Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival

by Luke Harding

These meetings happened under the shadow of war. The news—which I was writing for my newspaper, The Guardian—was alarming, terrible even. A week earlier, Russian-backed separatists had shelled a village in Ukrainian-controlled territory next to the pro-Russian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. The missile had landed in a school gym. Mercifully, no one was killed, but the eight-year conflict in the east was heating up.

The crisis had been growing since autumn 2020 like a fog rolling in. First, Putin had sent troops, tanks, and armored vehicles to Russia’s western border with Ukraine and to Belarus, a brother state that Moscow had practically absorbed. The vehicles bore a curious white symbol: the letter V.

Russia’s battle went beyond Ukraine. It was—to a large degree—a proxy war against the West. The glavniy protivnik was the United States—the chief adversary in dry KGB language—as well as other democratic governments that had armed the Ukrainians. Washington had sent ammunition and Javelin anti-tank missiles, London the Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapon (NLAW) system, the Baltic states additional hardware. These defensive shipments enraged Moscow. As conceived in the Kremlin, the war was something else, too: a civilizational struggle. It was more akin to a medieval crusade than the wars of the past century. One ideological foe was decadent liberalism. In the view of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Kirill I, who defended and blessed Putin’s endeavor, Europe was permissive and anti-family. The conflict’s scope extended into a transcendent realm; Russia’s armored vehicles were marked with a mystical Z. What the letter meant was unclear. It became the main propaganda symbol of Russia’s invasion.

Out on the street I took a call from a well-placed contact who had served in Ukraine’s foreign ministry. He knew people, information, rumor. It was approaching midnight. The sky was a dark shiny velvet. The invasion, he said, would begin at 4:00 a.m.

Russia was clinically targeting Ukraine’s defenses: airports, military bases, ammunition dumps. It was shock and awe, done with a ruthless indifference to human cost. Sleep-deprived, it was hard for me to make sense of Moscow’s developing war plan, but the bold strokes were visible. An attempted blitzkrieg was under way. The ultimate target was Kyiv and its U.S.-backed government. Putin, you suspected, would wish to kill or capture Zelenskiy and to replace him with a pro-Russian puppet governor and administration. Amid this ferocious onslaught there were moments of normality. The bombs didn’t appear to be close, so I ventured outside. It was cold, just above zero. I wore a flak jacket and a woolly hat. A few residents were walking their dogs. The first queues had formed outside cash machines. Most shops and cafés were closed. But Aroma Coffee had opened as usual, selling croissants and takeout, as if nothing very remarkable had happened. Among the locals I spoke to that morning, the mood was one of shock, fear, and quiet disgust that Putin—without cause or reasonable pretext—had decided on war.

He had watched Zelenskiy address the nation, introduce martial law, and urge citizens to be calm. “Putin is the aggressor here,” Viktor told me. “He’s invaded Ukraine because we don’t want to live under his strictures, his model.” The model—feudal domination by Moscow—was, Viktor said, unappealing.

Since 2014 this European country of forty-three million people had moved in an emphatically pro-EU direction. Its progress had been imperfect but dogged. Putin seemed determined to stop Ukraine’s westward integration forever. Paradoxically, his theft of Crimea and war in the east had consolidated Ukrainian nationhood and identity. Differences that once existed melted away. The war made everything simpler. Putin and Russia were the enemy; a struggle for survival had begun; defeat meant subjugation and extinction.

At home in the Kremlin, Putin examined what he called “the Ukrainian question.” Working in isolation, he called up books, files, and papers. Putin’s usual reading matter was composed of classified reports. This new material was open source. The result of his labor was a five-thousand-word article. It appears to be his own work. His focus was no longer current affairs but the distant past, shimmering like a vision before him. Published on the president’s website on June 12, 2021, the essay is titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” Putin lays out his controversial thesis in the first paragraph. He says he is returning to an idea he has long considered to be true: that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people.” The word in Russian is narod. They are, he writes, a “single whole.”

Putin returns to a familiar theme in the last part of his article. It amounts to a grumpy denunciation of America and Kyiv’s current Western outlook. Under U.S. tutelage Ukraine was an “anti-Russian project,” Putin sneers. Contemporary Ukraine is a place where neo-Nazis are indulged, ethnic Russians murdered, “spiritual unity” thrown aside, and multigenerational ties of family and friendship forged in the struggle against German fascism forgotten. He ends on a menacing note. It is unambiguous, clinically stated. From now on it is Moscow that will determine Ukraine’s future. “I am confident that true sovereignty of Ukraine is only possible in partnership with Russia,” Putin warns.

