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Ukrainian soldiers hold a Javelin missile system at a position on the front line north of Kyiv. Foto:
Gleb Garanich / REUTERS
Fortress Kyiv On the Road with the Volunteers Protecting the Ukrainian Capital
They used to be teachers or employees for logistics companies. Now they’re the core of the resistance. Tens of thousands of volunteers have developed a line of defense that has proved hard for the Russians to break. They have transformed the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv into a fortress.
By Kurt Pelda in Kyiv
18.03.2022, 17.25 Uhr
Like arrows, surface-to-air missiles chase an invisible target somewhere above the highway connecting Kyiv to the outside world. In rapid succession, Ukrainian air defenses fire five guided missiles. They leave a trail behind them before they turn into a big curve and explode far up in the blue of the sky. Like the contrails left behind by jets, the smoke from the rocket engines can be seen for minutes afterwards.
“They’re aiming at the missiles the Russians are trying to destroy our cities with,” says Daniel, the young driver, as he tries to follow what’s happening in the sky through the windshield. “Five missiles for one target – our air defenses certainly don’t seem to lack ammunition,” he adds.
Daniel, 20, is from the Luhansk, the region in Ukraine’s Donbas that has been largely occupied by pro-Russian rebels for the past eight years. We are not quoting him by his full name because he still has family there. DER SPIEGEL 12/2022
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 12/2022 (March 19th, 2022) of DER SPIEGEL. SPIEGEL International
Daniel’s mother tongue is Russian, but he says he has felt Ukrainian ever since he fled with his parents from Donbas to Kyiv in 2014. He’s also a staunch communist, albeit one who never experienced the Soviet Union. “Many Ukrainians don’t understand,” he says. They have bad memories of communism. “But I believe that everyone should give as much as they can and only take as much as they need.”
Daniel himself seeks to live by that maxim. He got his driver’s license last summer, and now he drives relief supplies and food to those in need as a volunteer, crisscrossing Kyiv and also heading out into the surrounding countryside. His girlfriend helps coordinate the logistics. She takes requests by phone and via social media and forwards shopping lists and destinations to Daniel. The money for the purchases comes from donations.
A residential building in Kyiv destroyed by artillery fire. In the north of the city, shelling can be heard regularly. Foto: Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGEL
Their ability to deploy volunteers quickly and efficiently where their skills are most needed has been one of the reasons for the Ukrainians’ successful resistance. Countless decentralized networks of activists across the country are organizing everything from places for displaced people to sleep, to food and fuel to night vision equipment and commercial drones used by the armed forces for aerial reconnaissance. Without the private initiative of tens of thousands of people, the resistance likely would have collapsed long ago, if only because the soldiers at the front and the militiamen at the countless roadblocks wouldn’t have enough to eat.
Help has also been coming in from abroad. One group of supporters in Vienna, Munich and Berlin, with the help of various travel companies, has organized bus convoys to transport medicine, baby food and diapers to Kyiv and evacuate women and children on the way back. The vehicles are accompanied by security guards who have been rounded up by the Swiss company T3-Concepts and are working on a voluntary basis. The relief effort at home and abroad has meant that there is still no shortage of essential goods, at least not in the capital.
We drive with Daniel to Vasylkiv, a little southwest of Kyiv. The city of around 40,000 is located in the corridor west of the Dnieper River through which Kyiv is supplied with food, fuel and materials needed for the war. If the Russian troops capture Vasylkiv and its surroundings, they could cut off this important supply line to the capital, with the highway and railway running next to it. Kyiv would then only be accessible via the eastern bank of the Dnieper, which would involve major detours and be considerably more dangerous. The land corridor near Vasylkiv is strategically important. In addition, the city is home to an air base, which has been attacked by Russian troops several times, and large barracks.
Civilians erect barricades in Kyiv: The work of volunteers has made it much harder for Russian soldiers to penetrate the center of the city. Foto: Emin Sansar / Anadolu Agency / Abaca / ddp
On the main road, we pass a base, with a military academy located right next to it. It was likely one of several targets that the Russians fired several missiles at in late February. One of those projectiles missed the military academy by about 100 meters and instead struck across the street directly in front of a vocational school.
