Issue of the Week: War

In the Trenches of Ukraine’s Forever War, The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 23, 2022

The End Of Civilization As We Knew It, Part Twenty

We return here for the first time since 2020 to our series, The End Of Civilization As We Knew It.

We have noted more than once that 2021 seemed an extension of 2020. It almost seemed as if time stopped in 2020, as if the pandemic and other historic events froze it.

Of course events didn’t, and haven’t stopped unfolding. And we’ve reached a point where resuming our series seems called for.

We now officially welcome you to 2022.

However, “welcome” may not be seen as the appropriate word.

The Covid Pandemic continues to rage on its two-year anniversary. The highest infection rate in the US ever, with hospitals overwhelmed and deaths above 2,000 a day. And a weary sense of this being normalized, while a concerningly high percentage continue to resist the cure–vaccination–while the cure for the big lies remains even more elusive. Much of the world struggles on without vaccines available to most yet. Perhaps the most recent variant will be the last. But as has been said, this virus is wily and pernicious. It has changed civilization in lasting ways to be sure, which we will continue to examine in greater depth.

Meanwhile, other of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse may be in process of taking the driver’s seat.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.

We just passed the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack on the US Capital and attempt to stop the electoral process, which could have ended democracy in America.

An unthinkable thing, accompanied by many unthinkable things.

At first, there appeared to be bipartisan agreement that this act was as horrific as it was.

For a while, 2021 seemed to be a beginning of a return to normal, even while the political and social forces that led to January 6 polarized further in some respects.

There was important support continued and expanded through government programs spearheaded by the new administration.

Then a series of crises, foreign and domestic, started to hit the wall, both colliding with and causal to each other.

Obviously, in the bigger picture, the global competition between the US and China has increasingly heated-up, which is economic and military–and ideological, assuming democracy in the US and elsewhere survives and thrives.

But the clear and present danger at the moment to democracy and the clear and present threat of war, including going global with the ultimate threat of weapons of mass destruction–is coming from Russia.

A little perspective.

Thirty years ago, the day after Christmas, the Soviet Union came to an end.

Anyone in their forties or older today will remember the impact as reality shattering. The US-Soviet bipolar superpower world was an assumed unending fact. The world was almost destroyed by nuclear war and the arms race more than once, but arms control also advanced. Back and forth. And proxy wars on the one hand, with cooperation in stabilizing the globe on the other.

The end of the Soviet Union was so stunning that it was described as the end of history by one commentator and then taken up as a mantra.

The Cold War was over. Democracy began, for a moment, to flourish globally. None more important than South Africa. And no more important an architect there than Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died the day after Christmas three weeks ago. As we’ve written before, we had the privilege to be with, worship with and interview this extraordinary man at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, just before it succeeded. He was subsequently increasingly highly critical of the lack of action, especially on economic social justice and equality policy from governments since, which is the rock bed reason for the chaos and increasing threats to democracy everywhere.

Thirty years later.

Russia is attempting to restore the power and influence of the Soviet Union for all practical purposes. The US, European NATO allies, including Eastern European nations liberated from Soviet control thirty years ago, won’t abide this in the end.

However, they have already abided the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea (anyone remember that–the first time since World War Two such a thing had happened, way back in 2014?). Always terrible precursors.

What preceded that? In 2013 the correctly intentioned Obama red line in Syria to stop Assad from using chemical weapons against his own people and shattering the international hard stop on the use of such weapons, turned green for the Russians, providing the opportunity to look good for a second in negotiating a deal to remove the chemical weapons (which never fully happened) and take advantage of a situation they never likely dreamed possible–to insert themselves fully as Assad’s savior and partner in crimes against humanity (established as legal fact in a precedent-setting trial in Germany last week) in slaughtering the people of Syria (which many political, military, intelligence and human rights leaders and experts across the spectrum argued that a number of likely effective and relatively low cost actions could have stopped or at least mitigated before this if carried out timely with strategic adroitness). This in turn helped to bring ISIS within an inch of sweeping across the Middle East, forced the US back to Iraq and belatedly to Syria under more constrained and even more complicated circumstances, worsened the refugee crisis and destabilized Europe, with Brexit echoing in the US as the same old divide and conquer strategy by race, religion, etc., among the increasing majority of the disenfranchised in the new age of inequality, enabled by policies of both political parties.

Then the Russians dumped a campaign of internet lies into this toxic stew to affect the 2016 US presidential election and may have succeeded in being one of the factors in electing Donald Trump and defeating Hillary Clinton.

The geopolitical context noted above was further exascerbated by, among other things, Trump’s denial of Russian interference in the US presidential election and abandonment of the Kurds in Syria who had sacrificed thousands of lives in place of US lives to fight ISIS, by refusing to leave only hundreds of US troops and security gaurantees in place–which kept Russia and Assad from entering Kurd conrolled areas in Syria (and kept other actors such as Turkey in place in a complex context) to help complete their slaughter and control. The result allowed Turkey to invade the part of Syria the Kurds controlled (out of their fear the autonomous area established by the Kurds, which supported a democratic socially progressive system renowned for gender equality, would impact the nationalist hopes of Kurds in Turkey) and drove the Kurds one hundred and eighty degrees from alliance with the US into alliance with Russia and Assad as a survival reaction, and allowed ISIS to begin to reconstitute. The story here, as elsewhere, is long, convoluted and tortured, and at this point has resulted in US troops back in alliance with the Kurds in a smaller area in Syria to again fight ISIS.

The 2020 presidential election was won by Biden for many reasons–the pandemic and the longing for sanity among the majority being key. The pandemic was number one. But Trump was also the only president in history at that point to be impeached and have a member of his own party vote for conviction–Senator Mitt Romney, the last Republican nominee for president (several other Republicans joined for a second impeachment of Trump after January 6–the only time either has happened in US history). Racial equality was important, but cut many ways, before, then and since. Economic inequality was and is at the core of all power and played a role but remained unfocussed. And wildfires and other climate catastrophes brought climate change more into focus than ever, but it remains out of view for anyone not guaranteed food, housing, health care and a decent life–and most people are still focused on this in the new age of inequality. These and other related issues have been covered by us and will be covered more so in future.

2022 begins with Russian troops surrounding Ukraine (including increasingly from Belarus which Russia has helped in thwarting democracy and maintaining authoritarianism). Russian invasion there is the talk of the day. War there has been the reality for years. Trump impeachment number one was wrapped up in an attempt to use this crisis to hurt Biden in the 2020 election. Are we too far away now to remember?

President Biden’s seemingly mixed message about Russia and Ukraine in his press conference today (clarified and strengthened later) is probably best understood as an indicator of the complexity and the stakes involved.

A quick detour to the situation in Afghanistan, since everything is interrelated. As a reminder, evidence showed and was widely reported (even if subsequently mitigated as uncertain in the challenging terrain of intelligence gathering in Afghanistan) that when the US military was still engaging the Taliban (although direct US military engagement had been rare for years) during the Trump years (until he made a deal with the Taliban to just leave without any real conditions) Russia effectively put bounties on the heads of American soldiers.

The toll of the moment and manner of the US withdrawing even its very small but partially stabilizing force in Afghanistan on the eve of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 continues to mount and cannot be fully forecast. There are many impacts and implications on many levels which we will return to. No one in the world has officially recognized the extremist Taliban regime as a legitimate government as we write. An entire nation is on the verge of starvation, quite literally. Many are terrorized and killed, with girls and women topping the list. US competence and credibility have taken an enormous hit.

But the stakes are higher with Russia and Ukraine and while the response of the US and other European nations may be flexible on the margins, it will not be on the central issues.

Some of the Eastern European nations liberated at the end of the Cold War themselves have morphed from democratic lights to virtual autocracies. But when it comes to Russia–nationalism and survival instincts borne of oppression defeated only a few short years ago run strong.

Russia is not just threatening to invade Ukraine. It’s de facto dictator, Vladimir Putin, is demanding a return to dominating Eastern Europe and the virtual withdrawal of NATO.

As if December 26, 1991, never happened.

And that’s never going to happen without war, even world war three, even nuclear destruction.

Because the US and NATO will never allow it.

Although never is a long time depending upon the cost. While NATO is increasingly alligned, there are some differences in interests.

And how far will Russia push? No one knows. Putin’s record of brutality beginning in Chechnya, then Geogia, then Syria, then Ukraine has been consistent and relatively unpunished. Although the US and NATO can make the cost far worse for Russia in economic terms alone. But when events like this start, predicting how it will unfold is a fool’s errand.

The primary black hole in the situation is perhaps the fact that Ukraine is not a member of NATO (it is highly unlikely that Russia would invade if they were, as this would trigger war with the US and NATO, although given Russian aims and NATO nations bordering Russia and Ukraine, the great risk is that through the “fog of war” this may still happen) and neither the US nor any NATO members have defense treaties with Ukraine, therefore direct military involvement in defending against any invasion is off the table. Helping Ukraine with arms and sanctions against Russia would certianly occur, but to what degree and to what effect is unknown, along with all the other upredictables in what will become a uniquely volatile global conflict no matter how it is waged.

For those who may need a reminder from the days of fearing nuclear destruction just before the Cold War ended, either the US or Russia has the capacity to destroy all life on earth many times over.