Putin’s argument on Crimea was equally specious. When Catherine’s imperial generals conquered Crimea, it was a longtime home to Crimean Tartars. They formed more than 80 percent of the population, together with Cossacks. The indigenous Muslim Tartars—deported by Stalin and persecuted by Putin—were written out of the picture. It was a classic example of what academic Andrew Wilson, writing for the London think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), called “settler colonialism.”

A Pantsir air-defense missile system appeared in a snowy field next to a local primary school in Voronezh district.

It was known that Putin did not use the Internet. He considered it a CIA creation. Instead, he relied on briefings from the shadow state in which he had served—Russia’s spies and secret agents. What were they telling him about Ukraine? Would its population resist or welcome “Russian liberation”?

Ukraine’s former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko shared this view, having negotiated with Putin one-on-one. She described him to me as “absolutely rational, cold, cruel, black evil.” “He acts according to his own dark logic. He’s driven by this idea of historic mission and wants to create an empire. It comes from a deep inner belief,” she said. His objective was to “depersonify” Ukraine, strip it of its identity, she added.

I got the first question. In light of strange recent video footage showing the Russian leader gripping a Kremlin table with both hands, I asked Zelenskiy why Putin had invaded. Was Putin mad or ill? Or had he gone to war for some other reason? Zelenskiy told me Russia’s president had “always wanted to do something like this,” adding that much of Russian society shared his prejudice that Ukraine shouldn’t exist. “This is a war for Ukraine’s freedom, so we can live,” he said.

The route was not without hazard, though. Lights were turned off at night to comply with curfew rules. And, put truthfully, to make it harder for Russia to blow up moving trains. Moscow had repeatedly hurled missiles at the Ukrainian railway infrastructure, killing fifty-nine people that April as they waited to be evacuated from the eastern city of Kramatorsk. The prime ministers and presidents who traveled to Kyiv—whether you considered them visionaries or idiots—showed a degree of bravery that went beyond conventional politics.

In the run-up to war, the White House and Downing Street made sensitive intelligence public. This strategy—dubbed “prebuttal”—went against the grain of intelligence practice. Biden repeatedly warned that Putin was about to invade and that Russia was preparing to launch false-flag chemical attacks—something that ultimately didn’t happen, possibly as a result of Washington’s preemptive tactics. Overall, the briefings wrong-footed the Kremlin and blunted its disinformation campaign.

The United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom also went after Russia’s defense industry. They banned the export of dual-use goods—anything that might be used for both military and civilian purposes. The United States tried to disrupt Russian defense supply chains by imposing sanctions on defense companies, on defense research organizations, and on other defense-related entities. It sought to starve Putin’s military-industrial complex of critical components. These included aircraft parts: navigation systems, meteorological locators, and smoke detectors. For Russian consumers, the most visible blow was the departure of international companies. Around one thousand major firms exited. They included Ikea and Apple, Netflix and Nike, Visa and Mastercard, Coca-Cola and Starbucks. Thirty-two years after McDonald’s arrived in Soviet Moscow, leading to long queues for Happy Meals, the fast-food chain’s golden arches were removed from Pushkin Square and 850 franchises. It was a symbol of Russia’s looping journey backward. The collective impact of sanctions on Russia was staggering, according to Chris Barter, the former head of Goldman Sachs Moscow. “No way did I ever think this decoupling would be possible,” he told me. He acknowledged high energy prices offset some of the economic pain but said it was only a question of time before Europe stopped being a commodity customer. Unfortunately for the Kremlin, it would take many years of investment and new infrastructure t...

It was Wednesday, a midmorning in May, when Finnish air traffic controllers noticed something odd. An unauthorized flight was taking place. A Soviet-designed Russian military helicopter had crossed the border from Russia into eastern Finland. The Mi-17 was flying between the towns of Kesälahti and Parikkala, over a landscape of glistening lakes and pine trees. It was an unexpected and menacing presence. The helicopter kept going for about four kilometers, Finland’s defense ministry said, before disappearing back into Russian territory. This was not the first time Moscow had violated Finland’s air space. The previous month an Ilyushin passenger jet had deliberately strayed over the medieval town of Porvoo. Finland’s neighbor Sweden had suffered similar breaches. Four Russian fighter jets had streaked above Gotland, a strategically located island in the Baltic Sea. A spy plane flew close to a Swedish naval base in the south of the country. And, back in 2014, one of Moscow’s submarines was found lurking in the waters off Stockholm’s archipelago. These incursions were not subtle. The Porvoo incident came the same day Zelenskiy addressed the Finnish parliament. He likened Ukraine’s military counterreaction to Finland’s own war against the Soviet Union eighty-three years earlier, when outnumbered Finnish soldiers fought back against Stalin’s winter invaders. It was Ukraine’s and Finland’s “fate” to share a border with Russia, Zelenskiy said. In case anyone had missed the message...

