On Sunday, I arrived in Kyiv on the sleeper train from Lviv. As I stepped off the railroad car and into the freezing morning air, I noticed the platform was deserted. Thousands of panicked women and children have been boarding train carriages, fleeing to the relative safety of western Ukraine. Soviet-era trains have helped hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians escape Vladimir Putin’s invasion—an irony of the nation’s calamitous history with expansionist Russian leaders.
After checking into a hotel and meeting with Ukrainian officials, my colleagues and I drove toward Irpin, a suburb cursed by its geography. The small city of sixty thousand people sits in the way of the Russian Army as it tries to move from Hostomel Airport, which it controls, and into the capital. When Ukraine’s Army put up a strong defense in Irpin, the city’s residents found shells, bullets, and battles raging around them.
At the last turnoff for Irpin, stern-faced Ukrainian soldiers and police, hunched under a frigid gray sky, manned a checkpoint of piled-up sandbags. A tent offered evacuees basic medical treatment; a nearby stand held sandwiches and a pile of children’s winter coats. Soldiers refused to allow us to go any further. Brent Renaud, an American journalist, had been killed earlier that day, they said, nodding toward the grassy side of the road where the award-winning documentary filmmaker’s body lay, covered in a blanket.
A few minutes later, Natalia, a small, gray-haired grandmother with glasses, arrived from Irpin in a rescue van operated by volunteers with her family. “We didn’t touch anybody,” she told us. “We didn’t touch that Putin. We don’t understand why he started this war. For what?” She had remained in her small, one-story home in Irpin for eighteen long days, with her husband, daughter, son-in-law, and two-year-old granddaughter, Sophia. Natalia had hoped that the Ukrainian soldiers would be able to hold on, but when a shell landed close by they decided it was time to go. “Everything will be all right,” she said. “We will be at Sophia’s wedding party.” The child stood quietly a few feet away, wrapped in a coat, clutching a candy bar.
Two days earlier, Jérôme Sessini, a photographer for the Magnum photo agency on assignment for The New Yorker, had visited a frigid basement turned makeshift bunker in Irpin. Elderly residents less able-bodied than Natalia lay on cots, curled up beneath filthy blankets. Some wandered around with walkers, looking confused and frightened. “Most of the people in the shelters were elderly,” Sessini told me. “They were all very scared.” Volunteers intermittently managed to bring in food to civilians and fighters. A table was piled high with old plates, boiled eggs, and crackers.
Outside, the bodies of four Russian soldiers lay on the ground near a burned-out Russian tank, Sessini said. They had lain there for several days, after trying to advance down a set of railway tracks, Ukrainian soldiers told Sessini. One of the Russians had been severely burned, seemingly having climbed out of the tank when it was on fire, and died nearby.
As Sessini made his way back toward Kyiv, he visited the main bridge to the capital, which the Ukrainian military had blown up to slow the Russian advance. As Sessini photographed the bridge from the Irpin side, elderly civilians slowly traversed its remains. Giant chunks of concrete and asphalt lay in a tangle on the riverbed nearby. Volunteers helped an elderly woman slowly shuffle along a makeshift wooden walkway. The rushing, dark waters of the Irpin River swirled around her as a volunteer reached forward, clasped her hand, and guided her toward momentary safety.
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