In minutes.

They have over 90 percent of all nuclear weapons in the world, divided roughly equally.

As the old saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Not always true fortunately, and the end-story has not been written. But we all do the writing, and we all need to pay very, very serious attention.

We are posting here two New York Times pieces as bookends on the current situation. The critical importance of the information in the first can’t be overstated. The multi-dimensional brilliance and humanity of the second make a necessary read for understanding a historical situation that could not be more important to understand.

The first is the front-page article from last Sunday’s edition which covers the effort by Russia to in-effect restore the Soviet Empire.

The second is the cover story from this Sunday’s Magazine on the eight years of war in Ukraine to this moment as the backdrop to the massing of over 100,000 Russian troops on the Ukraine border as we write.

Here they are:

“Russia Issues Subtle Threats More Far-Reaching Than a Ukraine Invasion”

By Anton Troianovski and David E. Sanger, Jan. 16, 2022, The New York Times

If the West fails to meet its security demands, Moscow could take measures like placing nuclear missiles close to the U.S. coastline, Russian officials have hinted.

VIENNA — No one expected much progress from this past week’s diplomatic marathon to defuse the security crisis Russia has ignited in Eastern Europe by surrounding Ukraine on three sides with 100,000 troops and then, by the White House’s accounting, sending in saboteurs to create a pretext for invasion.

But as the Biden administration and NATO conduct tabletop simulations about how the next few months could unfold, they are increasingly wary of another set of options for President Vladimir V. Putin, steps that are more far-reaching than simply rolling his troops and armor over Ukraine’s border.

Mr. Putin wants to extend Russia’s sphere of influence to Eastern Europe and secure written commitments that NATO will never again enlarge. If he is frustrated in reaching that goal, some of his aides suggested on the sidelines of the negotiations last week, then he would pursue Russia’s security interests with results that would be felt acutely in Europe and the United States.

There were hints, never quite spelled out, that nuclear weapons could be shifted to places — perhaps not far from the United States coastline — that would reduce warning times after a launch to as little as five minutes, potentially igniting a confrontation with echoes of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

“A hypothetical Russian invasion of Ukraine would not undermine the security of the United States,” said Dmitry Suslov, an analyst in Moscow who gave a closed-door presentation on the standoff to Russian lawmakers last month. “The overall logic of Russian actions is that it is the U.S. and NATO that must pay a high price.”

And as Ukrainians were reminded anew on Friday, as the websites of the country’s ministries were defaced in a somewhat amateurish attack, Russia’s army of hackers can wreak havoc in Ukraine, but also in power grids from Munich to Michigan.

It could all be bluster, part of a Kremlin campaign of intimidation, and a way of reminding President Biden that while he wants to focus American attention on competing and dealing with China, Mr. Putin is still capable of causing enormous disruption.

The Russian leader telegraphed that approach himself by warning repeatedly in the past year that if the West crossed the ever-shifting “red line” that, in Mr. Putin’s mind, threatens Russia’s security, he would order an unexpected response.

“Russia’s response will be asymmetrical, fast and tough,” Mr. Putin said last April, referring to the kinds of unconventional military action that Russia could take if adversaries threatened “our fundamental security interests.”

The current crisis was touched off by the Kremlin’s release of a series of demands that, if the U.S. and its allies agreed, would effectively restore Russia’s sphere of influence close to Soviet-era lines, before NATO expanded into Eastern Europe. It has also demanded that all U.S. nuclear weapons be withdrawn from Europe, saying it felt threatened by their presence — though the types and locations of those weapons haven’t changed in years. And it wants a stop to all Western troop rotations through former Warsaw Pact states that have since joined NATO.

How Russia’s Military Is Positioned to Threaten Ukraine

Russian forces now surround Ukraine on three sides, and Western officials fear a military operation could start as soon as this month.

It has reinforced those demands, which the U.S. calls “non-starters,” with a troop buildup near Ukraine and repeated warnings it was prepared to use unspecified “military-technical means” to defend what it considers its legitimate security interests.

In response, the Biden administration has issued warnings of financial and technological sanctions if the Kremlin should follow through with its threats, particularly in regard to Ukraine. American officials say that for all the talk about moving nuclear weapons or using asymmetrical attacks, so far the U.S. has seen little evidence.

At a White House briefing on Thursday, Jake Sullivan, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, declined to be drawn into the question of what kind of Russian action would trigger a U.S. response — whether, for example, the U.S. would respond to a cyberattack the way it would an incursion into Ukrainian territory.

“The United States and our allies are prepared for any contingency, any eventuality,’’ he said. “We’re prepared to keep moving forward down the diplomatic path in good faith, and we’re prepared to respond to fresh acts. And beyond that, all we can do is get ready. And we are ready.”

Of course, the most obvious scenario given the scale of troop movements on the ground is a Russian invasion of Ukraine — maybe not to take over the entire country but to send troops into the breakaway regions around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk, or to roll all the way to the Dnieper River. At the Pentagon, “five or six different options” for the extent of a Russian invasion are being examined, one senior official reported.

Researchers tracking social-media footage have spotted numerous signs of additional Russian military equipment being shipped westward by train from Siberia. In Russia, state television has been filled with commentators’ warnings that Ukraine could soon attack Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine — fitting with Washington’s allegation on Friday that Russian operatives, with specialties in explosives and urban warfare, have infiltrated Ukraine and might be planning to stage a provocation to justify an invasion. Russia denied the allegation.

Yevgeny Buzhinsky, a retired lieutenant general and a regular Russian television commentator, predicted a looming “limited” war provoked by Ukraine that Russia would win in short order through devastating airstrikes.

“There will be no columns of tanks,” General Buzhinsky said in a phone interview. “They will just destroy all the Ukrainian infrastructure from the air, just like you do it.”

In Geneva, Russian diplomats insisted there were no plans to invade Ukraine. But there were hints of other steps. In one little-noticed remark, a senior Russian diplomat said Moscow was prepared to place unspecified weapons systems in unspecified places. That merged with American intelligence assessments that Russia could be considering new nuclear deployments, perhaps tactical nuclear weapons or a powerful emerging arsenal of hypersonic missiles.

In November, Mr. Putin himself suggested Russia could deploy submarine-based hypersonic missiles within close striking distance of Washington. He has said repeatedly that the prospect of Western military expansion in Ukraine poses an unacceptable risk because it could be used to launch a nuclear strike against Moscow with just a few minutes’ warning. Russia, he made clear, could do the same.

“From the beginning of the year we will have in our arsenal a new sea-based missile, a hypersonic one,” Mr. Putin said, referring to a weapon that travels at more than five times the speed of sound and could likely evade existing missile defenses.

In an apparent reference to the American capital, he added: “The flight time to reach those who give the orders will also be five minutes.”

Mr. Putin said he would deploy such missiles only in response to Western moves, and President Biden told Mr. Putin in their last conversation that the United States has no plans to place offensive strike systems in Ukraine.

Russian officials hinted again in recent days about new missile deployments, and American officials repeated that they have seen no moves in that direction. But any effort to place weapons close to American cities would create conditions similar to the 1962 crisis that was the closest the world ever came to a nuclear exchange.

Asked about the nature of what Mr. Putin has termed a possible “military-technical” response, Sergei A. Ryabkov, a deputy foreign minister, said in Geneva on Monday: “Right now there is no reason to talk about what systems will be deployed, in what quantity, and where exactly.”

And when a Russian reporter asked Mr. Ryabkov in an interview broadcast on Thursday whether Russia was considering deploying military infrastructure in Venezuela or Cuba, he responded: “I don’t want to confirm anything or rule anything out.”

Moving missiles, however, is obvious to the world. And that is why, if the conflict escalates further, American officials believe that Mr. Putin could be drawn to cyberattacks — easy to deny, superbly tailored for disruption and amenable to being ramped up or down, depending on the political temperature.

Mr. Putin doesn’t need to do much to insert computer code, or malware, into American infrastructure; the Department of Homeland Security has long warned that the Russians have already placed malware inside many American power grids.

The Biden administration has sought to shore up U.S. systems and root out malware. The nation’s biggest utilities run an elaborate war game every two years, simulating such an attack.

But much of corporate America remains far less protected.

The fear is that if sanctions were imposed on Moscow, Mr. Putin’s response could be to accelerate the kind of Russian based ransomware attacks that hit Colonial Pipeline, a major beef producer, and cities and towns across the country last year.

The F.S.B., Russia’s powerful security service, on Friday announced the arrest of hackers tied to the REvil ransomware group — a gang connected to some of the most damaging attacks against American targets, including Colonial Pipeline. The move was welcomed by the White House, but it was also a signal that Moscow could flip its cyberwarriors on or off at will.

No one knows Putin’s next move, of course — not even his diplomats — and he likes it that way.

“There could be all sorts of possible responses,” Mr. Putin said when asked last month about the “military-technical” response he warned about.

“The Russian leadership is rather inventive,” said Andrey Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government. “It’s not necessarily only about Ukraine.”

Analysts in Moscow believe that beyond a more threatening Russian military posture, the United States would be particularly sensitive to closer military cooperation between Russia and China. Mr. Putin will travel to Beijing on Feb. 4 to attend the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics and hold a summit meeting with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, Russia said on Friday.

