country full of volunteer battalions funded by oligarchs, political parties, and donations looked more like premodern Europe than like a potential EU member.

The logistical center was located in the government’s House of Scholars, in a couple of basement rooms with a little kitchen. These premises were the government’s only contribution to the center. The basement flooded periodically, which was why the supplies—winter boots, coats, helmets, and homemade, though very professional-looking, bulletproof vests—were stored on shelves raised above floor level. There were piles of brightly colored single-use boxer shorts, many in floral or psychedelic patterns; these were sewn by Swedish women, the “Swedish battalion,” from scrap material. Now that it was winter, volunteers were sewing white helmet covers and robes, so fighters could blend in with the snow. A large Right Sector flag hung on the wall.

Roman, a small, laconic man in his thirties, was a former mechanic, one of about one hundred volunteers working at the center.

Other donations were less useful. One old lady had donated a large box of raspberry branches to stir tea, to ward off illness. (I remembered my Russian teacher Lena, with her endless supply of food-based folk remedies.) Someone else had donated an orange and white electric razor that, judging by the design, had been bought in the 1970s. Another had contributed the fourth volume of the collected works of Robert Louis Stevenson, with a handwritten letter wishing the soldiers victory and expressing the hope that the book would bring them comfort. One woman, Natasha said, had offered to sing to the soldiers. She had three numbers: “New York, New York,” a song by Whitney Houston, and an aria from the operetta The Circus Princess.

“People give what they have. We put everyone to work,” Natasha said, laughing. “We had one reporter peeling carrots. He loved it.”

The volunteers showed me the “mini-pharmacies” they’d made, little first-aid kits that were, they said, the same as those used by NATO. But while in Europe such kits cost 100 euros each, these cost only 300 hryvnia, which was then about 17 euros.

“The government doesn’t buy supplies because it doesn’t have any money,” Roman said. Then he seemed to contradict himself, saying, “They’re bureaucrats, people who should be sent to jail and have their property confiscated. They drive around in Mercedes while soldiers are hungry and cold.”

I asked him why he had chosen to volunteer.

“Each person does what he can do, what he has to do. The government isn’t going to do it,” he replied. In a bitter, muted tone, he continued, “This center has only enough supplies for fifty people.

Roman’s face had brightened with anger. He looked almost happy as he searched through a heap of clothing.

“Here’s one,” he said, bringing over a jacket. Its lining was in tatters, eaten by mice. Next he showed me a helmet that was dented and riddled with bullet holes, its edge torn by an explosion.

Natasha and Marina showed me bracelets of woven ribbon, some blue and gold, some red and black. Children had made them for the center.

“Take one!” Marina said. “The red and black ones are the very best, and the blue and gold ones are also good. We’re already on the second level,” she said, and showed me her own red and black friendship bracelet, the thread kind I used to make in elementary school.

When I picked a red and black bracelet, Marina, Natasha, and Roman were visibly pleased. By then a tall man dressed in camouflage had appeared; he was pleased, too.

“You’re one of us!” Marina said, or maybe it was Natasha. The tall man showed me his Right Sector ID card. Marina put it in my hand and took a picture of me. I hoped she wasn’t planning to post it on Facebook.

As we left, Vitaly and Marina told me that they worried that soon the volunteers’ money would run out. Military aid went to the Ministry of Defense, they said, and most of it was stolen; nothing went to the volunteers who were running the war effort.

The other worry was that the government would arrest the members of Right Sector once the war was over.

“And,” Vitaly said grimly, “they have good reason to rise up.”

DNIPROPETROVSK’S CENTER for displaced people was near the train station, on Karl Marx Avenue. The word used to describe these displaced people was pereselentsy, “resettlers.” When I said “refugee,” people often corrected me, perhaps because they didn’t want to acknowledge that the east was experiencing a full-fledged war. (The Ukrainian government never declared war, for political and financial reasons.) But pereselentsy was also a charged term; in the Soviet Union, it was a euphemism to describe deported ethnic groups such as the Crimean Tatars.

The center was housed in the kind of faceless, run-down Soviet institution familiar from my visits to drug treatment centers and hospitals, but it was obvious that this building was inhabited by energetic new occupants: the stairs were a fresh pink, the walls a fresh green. The red and black Right Sector flag hung beside the blue and gold Ukrainian one.

After some searching, we found Lyudmila Khapatko, the director, a small, thin middle-aged woman in a beige vest. She had been educated as a chemist and had worked in finance until she dropped everything, as she said, “to run to Maidan.” Her ferocious, friendly energy was almost equal to Marina’s.

