A slow drive to Rivne, four hours west of Kyiv. It looks like Manitoba with more hills and more trees. Grazing cows, gas stations, fields of farmed grain. Sometimes fighter jets take off from highways like these, hauled there by truck from some secret facility and then, with traffic blocked off, sent shrieking up to the sky and off to the east.
There is a military hospital in Rivne. (I hesitate to write this, having internalized the idea of never disclosing military locations, but the facility isn’t secret; it’s labelled as such on Google Maps.) We found a friend there, after two days of searching. His last messages from the front had sounded tense, and then there were none; after that, we heard different things about what had happened. First: he was injured, but ok. Then: severely injured and not conscious. Then: okay, moderately injured and sent by train to a hospital far back from the front, but our contact didn’t know which one.
When we arrive, just a bit after noon, the hospital grounds are peaceful. A cozy two-storey building of pale-yellow brick sits behind a low iron gate, watched over by two older soldiers who are relaxed and friendly, in that characteristically gruff Ukrainian way; beside the ward is a shady green park lined with new plywood benches, which is where patients hobble out to sip coffee and idly thumb at their phones.
The men here are, mostly, the walking wounded. They are not missing too much of themselves, or at least not missing parts of the type that can be seen. One man’s left leg concludes at the ankle; the rest mostly limp around on two limbs peppered with peculiar sprays of black micro-burns thrown off by exploding munitions. On the far side of the park, one middle-aged man sits on a bench. His legs, in grey sweatpants, are folded up to his chin. His wife sits beside him in a long purple dress; every now and then she says something. He never replies. Just sits. Just stares straight ahead.
Our friend does not know we are coming. His phone was lost, or maybe destroyed, in the same storm of violence that almost took his life, and did claim that of at least one of his friends. When we find him, carrying a coffee towards the park, it takes him ten seconds or so to register who we are. We hand him a new phone, still in the box; “Oh man,” he says in awe, as if holding a precious jewel. “Oh man, thank you.”
We sit a few hours, as our friend tells us what happened. We didn’t even ask, now that I think about it, but we just sat and then the words spilled out and kept spilling, and I think: it’s good that he's talking. It’s good that he’s joking about it too. Humour is as key a medicine as anything a doctor can put in a patient’s veins. It’s protective, a salve for the places in the mind the trauma is too raw, too painful to touch. It helps them come back to themselves, too. If you’re laughing about hell, it means you’re still alive.
The other patients in the park are unusually curious about us. They’re sort of bored, I realize, and foreign visitors are something new to look at. We’re speaking English and my friend is Asian-American, so he also stands out; early on, one patient hovers at the edge of our conversation and gestures at my friend.
“He is military?” he asks me, in Ukrainian. “Ukrainian military?”
I nod. The man raises his eyebrows, impressed, then eagerly stretches out a hand.
“Bro, thank you,” he tells my friend, in English. They exchange a warm fist-bump.
A few minutes later, another man sidles up and sits on the bench. As he listens to us chat, he pulls out a cigarette and brings it to his lips. Just before he lights it, he looks up, flinches. I turn to see a woman with close-cropped grey hair striding up the path into the park, smiling broadly; the soldier furtively hides his cigarette in his palm.
“Mom’s coming,” he mutters in Ukrainian, and then adds, in thickly-accented English: “No smoking.”
I smother a laugh. You can put a man through hell, and you can heal him when he gets wounded, but you can’t cure the innate filial fear of a mother’s disapproval.
As far as what happened to my friend, it’s a horrifying story, but in Ukraine there are tens of thousands just like it. Besides, it’s not my story to tell. Suffice to say that while it’s long been said that war is hell, we’re going to need a stronger word.
We leave the hospital on the brink of evening, ready to make the long drive back to Kyiv. The old soldier standing guard at the gate asks if our friend is healthy. Yes, we reply, he is. The idea of “healthy” is quite relative in places like this. He’s alive; he’ll stay that way; it’ll take him awhile to fully rehabilitate, but he won’t lose a limb.
The guard’s face softens, and his eyes well up with genuine gratitude.