The Kremlin has noted that Mr. Biden sees China, not Russia, as America’s most complex, long-term challenger — an economic, military and technological competitor that plays in a different league from Russia. Yet forcing the United States to increase its investment in a confrontation with Russia, analysts say, would undermine Mr. Biden’s greater strategic goal.

“The United States, objectively, does not want to increase its military presence in Europe,” said Mr. Suslov, the analyst. “This would be done at the cost of containing China.”

Anton Troianovski reported from Vienna, and David E. Sanger from Washington.

. . .

 “In the Trenches of Ukraine’s Forever War”

By James Verini, Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin, cover story, Jan. 23, 2022, The New York Times Magazine

Russian belligerence has drawn the world’s attention back to the eight-year-old secessionist rebellion in the Donbas region: a deadlocked, time-warped conflict with no end in sight.

A soldier on the front line near Avdiivka, Ukraine.Credit…Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum, for The New York Times

Pisky is as wronged a place as you will find in Ukraine. The village is on the front line that separates forces of the Ukrainian military from those of a secessionist statelet that calls itself the Donetsk People’s Republic. Backed by Russia, the D.P.R. has been at war with Ukraine for nearly eight years. Its fighters fire on the Ukrainian troops. The Ukrainians fire back. Or vice versa. No ground is taken, none ceded. The combatants rarely set eyes on one another. Rockets miss their targets and land in Pisky instead, the explosions echoing through the frames of the already-shattered homes and what was once the nave of the church. The priest fled years ago. So did most of the villagers.

Some rockets do find their targets. On a morning in early August, Volodymyr Veryovka and Yaroslav Semenyaka, soldiers in a Ukrainian Army company stationed at Pisky, were ordered to drive a freight truck down Lenin Road, which runs through Pisky and along the front, to a bridge in the village. The D.P.R. forces had been shelling every day through the summer, and the truck bucked in and out of fresh craters. The stretch Volodymyr and Yaroslav rode along now didn’t have the full cover of the tree line, and they knew they might be exposed to enemy batteries. There wasn’t much they could do about this. Loaded onto the truck’s bed was a crane, and Yaroslav could push the engine only so hard. So they talked.

This article was written with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

They had met for the first time that day. Volodymyr was a railway engineer until he joined up at age 34, because, as he said, “It had to be done.” Ukraine needed all the fighters it could get no matter their age. He had even been commissioned an officer, though this was his first deployment. He had been in uniform only a few months.

Yaroslav, three years younger, was the veteran. He rushed to the front as soon as the shooting started, in April 2014, when the D.P.R. and a lesser twin in sedition, the neighboring Luhansk People’s Republic, broke off from Ukraine. The secessionist war had quickly consumed far eastern Ukraine, the region colloquially known as Donbas, and then spread west. Ukrainians like Yaroslav were unsure whether their young nation, independent at that point for barely two decades, would survive.

His father, who did dispiriting service in the Soviet Ground Forces in East Germany during the Cold War, tried to talk him out of it. But Yaroslav, swollen with the same patriotism Volodymyr now felt, asked him, “If not me, who?” He was one of thousands of Ukrainians, young and old, men and women, who rushed to defend their country then. He had been on the front since, fighting in some of the war’s pivotal battles. Roughly 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians had died.

But now the war was stalemated. The front line had barely shifted in years. Ukraine wasn’t relenting, but neither was it willing to go on the offensive to retake the seized territory. The enemy likewise refused to retreat. Yet it was clear to Yaroslav, and to anyone else paying attention, that Russia no longer had much use for the D.P.R. or L.P.R. It hadn’t fully annexed them, as it had Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, instead leaving the statelets in a kind of limbo of national identity: part Russian, part Ukrainian, generally miserable.

While the people there waited to learn their fates, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who was elected in 2019 on the promise of restoring Donbas to the country, had made no progress in this regard and was increasingly unpopular. The European countries that had seen fit to reproach Russia over the war had now moved on. As for the United States, Ukrainians had held out hope that President Biden would be an improvement on Donald Trump, who courted President Vladimir Putin of Russia and tried to block military aid to Ukraine. Biden was taking a harder line with Putin, but when the two met earlier in the summer and Zelensky tried to interpose on the summit with dire warnings about the war, he was ignored.

As the stalemate dragged on, Yaroslav felt that even the Ukrainian Army had become indifferent to soldiers like him. On visits home, he told his father and fiancée that his will to fight had run dry. He had put in his papers. He had bought a house and renovated it. Soon he would be there, tending his vegetable garden.

It wasn’t long after Yaroslav told Volodymyr he’d gotten engaged that the first rocket came in. It missed the truck, crashing into the trees just behind. Volodymyr didn’t know what happened. Before he could ask, Yaroslav was opening his door and leaping from the cab. Volodymyr followed.

The second rocket also missed the truck but hit something. Volodymyr came to on his stomach. He was by the bushes on the roadside, unaware of how he got there. He looked at his right sleeve. It was soaked through with blood. He felt a hot wetness dripping over his left cheek. Looking up, he saw Yaroslav, still standing. He wondered why.

The third rocket hit the truck. This time, when Volodymyr opened his eyes, the vehicle was in flames. So were the bushes around him. Yaroslav lay on his back.

Volodymyr crawled to him. He grabbed hold of Yaroslav’s shirt. He tried to pull him from the road, but Yaroslav was heavy, and Volodymyr had the use of only his left arm. Blood poured into his eye.

He dragged Yaroslav away from the flames. He didn’t have the strength to move him any farther.

I was at a trenchworks on the far side of Lenin Road, with a group of soldiers, when we heard the rockets explode and looked up to see black smoke billowing above the tree line. We rushed over. We found the truck still in flames and the road enveloped in smoke.

At company headquarters, the commander told me that the truck was hit with a guided anti-tank rocket. Volodymyr was en route to the hospital, Yaroslav’s body to the morgue.

Some soldiers and I went to Pisky, where I wanted to find someone who saw the attack. I’d barely entered the village when the notion that anyone might be there rendered itself ridiculous. Pisky looked like an oil painting of some previous war. The destroyed buildings were no longer just destroyed but ruins, their debris picturesque, saplings sprouting from the blast holes. I might have been looking at the aftermath of a battle on the Eastern Front in 1943. The most conspicuous signs of the current fighting were the fins of unexploded rockets poking out from the pavement, and even these looked decades old.

I came to a house that appeared, contrary to all reason, inhabited. The roof was collapsed, but there was a bicycle leaning on the fence, freshly chopped wood, the whines of cats. My calls of greeting were finally met with slurred shouts from within. Onto the porch shuffled a shirtless and mostly toothless man, the drawstring of his leisure pants barely clinging around his waist, a crucifix bouncing in the hair of his sunken chest.

“I was on the road when I saw a wrecked car,” he told me. “I tried to turn, and that’s when the goddamned rocket hit me.”

Inviting me in, Yuri continued his account, confessing that the rocket didn’t actually hit him but came close enough, knocking him from his bike. Though it is true that Yuri was very drunk. He remounted his bike, he said, and rode to the headquarters. “I goddamn told the men, ‘Go and get your guy, he is lying there, he’s goddamn shouting.’”

I tried to learn more about what he saw, but Yuri wanted to tell me about making a living in wartime Pisky. He should have been retired by now, he said, but he still had to ride around hiring himself out for yardwork. He was a fisherman, but with the river running along the front, that was too dangerous now. Anyway, there was no one left to sell fish to. From a pile of clothing he pulled the jacket he wore at the pipe factory where he worked before it was blown up in 2015.

“Ride the bike here, ride the bike there,” he said. “I’m just hustling.”

From the kitchen, his wife, Masha, 18 years his junior, yelled interjections. She sat on a stool peeling potatoes, the ash of her cigarette dangling precariously over the pot. He yelled back. They got in a yelling match. She was more sober than Yuri but not by much.

They got together early in the war, when people in Pisky were living in basements converted to bomb shelters. Eventually even the basements were destroyed by rockets, and their neighbors left their homes, along with about 800,000 other Ukrainians. Yuri and Masha stayed. They might consider leaving, she told me, but where would they go? And with what money? They couldn’t even afford to fix the roof.

“Everything is ruined,” she said. “It’s leaking. What is the point anyway?”

Back at the company headquarters, which hunkered in a bombed-out Soviet-era apartment building, with the truck still burning, a group of men played cards. A press officer took photographs — not of the smoldering wreckage yards away but of a soldier sitting at a table handling, of all things, an antique crank-powered field telephone. I seriously wondered whether a movie was being filmed until I learned that the phone wasn’t an antique. Or rather it was, but a functioning one. The army installed the old phones after learning that the enemy had the use of high-end Russian electronic surveillance. I would see the wooden-and-brass boxes and their spools of black wire stretching through trenches up and down the front.

“Crank it,” the press officer directed the soldier. “Now talk.” He did a creditable impression of a radio man making an urgent call to the front in Stalingrad.

Combat troops get inured to death, but Yaroslav’s comrades seemed to me beyond inured, insensible. The attack on the truck hadn’t slowed time down, as violence normally does. Time here felt as though it had slowed long before.