The detonation destroyed the middle part off the structure. Now, there’s a large crater in front of the brick building. There’s also a pile of rubble where the entrance to the school likely used to be.
A few kilometers away, Daniel delivers the food he is taking to another school that is still intact. He carries canned meat into the storeroom, where two women are busy peeling carrots. In the kitchen next door, the pots are steaming, and pasta is being cooked for the displaced and needy in the surrounding neighborhood.
On the way back to Kyiv, long traffic jams form in front of the checkpoints at the entrance to the city. Many uniformed people, members of the Territorial Defense Forces, speak Russian and not Ukrainian. But they have still volunteered for military service. You often hear things from them like, “We don’t want to be a colony of Russia” or “We’re not Moscow’s slaves any longer.” The controls are strict at times. At one point, a militiaman wants a mobile phone to be presented unlocked. Then he goes through the list of recent calls before clearing the way.
Driver Daniel: “I believe that everyone should give as much as they can.” Foto:
Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGEL
There is much less traffic heading in the other direction out of town. People can still flee Kyiv, but of those who are still there, many want to continue holding out. Anna, a teacher in her late forties who also doesn’t want her name published, is one of those holdouts.
She tells us that her son is in his early twenties and isn’t allowed to leave the country because of compulsory military service. She says he has poor eyesight, wears thick glasses and probably isn’t fit for war at all. But Anna says she would feel bad if she just left her son behind now. His girlfriend feels the same way, which led them both to decide to stay. But the family has been pushed out of their home on the northwestern outskirts of the city because of artillery fire. They found refuge in an apartment further inside the city that belongs to friends who are currently living in Western Europe.
In the evening, Pavlo Haidai takes me to the northwestern outskirts of Kyiv. Haidai is the head of a logistics company, but he now wears the arm band of the Territorial Defense Forces, and he has an American Barrett assault rifle next to him in his car.
He says he would rather talk about anthropology, art or philosophy, but right now the war dominates every conversation. Haidai doesn’t believe the Russians will totally encircle the city. “In the northwest of the city, the Russian army has maybe 20,000 men,” he says. It’s doubtful, he adds, that this would be enough for an attack on a major city like Kyiv. “But a complete encirclement is an illusion with so few soldiers.” Nor, he says, has there been any indication so far that the Russian forces, which are in the area around Irpin, Bucha and Hostomel Airport, have received any significant reinforcements from Moscow.
Many militiamen at the checkpoints know Haidai and his car, so we rarely have to show our papers. We drive toward the Irpin River, which is a major obstacle for the Russians during their advance, partly because the Ukrainians have blown up most of the bridges.
Here, on the outskirts of the city, there are many shopping centers with extensive parking lots and also scattered wooded areas. The further we go toward the northwest, the louder the rumbling from the artillery gets. The Ukrainians shell the Russian positions, the Russians fire back. The salvos continue throughout the evening and most of the night. Sometimes the impacts, presumably caused by Russian launchers that can fire multiple missiles, sound like the roar of a thunderstorm.
We spend the night at a base belonging to the Territorial Defense. Locals who haven’t fled yet bring food and cook for the fighters. Most of the people in uniform – all men – are around 40 years old. The regular, mostly younger soldiers of the Ukrainian army aren’t stationed in the city area – they’re fighting outside in the smaller villages and forests.
The base commander is a large, corpulent man who goes be the nom de guerrre “Dragon.” He leads by flashlight in the darkness through a system of trenches and bunkers with hatches for shooting. The bottom of the trenches is covered with wooden boards and grates so the men don’t sink in the mud when it rains. “We built all of that,” he says proudly. He says they only have light infantry weapons, AK-74 assault rifles and a few machine guns. “Our mission is to control vehicles on this traffic axis, which is the entrance to Kyiv,” he says. “We created posts for the troops further forward so that they can set up their anti-tank missiles here if they are forced to retreat.”