“Slava boh,” he says: glory to God, and he shakes our hands warmly.
— — —
A new heat wave is sweeping Ukraine this week, but this time the mood, at least in the capital, is a little more optimistic. July was difficult. For weeks, the heat settled over the country like a fist, thick and heavy and oppressive. As citizens searched for relief, the electrical system — ravaged by over a year and a half of Russian attacks — struggled to cope; for much of July, scheduled power outages left us with as little as four hours of power a day.
This meant no air conditioning, no floor fans, and no light. It meant elevators didn’t work, and being trapped became somewhat common. I heard a story about a couple who lived with a dog on the 30th floor of a high-rise apartment; they eventually took to sleeping in their car and then, seeking relief, moved to a house in a village.
Normally, I prefer hot days to cold, but that stretch was punishing, largely because there was no way to escape. A non-exhaustive list, of things you struggle to do in a heat without reprieve:
Sleep. Eat. Write. Think. Go outside. Stay inside. Exercise. Cook. Clean. Do laundry. Wear clothing. Remember what it’s like to be at home in your skin. Remember what it’s like to not be slightly damp at all times. Hug a loved one.
The last part you do anyway, because even if everything else is miserable, you still need connection. “Gross hug,” we’d say, gingerly leaning to tap each other on the shoulder.
The power cuts are supposed to be back this week. In Kyiv, we were warned about that on the weekend, and the city administration said they’d begin on Wednesday; they hadn’t by the time I send this newsletter, but I’m expecting the lights to go out any moment.
Still, if the July heat wave was brutal, this time around the mood in the capital seems more buoyant, less resigned. On Saturday, the country will celebrate its independence holiday, which feels meaningful. And the Ukrainian military’s rather bold offensive in Russia’s Kursk region has been a significant morale boost across the country: “People have hope,” said one friend, who grew up in Crimea. “It’s a feeling of revenge. Finally, we’re on their territory.”
A lot of analysts have spent a lot of time debating the strategic goals of what’s going on in Kursk. I’m not a war analyst and won’t pretend to be one. What I can tell you is that, if one of those goals was to shore up the spirit of an exhausted population, well, it’s working.
— — —
The day my story about Austin Lathlin-Bercier, the first Manitoban soldier known to be killed in Ukraine, ran in the Free Press, I had a phone call with Luka, the Croatian whose story of Austin’s heroism opened the piece.
When I had first reached out to Austin’s unit late last year, it took a bit of time for the guys to agree to speak with me. This I understood. Partly, many soldiers are skeptical of journalists, and cautious about their safety; but also, I think, they just wanted to be sure that they were giving their memories of their friend to someone who would hold them respectfully. But as for the why they decided to do it? On the day the story ran, I called Luka, just to check on something. I thanked him again for trusting me.
“All we wanted is for people to know about him,” Luka said.
Well, mission accomplished. The response to this story from Free Press readers was incredible. I received dozens of messages, many of which were incredibly heartfelt; I shared a few with Austin’s mother and brothers-in-arms.
It reminded me what I love, about home. Earlier this year, I was talking about Austin with a close Ukrainian friend, a veteran of the current invasion who has lost many of his friends and colleagues. He posed a challenging question: why, he queried, would I spend so much time telling Austin’s story? There are tens of thousands of Ukrainian dead; is it only because he’s from my province that I would give that attention?
Yes, I said, that is the reason, and the only reason. It isn’t that Austin is more special because he’s from Canada. It isn’t that his life mattered more. He isn’t; it didn’t. But his home is my home, and I have always understood my work, as a writer, as being to tell our stories to each other. Austin is not more special than the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who have perished. He is simply ours, and so it’s our duty to tell his story, to put it in the histories of our little corner of the world. Otherwise, who will?
At any rate: it was an honour to write for home again, and I’m so glad so many people found it a meaningful read. I’ll have another long feature coming up in the paper early next month. And in case you missed it, I did a quick column last weekend checking in with one Winnipegger, to give curious folks a sense of what it’s like to volunteer here in Ukraine.