Last month, Russia began massing troops on its border with Ukraine next to Donbas. Putin said he was responding to Ukrainian provocations and accused the United States of bringing “missiles to our home, to the doorstep of our home.” There have long been NATO missiles in Ukraine, and he wasn’t specific, though he probably had in mind the Javelin anti-tank missiles sent in the fall by the United States, which has been aiding the Ukrainian military since the war’s start. Putin’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, claimed Russia had proof that American mercenaries were delivering chemical weapons to Donbas in tanks. NATO cautioned that military action by Russia would “carry a heavy price,” and the Biden administration threatened a new regime of sanctions.

Diplomats and journalists warned of a possible invasion. Their worries were amplified when Russia sent troops into Kazakhstan during the first week of January to put down protests. But Putin’s saber-rattling at Ukraine, like the missiles, isn’t new. This is Russia’s second buildup in a year and only the latest in a series of feints since the war in Donbas began. It appears to be part of Russia’s larger pursuit, in Ukraine and elsewhere in the region, of hybrid warfare: the furthering of political aims through a mixture of military action, sponsored insurgency, cyber war and misinformation, a strategy it refined in Ukraine in 2014.

But the war in Donbas is hybrid in another sense. It is both an invasion and a secession, an incursion by an aggressive enemy but also a species of civil war. The rebellion of the D.P.R. and L.P.R. has lasted this long because it has exposed deep cracks in Ukrainian society. And while the war is regional and intimate, its front is also the front in a revived global struggle, between an ever more assertive Russia and the West.

The crisis in Donbas originates in the 2010 election to the presidency of Ukraine of Viktor Yanukovych, the longtime political boss of Donbas. For years before his election, Ukraine had grown steadily closer to the West, a trend that pleased progressive and nationalistic Ukrainians but displeased conservative Russophiles like Yanukovych. He reversed course, restoring the country’s relationship with Russia. When he scuttled an economic agreement with the European Union in fall 2013, progressive Ukrainians reacted with demonstrations, first in Kyiv and then around the country. Matters turned violent, and by the end of the Euromaidan, as the demonstrations came to be known, about a hundred civilians and more than a dozen police officers were dead.

Ukrainians who supported Euromaidan called it the Revolution of Dignity. To them, Yanukovych and the security forces were to blame. But to many other Ukrainians, particularly in places like Donbas, where attachment to Russia runs deep, the reality seemed the reverse. What they saw was vicious young people being egged on, if not outright organized — as Russian news assured them — by the West.

Yanukovych fled to Russia on Feb. 22, 2014. Five days later, Russia invaded the Crimean Peninsula. Overwhelmed, the Ukrainian government did not fight. Within three weeks, Crimea was annexed. Ukraine’s Western allies declined to intervene, instead imposing sanctions on Russia. The invasion put an end to whatever rapprochement the West and Russia had effected to that point.

Soon after in Donbas, counterprotests against Euromaidan transformed into an armed uprising against the Ukrainian national government. It was led by a mixture of Ukrainians and Russian nationals, including current and former members of the Russian security services and military, some of whom had taken part in the invasion of Crimea. Within weeks, the D.P.R. and L.P.R. had proclaimed their existence. Hasty referendums to declare them independent of Ukraine were held and passed with 89 percent of the vote in the D.P.R. and 96 percent in the L.P.R., at least according to the secessionist leaders.

Attempts at political secession spread as far as Odessa to the south and Kharkiv to the west. Residents of Kyiv started air-raid drills. Fearing the whole country might soon be occupied, people like Yaroslav Semenyaka went to the front. With an ad hoc force of regulars and volunteers, Ukraine counterattacked, pushing the secessionists back toward the border. The Russian military responded with artillery and airstrikes. Tanks without number plates carried soldiers without insignia — the “little green men,” as they came to be known. Intense combat persisted until late 2015, when the front line solidified. The war has been essentially deadlocked since.

Putin is open about annexing Crimea. Beyond conceding that Russian intelligence officers were in eastern Ukraine at the beginning of the war, however, he refuses to admit a formal Russian role in Donbas. He’ll say only that Russian volunteers have crossed the border to help with an indigenous uprising and protect “Russian culture.” It is a grope at plausible deniability that is implausible in at least two ways.

The first is that Russia very obviously wields great power in the D.P.R. and L.P.R. and has done so since 2014. A lot of official propaganda but little in the way of genuine information escapes the statelets, and foreign organizations are mostly forbidden to work in them. The little we do know comes mainly from firsthand accounts, social media and a handful of humanitarian reports. According to the D.P.R.’s and L.P.R.’s official websites, their government leaders are Ukrainian. But according to defectors and released prisoners with whom I spoke, Russia’s hand is everywhere plain to see.

The ruble has replaced the Ukrainian hryvnia. Residents are made to apply for Russian passports and relinquish their Ukrainian ones. They vote in Russian elections, though it appears that most of the three to four million people (a very rough estimate) who live in the territories are not afforded full Russian citizenship. The vast and oppressive security apparatus is managed by Russian and Ukrainian agents. The teaching of the Ukrainian language is forbidden, as is the celebration of Ukrainian holidays. Defectors describe increasingly wretched circumstances — a scarcity of work and goods, failing social services — but also a persistent hope among devoted Russophiles that Putin will eventually incorporate them and life will improve. Before 2020, people could cross in and out of the statelets with ease. Since the beginning of the pandemic, only two crossings have been open.

The partition of Donbas has split Ukrainian families and neighbors physically, with some members ending up in the D.P.R. or L.P.R., others in Ukraine proper. It has also split them ideologically. Before 2014, Ukrainian patriotism and Russophilia could exist alongside each other, if not harmoniously then at least not violently. But with the war, Ukrainians, especially those in the east, had to decide once and for all where their allegiances lay. A father supported secession while a son went off to join the Ukrainian Army. A wife plotted to escape the L.P.R. while her husband was content to stay. You hear these stories constantly in Donbas.

The second way in which Putin’s denial of involvement in Donbas is implausible is this: Ukrainian secessionists aren’t interested in playing along with his fiction. Though the secessionist movement in Donbas rose to the surface eight years ago, it had been simmering for a generation, since the day in 1991 when Ukrainians voted to become independent of the Soviet Union. The vote, which passed overwhelmingly, including in Donbas, was the final nail in the coffin of the U.S.S.R. It wasn’t long before economic devastation and fumbling governance made many Ukrainians regret their choice. A defining trait of modern Ukraine, that regret is felt with particular bitterness in Donbas. Though it was provoked by Russia and led in large part by Russians, the secession was successful because Russophile Ukrainians participated in it at every turn and on every level: Members of the country’s own security services, politicians, officials and businesspeople, down to miners, metalworkers, pensioners.

One initial supporter of secession was a woman named Kateryna, whom I met last summer in Kyiv. She had recently left the D.P.R. Kateryna told me it was true that Russian propaganda flooded Donetsk, where she lived, when the war began, selling the story that bloodthirsty Ukrainian fascists were converging on Donbas to destroy it and the Russian language. Laughable as this was, she said, people bought it. Even if they hadn’t, however, the choice to secede felt “natural.” “It seemed to me at the time that it would be better to join Russia,” Kateryna said.

When I asked what her reasoning was, she said there wasn’t much reason. It was just the popular sentiment. “There was just sort of this hope that Russia was a big, great, powerful country. We thought, let’s go there.” But seven years later, without work or prospects, she left.

To Ukrainians who think as Kateryna once did, Russia’s formal role in Donbas is precisely the point. They have no more use for independent republics than they had for an independent Ukraine. Though secessionists, what they want isn’t separation so much as reunification — with Russia.

Today the Ukraine government denies that the D.P.R. or L.P.R. exists, calling them “temporarily occupied territories.” The boundary separating them from Ukraine is not a border or a front line but the “administrative line.” That line extends for roughly 250 miles north to south, cutting off the eastern corners of the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts and with them about 6,500 square miles of Ukraine along the Russian border. Civilians like Yuri and Masha in Pisky, who live hard by the front on the Ukrainian side, are in what’s known by the Joint Forces Operation, the Ukrainian military entity that oversees the front, as the Red Zone. Some towns along the front resemble Pisky, their homes and public buildings destroyed. Others have been partly rebuilt. Aside from these obvious signs, the line and the Ukrainian positions along it are mostly hidden from view: forest trenchworks, observation posts beneath camouflage netting, firebases in abandoned factories, headquarters concealed in the husks of apartment buildings.

For land mass, Ukraine is the second-largest country in Europe after Russia, but since the Donetsk airport was demolished in the fighting, the only way to get to the front is overland. From Kyiv, it is a 500-mile journey on indifferent roads, which I made in August. You pass through the vast grain fields that once fed imperial Russia, later so coveted by Joseph Stalin that he starved and killed millions of Ukrainians to get at them. You pass over the sites of some of the worst battles and most hideous massacres of World War II. Approaching Donbas, the wheat gives way to sunflowers, and in the warm months, the florets lend the atmosphere a golden tone.

Finally, you emerge into hill country. The horizon is broken up by smokestacks and the headframes of mines, and the gold is cut with a gray haze. The hills stand on their own and are strangely pyramidal; it’s like driving into Giza. Then you see why: The hills are in fact the decades-old culm banks of the coal mines. Some rise hundreds of feet. Many are covered over in shrubbery and trees.