Lyudmila took us to a bright room full of attractive furniture and children’s toys, with flowered wallpaper and a row of new sewing machines donated by the UN. More than two thousand people had passed through the center; at the moment about thirty were staying there. Most of the people who stayed in the center were there for only one night, stopping over en route to regions that were not yet overflowing. Dnipropetrovsk had been closed to resettlers long ago, being completely full, as had Kiev, Vinnytsia, and other more populous and desirable places. It was hard for the resettlers to find housing; sometimes eight people would live in a single room. The government was doing a miserable job of supplying its soldiers, but it was even worse at handling the flood of displaced people. Here, again, volunteers had leaped forward to fill the gap.

Lyudmila was doing admirable work, but she had few tender feelings for the people she was helping.

“The patriots left long ago,” she said, “but there weren’t many of them anyway.” She estimated that 80 percent of Donbas people hated the people of Dnipropetrovsk.

“Donbas people have a strong sense of entitlement. They’re aggressive, so people in Dnipropetrovsk don’t like them, don’t want to hire them,” she told me. “But if they would behave, they could find work.” Given Ukraine’s financial crisis, I had my doubts.

It was hard, she said, for the center to find volunteers. Of every kind of volunteer work available in Dnipropetrovsk, helping displaced people carried the lowest prestige; volunteering to help soldiers was far more popular.

I asked why the resettlers didn’t help run the center.

“No resettler can be a coordinator—it’s out of the question,” she explained. “It’s not just a matter of mentality—they’re simply another kind of people. They’d start trying to act like kingpins. Their first commandment is not to be too trusting, not to be gullible.

“Most people come to the center for concrete assistance. But eventually, we would like to make it a social center.... You can’t just give people some groceries and say goodbye. You can’t let them be enemies. They’ll start to form self-organizations that might be anti-Ukrainian. Organizations of people from Luhansk helping people from Luhansk, people from Donetsk helping people from Donetsk.”

There were suspicions, she said, that some people were playing a double game, taking aid while engaging in antigovernment activities. Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republic graffiti had started to appear in Dnipropetrovsk.

Lyudmila said she often couldn’t stand the parents, but she loved the children. After all, they hadn’t chosen where they’d been born. She showed me some of the stuffed animals she’d sewn herself. One was a smiling cat, red and black for Right Sector. A child’s drawing, posted on the wall, had a picture of a polka-dotted tank flying a Ukrainian flag, and GLORY TO UKAINE GLORY TO HEROES MAKSIM DANETSK [sic] written in crooked blue and gold letters. Nearby hung a portrait of Roman Shukhevych, the Ukrainian ultranationalist who was involved in terrorist attacks against Poles in western Ukraine in the 1920s and ’30s. Made a “Hero of Ukraine” by Orange Revolution president Yushchenko in 2007, Shukhevych, like Bandera, soon lost his posthumous title under Yanukovych.

AT AN AMERICAN THEME BAR called the Cotton Club, on Sholem Aleichem Street, in a blizzard, I interviewed Tanya Savchenko, who’d run the harm reduction NGO I’d visited in Pavlohrad in 2007, and her husband, Andrei, a Luhansk native. Tanya had moved from Pavlohrad to Luhansk and, once the war started, to Dnipropetrovsk.

No two people could have borne less resemblance to the aggressive, self-pitying, conniving Donbas residents that Lyudmila Khapatko had described. It was hard, Tanya admitted, to go from being the one who helped others to being the one who was helped, but she and Andrei had already found work and a place to live, and now they were doing what they could to help other displaced people. The members of the Luhansk community, they said, supported one another. This didn’t sound like a sinister cabal.

When I asked about discrimination, they admitted that Andrei, who worked in trash collection and recycling, had been denied a contract in Zhytomyr, in western Ukraine, because his potential employers believed that all eastern Ukrainians were terrorists. But such cases were rare, Andrei and Tanya insisted.

Tanya gave me a trident pendant and a knit floret pin in blue and gold; I had the impression that she and Andrei took pains to display their patriotism whenever they could. They were working hard to improve their Ukrainian.

WHEN IT WAS TIME for me to get on the train back to Kiev, Tanya and Andrei gave me a ride. They took the long way in order to show me the Hotel Parus, which had been under construction for nearly forty years. Parus means “sail” in Russian, and the hotel billows out over the Dnieper River. A grandiose plan of the Brezhnev period, the hotel, on the Lenin Embankment, was under construction throughout the 1970s, but financing slowed to a trickle in the 1980s and ended for good in the 1990s. Everything that could be stolen from the building—doors, windows, wiring—was taken. Only a concrete shell remained.

The city had painted the side of the thirty-two-story building with Ukraine’s blue and gold trident, the largest in Ukraine. Now the hotel would have to be finished; demolishing the building would look like the destruction of Ukraine itself.