The Long War #47
Old Believers, Odesa's black market for weapons, remembrance, and things I wrote about this year
KYIV—This will be the last issue of the year, as I prepare to head back to France for a few weeks of vacation. And to mark the end of what has been a really long year, I’m going to deviate once more from this newsletter's usual template: after highlighting five interesting stories I picked up in Ukrainian media these past few weeks, I'll be looking back at stories I've worked on these past 11 months — most of them were published in French-language media, so they should be largely new to the readers of this newsletter.
Beyond this, I don’t really want to do an extensive reminiscence of the past 11 months—there’s only so many ways you can talk about uncertainty and exhaustion. In the short term, the main question is where the frontline will stand when Donald Trump steps into the White House. Will Ukraine be able to stabilize the frontline, will Russia’s mind-numbing losses finally lead to the culmination of its year-long offensive? It’s something people have been predicting (or hoping) for many months now, and Moscow has a strong incentive to push as much as possible before January 20, so more Russian advances are unfortunately likely.
There’s a strange cognitive dissonance right now in Ukraine, a vague feeling that we’re maybe—maybe—approaching some sort of resolution, as negotiations will surely begin under Trump’s pressure, even as the facts on the ground still make it incredibly hard to see how even a simple ceasefire could come about in the near future. But then again, facts on the ground can change.
One last thing: I want to hear from you, dear reader! You are a very diverse bunch of subscribers, and I'd love to hear your comments and thoughts, about this newsletter or about Ukraine in general.
Something to read
Hromadske visited Stara Nekrasivka, a village in the Odesa region still largely populated by Old Believers who also happen to be ethnic Russians. It’s a village where people are still more often attached to their religious and Bessarabian identity than their Ukrainian one, where some men went to join the Ukrainian military and others explain it by "propaganda", where modernity nevertheless seeps in, where many people who don't see Russia as an enemy still have to endure the regular passage of kamikaze drones. It is quite fascinating.
Another way to witness the war's impact: Ekonomichna Pravda shows on a map the amount of taxes levied by every Ukrainian hromada (district) compared to before the invasion. The map shows an unsurprising turn West, with the 70 hromadas of the Lviv region registering a 64% growth in local taxes raised compared to 2021, the highest growth of all regions. Yet the contrast on the map isn’t as sharp as one may expect, with many districts in the country’s East having also increased their amount of taxes levied. That is in large part because people who flee war and occupation often try to remain as close as possible to their homes, settling in villages or towns sometimes only a few dozen kilometers away from the frontline.
Babel took an interesting approach to discuss the problems within the Ukrainian military, dividing its piece between problems at three levels: operational-tactical (quoting an anonymous officer who worked in a brigade's command staff), operational (headquarters commanding several brigades on a portion of the front) and strategic (General staff).
Odesa-based outlet Dumskaya looks into the local black market for weapons. The piece doesn't do a great job at explaining the scale of the problem, but one quote provides an interesting insight into the way the chaos of war can lead to weapons being sold thousands of kilometers away: the lion share of weapons currently on the black market are reportedly made either of trophy Russian weapons, or of weapons abandoned near the frontline during the evacuation of wounded servicemen or when soldiers are killed in action.
From Poltava (halfway between Kyiv and Kharkiv), local outlet Poltavshyna wrote about a topic that unfortunately now concerns all of Ukraine: how to remember local soldiers killed at the front. Local authorities started installing in the city’s main park steles showing the portraits of soldiers killed in action, which prompted a local blogger to complain about “drinking coffee in a cemetery”—understandably outraging families of veterans and soldiers. But the issue isn’t an easy one: while there is a huge demand for the public commemoration of every individual soldier who died at the front (something that was done between 2014 and 2022, with schools, streets and squares often renamed to honor defunct local soldiers), the sheer scale of the losses has made this public, individual remembrance much more difficult.
Things I wrote about this year
Death has been an inescapable topic. I wrote about a journalist in the Poltava region painstakingly combing social media to publish a weekly toll of local soldiers killed on the frontline; about a soldier mentioned in one of these reports, a man in his fifties, mobilized in September 2023, killed five months later; about the struggles of remembrance, and the thousands of families publishing petitions on the website of the Ukrainian presidency to get their son, father or brother killed in action recognized as “hero of Ukraine”—the highest state award—even though an extremely small portion of these petitions have been successful; about a gravedigger in Pokrovsk, who kept burying people even as the sound of artillery crashed in the background.
Mobilization is another unavoidable topic. Early in the year, I went to villages in central and eastern Ukraine, and witnessed the familiar scenes of farmers lacking fieldhands, companies hiring women, local village officials handing out summons, complaints about mobilization having emptied the villages of their able-bodied men, about mobilization targeting the countryside and sparing the big cities. More recently, I looked at the political aspect of mobilization, about the activists and the soldiers asking for a complete change of model, for a move towards a full mobilization that (according to them) would be the only way of relieving exhausted troops—and I also looked at Zelensky’s reluctance to head that way.
Back in May, I wrote a report for the Financial Times about Chasiv Yar and the town's importance for the Ukrainian defensive strategy. At the time, I think most people expected the town to fall in the following weeks, or by summertime at the latest. Unbelievably, it is still currently in (partial) Ukrainian control. But almost as unbelievably, the Russian offensive is still ongoing—most people expected it to culminate at some point in the summer, when the combined effect of Russian losses, replenishment of Ukrainian troops thanks to the new mobilization law as well as the arrival of U.S military aid would start having effect.
And I wrote about justice—the ordinary kind. I spent a few days following audiences at the Kherson city court, trying to understand the point of keeping a tribunal in a half-empty city under constant threat of bombardment. For some, it was a pointless endeavor, one in which a judge would often sit alone in a courtroom, prosecutors and lawyers speaking through a webcam from Mykolaiv or Odesa, witnesses, defendants, victims and case files lost during the occupation. Others believed it to be a crucial step to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty and authority in the only regional capital occupied by Russian forces. It was impressive, daunting, sad and surreal all at the same time—the cases of petty theft from before the occupation (which may just as well been a decade ago), the desperate need to get back to a routine for the employees who survived the entire occupation, the sheer mass of collaboration cases.