Many of the mines are abandoned or destroyed. Aesthetically, Donbas looks stuck in time, somewhere between Khrushchev and Brezhnev, all but taunting the foreign visitor with its unrectified Sovietness. Monuments to the Great Patriotic War are everywhere. The apartment blocks are insistently drab, the housecoats threadbare, the haircuts practical. The sidewalks are outlined by rusted overground gas pipelines and the roads dominated by boxy old Lada sedans and Dnepr motorcycles, often equipped with sidecars.

Many Ukrainians in Donbas are wholly or partly ethnically Russian and, what is more important, culturally Russian. They speak Russian. In school, they were taught a patriotic version of Soviet history. They watch Russian TV and read Russian books and gather on Russian social media. A man from Luhansk told me of life there before the occupation: “It wasn’t influenced by Russia. It was Russia.”

When Russia sent troops to the border early last year, the point was unclear: Was it a warning to the newly inaugurated President Biden? A reminder to Ukraine that Russia could overrun it at any time? Some of the troops eventually withdrew, but D.P.R. and L.P.R. forces undertook a campaign of increased bombing and sniping that persisted through the summer. Its aim, too, was unclear, in both senses. Soldiers were dying, and a lot of civilians were being hit. The Ukrainian soldiers I spoke with agreed that the fire was probably more symbolic than strategic. Aug. 24 would mark the anniversary of Ukrainian independence. The enemy showed off its artillery every year at this time, but this was the 30th anniversary, and they seemed to want to be especially disparaging.

Two days after Yaroslav Semenyaka was killed in Pisky, I was near Krasnohorivka, a Red Zone town a few miles to the southwest that was controlled by Ukrainian forces. I was awakened at dawn by the thumps of incoming artillery. A rocket had hit an apartment building in Krasnohorivka. When I arrived at the building later that morning, soldiers and local officials were gathered outside. A group of neighbors stood on a walkway, gazing up at the third story. A gaping hole was in the exterior. Bent rebar hung from what had been a balcony.

But it took me a while to notice all that. After years of fighting and stray rockets, the whole edifice was beaten up. Shrapnel scars were everywhere; half the balconies had been torn off at some point. Some had been rebuilt, others covered over with plywood or plastic tarpaulin.

The dark stairwell smelled distinctly of explosives and faintly of old plumbing. The landing outside Apartment No. 83 was smeared with blood. Above the blood a woman in a floral housecoat stood in what had been her doorway, as though awaiting guests.

“Come in, admire,” she said wryly. “We’ve cleaned up some, but the fact remains.”

The tiny apartment was decorated with color-tinted family portraits and wallpaper so old it looked as though it had soaked into the walls. A coal stove squatted in the kitchen next to a Ukrainian Army press officer who was photographing the blown-out windows with his phone.

Larisa wore her short white hair swept up, and she had military-grade posture and the frankness to match. She and her husband had just gotten out of bed when the rocket hit. “I was on the toilet when the ceiling collapsed on me,” she said. He had been having tea in his underwear in the sitting room. She heard him bellowing. “He was saying: ‘Help me! I’m being crushed!’”

She pushed aside the splinters of the door and went to the sitting room. It was all smoke and dust. She couldn’t see him. Reaching in, she found his outstretched hands. She dragged him to the landing. She looked down and saw red on her hands and red dripping onto the floor. “He was completely covered in blood.”

At the hospital, the doctors found that his liver had been punctured by shrapnel. His arms were shredded, and he was deafened. He was conscious, but when she tried to talk to him on the phone, he couldn’t hear her.

Larisa showed me the sitting room. Ceiling tiles dangled; a fish tank and a TV lay in pieces. The sofa set was covered in the plaster and wood shards of the balcony, which had probably saved her husband’s life — without it, the rocket might have exploded in the room. Where the balcony had been was the gaping hole. The remains of stuffed animals lay on the floor. Normally her daughter and grandchildren would have been sleeping here.

“It was sheer luck they were away,” she said.

A lap dog circled Larisa’s feet. He had only just summoned the courage to come back into the apartment. She opened the dresser. Two cats cowered on a pile of clothing.

I asked how it was she was so calm. “Because this has been going on for such a long time,” she said.

A family from downstairs was cleaning, carrying out buckets of debris. Another neighbor mopped the blood from the landing. A local official interviewed Larisa and wrote a report. He told her he had contacted the Red Cross, which would bring medicine. Getting help fixing the apartment was another matter. If it was determined that she qualified for state assistance, he told her, “the government may take ownership of the apartment.”

She told him the government already owned the apartment, technically. In the Soviet Union, citizens were given state-owned apartments. Her mother originally got this one. When Ukraine became independent, the new government encouraged people to take ownership of their homes. Larisa had never gotten around to it.

She looked back on those days before independence with longing, she told me. Moscow had taken care of people. You had to work hard, of course, but in return the state gave you housing, food, medical care, schooling. On its own, Ukraine had been a disaster. Like just about everyone she knew in Krasnohorivka, Larisa was an admirer of Viktor Yanukovych. She had opposed Euromaidan, just as many in Donbas had. They had also opposed the mass demonstrations, known as the Orange Revolution, that arose in 2004, when Yanukovych first stood for the presidency and lost. When I asked her when things started to go wrong, a neighbor of Larisa’s who was keeping her company interjected: “When Gorbachev started Perestroika.”

The neighbor hinted that she suspected the rocket may not have come from the D.P.R. at all but was, in fact, Ukrainian. That’s what people were saying on Russian social media.

Outside, her neighbors were of the same opinion and less demure about it. A local news crew had arrived and was filming a Ukrainian soldier who had salvaged the bent fin of the rocket. He held it up for the camera. The reporter directed him to walk away and then walk back toward the camera dramatically. Watching this, the neighbors grew indignant.

“Donetsk has never shot at us, ever!” a woman yelled at the soldiers. “They haven’t fired for two years!”

“Look at them, taking pictures of themselves,” an older, gnomish woman said. Between the thick lenses in her glasses, which made her eyes immense, and her small size, she had a prophetic air about her. She confirmed her friend in slow, enigmatic phrases. “What is there to take pictures of? A person will be saved, or he won’t be.”

“Good for them,” the first woman said. “How many people can they kill? The bitches. Go shoot your parents. And they congratulate us on our liberation. Liberation from what? From gas? From light? Water? From everything. From normal life.”

“From civilization,” a man added.

“And they say it’s the D.P.R., always the D.P.R.,” she said. “We hear who’s shooting. We know how much you’re shooting!”

“We’re not deaf,” the older woman said.

“They mock us,” the first woman said. She insisted she knew where the offending rocket had come from — a Ukrainian tank near her building. She had seen it, parked there plain as day. There had also been a personnel carrier, she said. It ran over tomatoes she had planted with her grandmother. She would have filed a complaint about the tomatoes, but she didn’t want to be jailed.

“Ruins, our city,” she said. “We used to live beautifully and wonderfully. There were shops, there was everything.”

“When we became Ukraine,” the older woman said, “that was the goddamned end.”

Donbas was once a refuge for ethnic Ukrainians, Russians and others who wanted to escape the reach of the Russian Empire. “Ukraine” is derived from a word for borderland, and that was true most of all in what is now the country’s east. It was the steppe frontier between the czars and the Ottoman sultans. It was also underlaid by vast seams of coal, whose extraction was industrialized in the 19th century by European engineers.

During the Russian Revolution and civil war, the mines and metalworks of Donbas were coveted by the Red and White Russians alike. In 1918, the Bolsheviks created a puppet Soviet republic in Donbas. (It lasted only a few months, but the D.P.R. would invoke it a century later.) The region was devastated by the German and Soviet armies in World War II, in which seven million people died in Ukraine. After the war, Moscow repopulated and rebuilt Donbas. Its miners were held up as the beau ideal of Soviet manhood, and it became a kind of set piece for the worker’s utopia. Because of Donbas’s importance to the economy, life there was better than in much of the U.S.S.R. At the same time, Stalin, like the czars, put down the Ukrainian nationalist cause and suppressed Ukrainian culture. No one knows how many of his victims lay in the mine shafts.

Some days before Yaroslav Semenyaka was killed, I was in what was once a prosperous town, Zolote, built around a complex of mines in the Red Zone, just outside the L.P.R. Only a few of the mines are still open. The rest were abandoned before the current war or wrecked in it. Looming over Zolote were a deserted headframe and hoist house and the grown-over culm bank, reminders to the villagers of the life they once had.

A Ukrainian Army company from Lviv stationed in Zolote had been taking heavy artillery fire all summer. From the ground around the command post protruded the fins of unexploded ordnance. The post was in what had been the mine’s administrative building, which still exhibited the expense and artistic flair the Soviet Union put toward its mining sector. The stairwell was decorated with glass-tile mosaics. Anti-Putin literature and patriotic artwork sent by Ukrainian schoolchildren were now tacked on the walls. A smiling marker child stood next to three smiling marker soldiers. A green crayon tank fired a perforated line into a stick building containing a stick figure lying on its side. The caption read Come back alive, our defenders!