During the first three weeks of the war, the Territorial Defense and countless civilian relief forces built positions, bunkers and roadblocks along the main arteries, some using excavators. Tank mines were buried where attacks were expected off the roads. Signs with red lettering warn about the mines. This will make it harder for the attackers to penetrate the city center.
Outside the city, countless Russian tanks are stuck in the mud and have been abandoned by their crews. Sometimes the Ukrainians manage to pull the vehicles out of the mud and get them going again. In the middle of the city, we see a captured T-72 battle tank, which the Ukrainians have painted with their national colors.
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In a hospital in an outlying district, surgeon Igor Khomenko welcomes us in his office. He is actually retired. Earlier, he held the rank of major general in the army. But now he’s back in uniform. He proudly shows a video on his mobile phone of an operation he recently performed on the heart of a wounded man. He says the man got struck in the chest by shrapnel. The emergency surgery saved the man’s life, he says.
“Most of the injuries we are seeing here are from shrapnel or bullets from infantry weapons, mostly to the extremities,” Khomenko tells us. “We are about 20 kilometers from the combat zone, so we are the first hospital the wounded are brought to.” This is where life-saving measures are taken and the patients are stabilized before transferring them to other hospitals in parts of the country with less fighting.
Many of the hospital’s staff have fled, he says, but they still enough people, with only around one out of four beds occupied. There is, for example, a man from the Territorial Defense who had already fought in the Donbas in 2014. His position near the large dam north of Kyiv got struck by a mortar shell. He sustained thigh injuries from shrapnel.
A retiree living near the Hostomel Airport, which was captured by the Russian military, was caught off guard together with a friend during a Russian missile attack on the street. “Although we immediately threw ourselves to the ground, we were hit,” the old man recounts. Shrapnel wounds can be seen on his head and arm. “My friend didn’t survive the attack.”
After that, I accompany the helper Daniel on another mission. He has a shopping list with him, and we first head to a supermarket in western Kyiv. Artillery fire is audible, even here. The customers are used to the noise and don’t seem to mind much. Soldiers stationed at a nearby front line also come here to stock up on food. A couple in uniform – he with a pistol and an oversized silencer in the holster – push a shopping cart through the aisles. Credit cards continue to be accepted at the cash registers.
Helper Flores-Cortez: “The ‘Z’ is something Ukrainians will never forget.” Foto:
Maxim Dondyuk / DER SPIEGEL
Later, we drive to the big dam wall in the north of the city and cross it to the east. The Ukrainians blew up a bridge over a side channel of the Dnieper here, and now the village of Khotianivka on the opposite bank is hard to supply. So, Daniel and other helpers deliver food, mainly potatoes, white cabbage and canned fish, in their cars to the blown-up bridge, where men load the food onto an inflatable boat with an outboard motor.
One of the helpers is named Alberto Flores-Cortez. His father is Bolivian, his mother Ukrainian. Before the war, he ran several martial arts studios in Kyiv with a total of 75 employees. “My business was doing well,” he says, “but now it’s all dead.” To support the Ukrainian resistance, he set up a foundation and also transferred a large part of his sayings to a government bank account so it could be used to purchase weapons.
Together with Flores-Cortez, we cross the canal and then go to the community center in Khotianivka. A family with three small children is already waiting for the food to be served. The parents speak decent German, having lived in the town of Ansbach in Bavaria for a few years before returning to Ukraine.
On the way back to Kyiv, Flores-Cortez talks about his martial arts studios. The chain is called Cortez – Mixed Martial Arts. The logo is in white lettering on a black background, with a distinctive red “Z” at the end.
Flores-Cortez says he will have to change the logo. The letter “Z” is the sign of the Russian invaders, it is painted on many trucks, and war supporters in Russia wave “Z” flags.
“I’ll have to come up with something new,” he says, wistfully. “The ‘Z’ is something Ukrainians will never forget.”
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