The company commander told me that the day before, he counted 70 120-milimeter rounds falling onto and around the village. It was the most artillery he had ever seen, and precise. “It was like jeweler’s work,” he said. “When 70 shells arrive on top of you like that, you don’t lift your head. You just lay down on the floor of the trench.”

There may have been some point to all of it, but he suspected it was for show. Not only was there the extra shelling in anticipation of Ukraine Independence Day going on up and down the line, but the day before was Russian Air Force Day.

The commander called himself Volodya, though by now I’d learned that the soldiers gave journalists fake names as a matter of course. A 23-year-old lieutenant, he aped the imperiousness of a middle-aged colonel. Wearing camouflage mesh leisure pants, a T-shirt stretched over a bulging gut and a bushy chin-curtain-style beard, he sat in a folding chair, smoking, a pack of Parliaments and a cellphone tucked deep into his groin. I asked if he’d been permitted to fire back. Though company commanders were sometimes allowed to return artillery fire at will, they often had to wait for approval from higher up.

“I will not answer this question,” he said. “This is a painful question.” He continued: “My soldiers are quite patriotic, war-minded. They want to fight, to protect their turf. They don’t panic. In fact, they want to move forward and take our land back. They’re just waiting for the command.”

“But the command never comes?”

“How can I say it? They’re not disappointed, but maybe they want something more.”

As though to underscore his point, we heard incoming rockets and the cracks of automatic rifle fire.

I entered the trenchworks, hidden by the forest, that surrounded Zolote. I spoke with the young soldiers manning fire positions and observation posts. “In the beginning of the war, we didn’t stay in one place for more than two days,” one rifleman told me. He started as a tank commander. He hadn’t known what was happening, who was where, everything moving so fast, but at least he got to fight. Now he knew exactly where the war stood and what was happening — nothing — and he felt useless. “You hardly see anyone. We’re just waiting for something unknown.”

The farther into the trenchworks I got, the further back into history I seemed to go. The earthen walls were bolstered with thoughtful wood planking. Men peered over the rim with antique periscopes. They waited by a hand-crank field telephone that didn’t ring. One man had a Japanese revolver from the early 20th century — a replica, it turned out, but no less anachronous for that. If it had hired set decorators to recreate the Western Front in 1915, the army could hardly have done better.

“It is like the First World War,” a tall, gangly man said, voicing what I was thinking. Having given up on formal battle dress, he wore a black hoodie that framed unkempt hair and a left earlobe tattooed with the number 14 — his age when his grandfather, who raised him, died, he told me. He had once been fired with the cause, but now, he said, “It’s very boring. I’m just going through the motions. Sometimes I get depressed. I fold my arms and want to give up on the war.”

Misha had given up a lot to get here. He was Russian and crossed the border to fight. Fascinated by war from an early age, he said his favorite book was “Storm of Steel,” the memoir of the German World War I hero Ernst Jünger. In the spring of 2014, when he was 19, Misha announced that he was going to the front to volunteer for Ukraine. His father, a veteran of the Soviet Army, objected. The Ukrainians were wrong, his father said. Donbas was Russian land. In fact, all Ukraine was.

Misha disagreed. He believed in self-​determination, and it was obvious to him that Putin was backing the secessionists in order to enslave Ukraine. “Russia is now an empire like any other, like America,” he told me. “They always colonize other countries, and the policy is always clear. To invade, to conquer, to destroy.”

He has been on the front ever since. He lost his Russian citizenship and wasn’t able to return to Russia for his father’s funeral. If he went back, he would surely be imprisoned. Now a Ukrainian citizen, he was fed up, but he didn’t know what else to do. “I live for war,” he said.

I was a bit confused by Misha’s story. You don’t often meet a Russian obsessed with Ernst Jünger, an author dear to fascists. But I admired his courage — or I did until I learned later that the 14 on Misha’s ear was, in fact, a sign of his membership in C14, a Ukrainian white-supremacist group.

Among the volunteers who had come to Ukraine’s aid at the beginning of the war were a number of white supremacists from Russia, Europe and America. No one knows just how many. They didn’t dislike Putin so much because he was an imperialist as because his policies, they believed, oppressed white people. Ukraine isn’t particularly known for its racism or even, any longer, for its anti-Semitism. (President Zelensky is Jewish.) But in 2014, the country was fighting for its life and accepted just about anyone willing to help. Many had stayed and, like Misha, been accepted.

“I am for the white race,” Misha told my interpreter in Russian. Maybe wisely, she waited until we were out of the trench to translate that.

At the command post, the lieutenant said a begrudging hello to a woman who was leaving her home, a few yards away. I asked about his relations with the villagers.

“Communicating with these people, it’s a painful topic,” he said. They were provincial. All they knew was mining and drinking. To them, Lviv, where he was from, was Europe. Many of them were unpatriotic. “There are the people who have always been for Ukraine, and there are those who voted with the secessionists in the referendum. They are blind kittens.”

When the woman, whose name was Maryna, returned, I greeted her. She invited me inside. Walking into her garden was like entering an oasis; it was difficult to believe we were on a front. The garden was ripe with melons, apricots and tomatoes. On a picnic table below the trellises of a small grape arbor, Maryna put out tea and sweets. She would have put out raspberries too, she explained, but when she went to pick them that morning, a rocket landed nearby, and she went back in the house.

Maryna lived there with her sister-in-law, Valia, who joined us. The family went back three generations in Zolote. We got on the subject of the anniversary of independence. They said they vividly remembered that heady winter, 30 years before, when Ukrainians voted to leave the Soviet Union. The two women were for it. Maryna even helped with the balloting, she said.

“People had hope,” Valia said. “We hoped for the best. Ukraine is a rich, good country. There is a lot of everything in Ukraine. But here’s what happened. As they say, now we have what we have.”

The war made a bad situation worse. For months they lived in the root cellar. Maryna’s father was disabled, and they carried him underground every day.

“We didn’t know who the secessionists were,” Maryna said. “We were all the same, and then we woke up one morning, and suddenly the people down the road were secessionists. And we became God knows who.” Now they were the enemy. “The soldiers say, ‘You are all secessionists here.’”

They didn’t have the means to move. And even if they did, where would they go? Maryna uttered a phrase I heard again and again from people in Donbas: “Who needs us?”

Outside, I found the lieutenant still in his folding chair, still smoking, stroking his beard, flanked by subordinates.

Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine

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A brewing conflict. Antagonism between Ukraine and Russia has been simmering since 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, annexing Crimea and whipping up a rebellion in the east. A tenuous cease-fire was reached in 2015, but peace has been elusive.

A spike in hostilities. Russia has recently been building up forces near its border with Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s messaging toward its neighbor has hardened. Concern grew in late October, when Ukraine used an armed drone to attack a howitzer operated by Russian-backed separatists.

Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.

The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.

Rising tension. Western countries have tried to maintain a dialogue with Moscow. But administration officials recently warned that the U.S. could throw its weight behind a Ukrainian insurgency should Russia invade.

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“Did she tell you how she was one of the main secessionists?” he asked. “Did she mention how she helped organize the referendum? She was even tried for it. Great woman.” The soldiers laughed a little too hard. “Here’s what you do: Dig a hole, fill it with lime, throw all these people in it. Then take a tractor and cover them over with earth.”

Looking at my interpreter, he said, “Don’t translate that.”

When I returned to Zolote the next week, Maryna was injured. She had been returning from the home of a neighbor, an old man she looked after, walking next to a fence, when a rocket came in. She dropped into a crouch. Shrapnel tore into her shoulder and back.

I looked at the fence. The fresh holes were at eye level. If she hadn’t ducked, she’d be dead.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, only one checkpoint has remained consistently open between Ukraine and the secessionist territories, in Stanytsia Luhanska, a town about 90 miles northeast of Pisky. It is in the northernmost sector of the Red Zone, outside the L.P.R., near the Russian border. In the war’s first days, images of civilians dashing across a destroyed bridge in Stanytsia Luhanska, dodging fire, were broadcast around the world, calling to mind Sarajevo.

When I visited in August, Stanytsia Luhanska called to mind Cold War Germany. In front of the border checkpoint stood a large white obelisk and a red Soviet star. A plaque read, “In memory of the 242 prisoners of war who were executed in this village in 1942.” The checkpoint had, like so much else on the front, been formalized. The bridge was rebuilt. There were freshly painted white storm-fencing, orderly queues, converted cargo containers housing A.T.M.s and NGO offices, cafes. Taxi drivers waited to pick up fares.

The Ukrainian side of the checkpoint was crowded with people who were waiting to cross into the L.P.R., but most people were going the other direction: to see family, to check on property they owned, to go shopping. Goods were less expensive and of better quality on the Ukrainian side.

A family waited for a minibus at a cafe. The parents, carrying overnight bags, a large bottle of water and a plastic bag of snacks, stood protectively over their young son and daughter, who sat silent and watchful at a table in the shade of an umbrella. They were going to Severodonetsk to visit relatives, the mother, who introduced herself as Maria, told me. They had waited nearly three hours to get across from Luhansk, where they lived.

Her son carried a small guitar case. I asked about it. She said he was learning piano too. “He likes to play patriotic Ukrainian songs.” At this the boy winced. I now noticed he looked frightened. So did his sister.

“The truth is, we’re not going back,” Maria confided, unprompted. “We’re leaving Luhansk for good.”

It was as though she had been wanting to tell someone for ages. Now that she’d said it, relief seemed to overtake her. I asked why they decided to defect. Without hesitating, looking at her children, Maria said, “To give them a future.”

Her husband eyed me. He clearly didn’t want Maria speaking with me, but before he could say so, their minibus arrived. My interpreter and I offered to drive them to Severodonetsk instead. They could get their tickets refunded. Even the husband agreed to this readily. They had sunk everything they had into their escape and needed all the spare cash they could get.

Once we were driving, Maria poured forth. They had been planning their escape for years, she said, slowly moving their possessions out, trip by trip. On the last trip, they had found an apartment in a city in central Ukraine where they’d never been before. They had seen it only on a map. It was near an industrial center where her husband, Oleksandr, would hopefully find work in a plant. In Luhansk, he was a miner. When his mine closed, he went to work in one of the illegal open-pit mines. It was absurdly dangerous work, and many of his friends died. Maria was a freelance tutor. Between what she received from her late father’s pension and what they saved, they had just enough to make the down payment on their new home. She had enrolled their son, Andriy, 10, and daughter, Kira, 6, in a school.

The farther from the checkpoint we got, the more excited Maria seemed to get about the future, and this in turn kept bringing her back to the indignities of life under occupation.

“Everything was decrepit,” she said. “In Luhansk, you could take a person who had been healthy and prosperous, and soon they would become a drunk.”

Salaries were a fraction of what they were before the war and prices higher. There were constant electricity outages, food shortages, shortages of everything. What goods there were on shelves were Russian castoffs. There were even food lines, as in the worst days of the Soviet Union. Public services had deteriorated or disappeared entirely. Garbage piled up in the streets. The hospitals were falling apart, and many doctors had defected or died in the pandemic.

Most of the people Maria knew, even her own family members, longed to be absorbed into Russia and blamed Ukraine for their misery. She compared them to abused girlfriends. The harder Russia hit them, the faster they scurried back to him. She had arrived at a conclusion about Russians: “They don’t need freedom. They don’t even want it.”

The propaganda had been everywhere. Kira and her classmates had been made to dress up in military uniforms and sing Soviet war anthems in their nursery-school class. Kira was a “war baby,” Maria said: She was born under the occupation and didn’t know anything else. She was accustomed to seeing guns every day. There were armed guards outside her nursery school, their fingers on the triggers. “Why do they need to have their fingers on the trigger in front of a nursery school?” Andriy could slightly remember a time before and was worse affected. He couldn’t sleep, was frightened all the time, even paranoid. When Maria put on Ukrainian music at home, he ran around the house closing the windows and begging her to turn it down, worried someone would hear.

Maria’s problem wasn’t getting to sleep so much as what happened once she was there. She had acquired a recurring nightmare. A man is pointing a rocket-propelled grenade at her. She screams: “Shoot me! Shoot me!” He pulls the trigger. She bolts awake.

Andriy and Kira listened, whispering questions to their parents. They, too, had relaxed. Andriy peered out his window, not exactly in wonder, while Kira chewed from a giant chocolate bar.

Now it was Oleksandr who looked stricken. He hadn’t loathed life in Luhansk as Maria had. The lack of freedom didn’t bother him, she said, with what struck my ear as a mixture of affection and exasperation. She jokingly called him “the Secessionist.” He didn’t argue the point. He didn’t say much, except to occasionally push back on her complaints about the life they had left behind.

“I guess everyone dealt with the occupation differently,” Maria said. “They survived, they adjusted.”

“People went to bars,” he said.

“What bars? There was a 10 p.m. curfew.”

“11,” he said.

“OK, 11,” she said.

Oleksandr was thoughtful. “It’s scary to change everything,” he said, “to start all over again at 40.”

They still had a home in Luhansk and a car. His mother was still there. What would happen to her if the authorities learned of their defection? Families of defectors were interrogated for months and years, he’d heard. Sometimes they disappeared.

“You can’t criticize Russia,” Maria said. “Not even on the internet. Everyone is afraid.”

“What happens if you do?” I asked.

“They take you to one of the basements,” Oleksandr said.

Maria unburdened herself, but she didn’t drop her guard. She wouldn’t tell me their family name. When we arrived in Severodonetsk, she asked us to drop them at a bank. She didn’t want me seeing where they were staying.

“If you have to write a surname, say it’s Ivanov,” Oleksandr told me as he got out of the car and shook my hand. “That way, if I have to go back, they won’t shoot me.”

“Basement” is a word you hear often in Ukraine. It can have one of two meanings. It can refer to the basements that people fled to during the worst days of the war. Or it can mean what Oleksandr meant — the secret prisons in the D.P.R. and L.P.R. that are used for interrogation, torture and murder.

I spoke with a former prisoner, Stanislav Aseev, who was living in Makiyivka, a town outside the city of Donetsk. Makiyivka was occupied by D.P.R. forces in 2014 and is still occupied. Like just about everyone else in his town, he told me, he was raised with very little sense of being Ukrainian. He spoke Russian, he read Russian books, he watched Russian TV. When Russian news said that the Euromaidan protests were a coup backed by America, he believed it. When it said the independence movement in Donbas was genuine, he believed that. His friends joined the D.P.R. forces, thrilled by the idea of “killing fascists.”

It was hard to know who was in charge or what they intended, but Aseev saw with his own eyes the Russian agents around Makiyivka, the obviously foreign soldiers in unmarked uniforms. Then he started to notice that critics of the D.P.R. were disappearing. He began hearing about the basements. You could find yourself in one for something as simple as writing a Facebook post critical of Russia or the D.P.R.

“It took me a while to emerge from my indoctrination,” he said.

Aseev began writing pseudonymous dispatches for a Ukrainian website. They were widely read, and they found their way onto Russian social media. Getting bolder, he began adding photographs to his articles. One day in 2015, he was taking pictures in Donetsk’s city center when he was stopped by a policeman. Plainclothes agents arrived. He was bundled into a car, and a burlap bag was placed over his head. An agent told him, “You can’t imagine how many people we’ve beaten, thinking they were you.”

He was taken to the basement of a local government building. For weeks, Aseev was tortured and interrogated. He was beaten with truncheons. The wires of a crank-powered field telephone were strapped to his thumbs and ears, and he was shocked.

He noticed that while his captors were being directed by a Russian, they were Ukrainian. He was tried twice in a D.P.R. court for spying. The trials lasted a few minutes, and each ended in a 15-year sentence. Like his captors, the prosecutors and judges were Ukrainian. For the next two and a half years, he was moved through a series of prisons, including the most notorious, known as Izoliatsiia.

Described in a recent United Nations human rights report, Izoliatsiia was a perfect travesty of the Stalinist era. The torture chambers and solitary-confinement cells were in old nuclear fallout shelters. The prisoners were forced to sing Soviet anthems. The commandant was a “psychopath in the classic mold,” Aseev said. Most nights he would drink himself into a rage and then beat prisoners or order prisoners to beat one another while he watched. Aseev believes he also raped female prisoners.

It wasn’t just critics of the occupation who were inside. Many of his fellow prisoners were Ukrainians who had supported the occupation and joined D.P.R. forces. Some were Russian nationals who had volunteered, believing in the cause, he learned. Others had been mercenaries. The regime was already turning on itself, paranoid that even its devotees were spies or traitors.

Aseev was released in a prisoner exchange at the end of 2019. President Zelensky awarded him an apartment in Kyiv, where Aseev’s mother, who was interrogated repeatedly while he was imprisoned, recently joined him.

“The thing is, the Ukrainian government doesn’t know what it’s up against,” he told me. “They have this optimistic belief that they can end the war and free Donetsk and Luhansk. This isn’t going to happen. Russia has the resources to sustain this conflict for decades.”

The Ukrainian-controlled portions of Donbas are still shot through with secessionist sentiment. Many of the people who supported secession in 2014 are still around, including officials. Some of them still hold office. In an effort to purge Donbas of the worst offenders, the Zelensky government has suspended local elections in the region, a move that has earned rebukes from democracy advocates.

Ukrainian prosecutors have brought hundreds of cases against Ukrainians in Donbas for treason and sedition. Some of the defendants have fled to Russia, but many have stayed. Few have faced full trials, and only a handful have been sentenced. When I asked a judicial activist in Kyiv why this was, she said she believed the main reason was political. With Zelensky growing unpopular, the judges worried the next regime to take power in Ukraine might be another tied to Moscow. They didn’t want to risk their careers, never mind their lives.

Donbas offers little to Russia, which does not need the region’s coal or its sad vestiges of industry. Presumably the Kremlin does not want the burden of Donbas’s public-sector budgets or its pensioners. Unlike Crimea, home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, Donbas has no strategic value — except as a platform for further menacing Ukraine — and no beach resorts.

What, then, does Russia want with it? Putin’s thinking has been so far removed from public scrutiny that any answer to that question is very conjectural. It depends on the drift of your Kremlinology, which in turn depends on your presumptions about his power. Russia analysts who are of the (prevailing) view that Putin approaches omnipotence ask what his realpolitik long con in Donbas can be. He’s always got one, their thinking goes. One possible explanation is electoral. Though Putin refuses to acknowledge an official Russian role in Donbas, the region has added an estimated 600,000 voters to the Russian rolls. If the results of last fall’s elections are to be believed, they support his United Russia party.

Those who class Putin with other world leaders — that is, as a mortal navigating among rivals — ask if Donbas doesn’t represent the rare miscalculation on his part. Euromaidan was a convenient pretext to invade Crimea, an idea long contemplated in the Kremlin. The Donbas operation was probably more impulsive, and it has met with a Ukrainian defiance few in Russia, or for that matter in Ukraine, would have predicted in 2014. Russian intentions there have seemed to evolve. Donbas has served variously as a bargaining chip with Western powers, a cudgel to hold over them, a hobbyhorse for the home audience and an albatross. Seizing Crimea increased Putin’s popularity hugely but only for a time. And while his ratings get a bounce with every southernly rattle of the saber, years of economic sanctions have the reverse effect.

Shortly before I arrived in Donbas, a remarkable open letter was published on the Kremlin website in Russian and English. That it bore Putin’s signature doesn’t mean he wrote it, but the 7,000-word letter did unfurl with the kind of party-congress loquacity this otherwise terse president sometimes indulges. “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” recounted the joint histories of Russia and Ukraine from the ninth century onward. Striking a conciliatory note, Putin lamented Bolshevik crimes in Ukraine (nothing of Stalin) and confessed that the war in Donbas was “in my mind our great common misfortune and tragedy.”

He went on to link Ukrainian nationalism to German fascism and to claim that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era.” When Ukraine became independent, it was “taken away” from its “historical motherland,” resulting in a disaster that culminated in Euromaidan. “Western countries directly interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs and supported the coup,” he wrote. “Step by step, Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia.”

The letter led some observers to wonder whether Putin hasn’t so much directed events in Donbas as allowed them to progress at the hands of hard-liners in his orbit. That hard line may be defined, 20 years into his reign, by the worldview of Novorossiya. Originally a czarist term meaning New Russia, it has been revived by Russian ultranationalists to describe their project of reconstituting a Russian imperium.

Novorossiya is not about realpolitik. It is about history and pride. And while it is unclear just how committed Putin is to it, there is little question that Novorossiya is now part of Russian policy. Like the front line running down eastern Ukraine, it is regional fact. In addition to Donbas and Crimea, Russia has intervened in Georgia to prop up the republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and in Moldova to establish the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, usually known as Transnistria. In all, that is roughly 20,000 square miles of Europe carved off three different sovereign states since Putin first took national office. A form of Russian hybrid warfare was applied in all of these places. In other former Soviet republics such as the Baltic States, Russia carries on a relentless cyber war in an effort to hobble and discredit their governments.

To the proponents of Novorossiya, as to the Romanovs and the Bolsheviks and the Stalinists, Ukrainian independence is a misnomer. There is no distinct Ukrainian people or culture. There is no Ukraine. There is only Russia.

In 2014 and 2015, Russia and Ukraine signed the Minsk Protocols, which call for returning Donbas to Ukraine. There is evidence that Putin really wants that. But he insists the region take on a semiautonomous form that Zelensky can’t abide. Putin has not accepted Zelensky’s invitations to negotiate outside the Minsk language. Instead, twice in the last year, he has sent troops to the Ukrainian border and spoken of war. Now it’s not only Western Europe and the United States who are pushing back. In the fall, Russia’s sometime ally Turkey sent Kyiv a shipment of TB2 armed drones. This month, Estonia pledged to provide Ukraine with weapons. Days later, Russian and American diplomats began formal talks to resolve the crisis on the Ukrainian border. Ukraine was not invited.

On Aug. 24, a parade in Kyiv marked the 30th anniversary of Ukrainian independence. The nights before, rehearsing Ukrainian soldiers marched through the streets chanting: “Putin, dickhead! Putin, dickhead!”

In his speech, Zelensky didn’t mention Putin by name. He did say of Donbas: “We fight for our people there. It is possible to occupy territories temporarily. However, it is impossible to occupy the love of people in Ukraine. It is possible to create desperation and force people to get passports. However, it is impossible to passport-ize Ukrainian hearts.”

It was not a very inspiring speech, but it got at a fact about the war in Donbas that is often overlooked. It has split the country, yes, but it has also brought many Ukrainians together as never before. It has created a nation, you might say, or the beginnings of one, where before there was only an uncertain former Soviet republic. Ukrainians of patriotic mind get indignant when the war in Donbas is called a “civil war,” and in one sense, probably most senses, they’re right. It was started by and is perpetuated by Russia. But in at least one sense, they’re wrong: This is a civil war in that it’s taking place within the Ukrainian identity. The war has forced Ukrainians to decide who they are, or at least who they are not: namely, Russians. Ultimately, that may represent Putin’s real miscalculation.

At the independence celebrations, I watched the streets fill with Ukrainians draped in the national flag, their faces painted in blue and yellow. It was hard to believe this was happening in the same country as Donbas, where I had seen little of anything that looked like hope. The people I met there compared the lives they led before independence — the pride they once had, the sense of belonging, the centrality of Donbas in the Soviet world — with what they had now. The choice was no choice at all. The war in Donbas is complex; it is a hybrid. But the disagreement from which it arises is not. It is simple. It is between people who want to return to the past and people who don’t.

The same week, with the leaves turning brown and an autumn chill taking the air, Volodymyr Veryovka recuperated at a military hospital in Kyiv. His right arm was bandaged and bent at a permanent angle, held in place with a triangle of metal rods and screws that went into the bones. An intravenous tube pumped plasma into the wound. A deep scarlet groove ran from the left side of his shaved head nearly to his brow. The doctors had never determined what hit him there, but whatever it was, he was lucky to still have his sight, and for that matter his life. An inch lower and it might have punctured his temple or gone through his eye socket.

Though Volodymyr and Yaroslav Semenyaka only met the morning Yaroslav was killed, Yaroslav’s father paid a visit to the hospital, accompanied by Semenyaka’s fiancée. They brought him bags of fruit from Yaroslav’s garden. The two men talked in a gazebo outside the ward. Volodymyr had a vacant look in his eye and was slow of speech, my guess was from the painkillers. The conversation was awkward.

“Did he have children?” he asked Yaroslav’s father. “I can’t remember.”

“No, no,” the father said. “This is his fiancée.” She kept silent but leaned on her almost-father-in-law as he spoke, tears sometimes escaping her eyes. “They were to have married on Oct. 15. His contract was up.”

“He did say something about the wedding,” Volodymyr said. “But we didn’t talk about finishing our service.”

“Well, he spoke of it just with us,” Yaroslav’s father said. “He didn’t talk about it with the guys yet. He’d bought a house, renovated it. All with his own hands, all how they wanted it. He said, ‘My contract will finish, and we’ll live like humans.’ If anyone would have told us. …”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

By that point, Yaroslav had been buried, in his hometown, Pidlypne, three hours northwest of Kyiv. In the morning, mourners began gathering outside Yaroslav’s house, its wood siding freshly painted a vibrant green. Family, friends, neighbors, classmates, fellow soldiers and local veterans carried flowers, many of them in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, all of them held upside down, a local custom. Some, like Yaroslav’s commander, had traveled from across the country to attend. By midday there was a crowd of several hundred.

At noon, a police car, siren flashing, pulled in front of the house, and the crowd parted to let it through. Behind it was a Humvee with an open rear. A coffin was draped in blue-and-yellow wreaths. An honor guard of cadets carried the coffin into the garden. A quartet of priests and army chaplains in olive drab surplices sang hymns. Yaroslav’s fiancée fainted and was carried into the house. As the coffin was carried back out to the Humvee, a cadet yelled, “Heroes never die!” The other cadets echoed, “Heroes never die!” A brass band struck up a dirge and started toward the church, the Humvee and crowd following behind.

I fell in with a man in his 60s walking with a single crutch. He was wearing an old telnyashka, the traditional striped undershirt of the Russian military, beneath a great coat. The medals hanging from it clattered.

He had been a Soviet paratrooper in Afghanistan, he told me, and was proud of it. But he was also a Ukrainian, from Donetsk, and when the war in Donbas started, he helped organize the volunteers from Pidlypne. He had been going to funerals like this one ever since. If this had been a few years ago, he said, the whole city would have turned out. There would have been thousands of mourners, not hundreds.

“Now everyone is tired of the war,” he said.

Though Ukrainian, he, too, longed for the days of the Soviet Union, he confided. Life was dependable then. The leaders might have been cruel, but they were honest. Now it was a mess. He didn’t know what to expect.

“Afghanistan was a real war,” he said. “But this war is something I don’t understand.”

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Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin/Magnum, for The New York Times.

James Verini is a contributing writer for the magazine who lives in London. His book “They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate,” based on his series for the magazine about the war against the Islamic State, is out in paperback. His work has received a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award. Paolo Pellegrin is a Magnum photographer who has won 11 World Press Photo awards. His most recent book, “Des Oiseaux,” was published in September, and his work will be exhibited at the Gallerie D’Italia, in Turin, in April.

. . .

 To be continued.