At the beginning of February 2022, Finnish support for NATO was at 44 percent. Putin’s actions pushed it to 76 percent. Niinistö unveiled his plan to join NATO the day after Russian warplanes bombed Mariupol’s maternity hospital.

As the historian and journalist Anne Applebaum observed, the answer depended on which country you asked. Western policy makers interpreted the war through the prism of the past. But they saw different parallels. The United States and the United Kingdom compared Russia’s Ukraine invasion to Nazi Germany’s dismembering of Poland in 1939. Putin was Hitler, Kyiv was Warsaw, and February 24, 2022, matched September 1, 1939—the date that marked the outbreak of the Second World War. Poland itself shared this analogy.

“We are moving to Europe and NATO. Russia is stuck in the Soviet past,” Lieutenant Petro Yanchenko said. Why was he fighting? “So my family can live in a free country,” he replied.

The Russian government was keen to use Kherson as a laboratory, a political showcase for how the south’s “return” meant positive change. Its preferred military-administrative model had been tested in the east. According to Zelenskiy, it wanted to create a “Kherson People’s Republic” along the lines of the Moscow-controlled puppet governments in Donetsk and Luhansk. The plan was to hold a “referendum” on Kherson joining Russia, similar to the spurious polls held in 2014 in the separatist areas. It was increasingly obvious, however, that there was little support for integration with the Russian Federation. Humanitarian convoys were brought in from Crimea, together with former prisoners who acted as locals and gave flowers to Russian soldiers. But even Russian state TV struggled to come up with footage of enthusiastic crowds cheering Russia. The real residents ignored the humanitarian aid. And so the Kremlin came up with a solution. Referendum or no referendum, it would annex the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions and proclaim them Russian territory. They would join Crimea as a part of Russia’s southern federal district. This takeover was contrary to what Putin had promised at the start of his special operation: that he did not seek to steal Ukraine’s land. He did. That was always the idea. It was this century’s most stunning example of naked imperialism.

To give this colonizing project legitimacy, Moscow needed collaborators. There was a small pool of locals from whom to recruit. Olha estimated 1,000 to 1,500 people backed the invading army, from a population of 300,000 in Kherson and 1 million in the region. “They were like mushrooms after the rain. They popped up. Ugly red mushrooms,” she said. “They feel like they are masters of the situation.” Locals considered these pro-Russian agitators “to be loonies,” she added. Now these careerists joined the new administration, together with officials from Russia.

In June it was the turn of Kolykhaiev, Kherson’s elected mayor. The FSB detained him when he went to work at the city council building, where his executive committee continued to function. Russian troops broke open safes, looking for documents. They seized hard drives. Kolykhaiev had refused to transfer communal enterprises to Russian jurisdiction, aides said. He was put in a bus marked with a Z and driven away to an unknown destination. The “ex-mayor” was “neutralized,” Stremousov said. Word of these abductions spread. Gradually the mass rallies ceased. A quiet terror descended over Kherson. Streets were mostly empty. Supplies of fuel, food, and medicines ran low; ATMs and banks stopped working; farmers supplied vegetables; bread was homemade. “The whole city was mostly moving on bicycle,” Yulia, the artist, said. “We pedaled past Russian tanks. The soldiers generally wore balaclavas. You couldn’t see their faces.” In some raids, the occupiers took away laptops and phones, hunting for evidence of anti-Moscow activity.

The aim was to erase all vestiges of Ukrainian statehood. After all, in Putin’s Orwellian view, Ukraine had never existed, and he who controls the past controls the future.

Anne Applebaum has argued Putin’s methods were well-known totalitarian ones. He was replicating what Stalin’s forces did in occupied Poland, the Baltic states, and the rest of Central Europe in 1939, as well in 1944 and 1945. It was an “eerily precise repeat of the NKVD [Soviet secret police] and Red Army’s behavior,” she told me. Arrests, murders, ethnic cleansing, the shutdown of noncommunist parties and free media…all took place in East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and other zones under Soviet control. Speaking of today’s Moscow, she said, “They have lists of people to arrest—mayors, museum directors, local leaders of all kinds. They systematically rape and murder civilians in order to create terror. They deport other people en masse to Russia to enhance their own depleted populations. They eradicate local symbols and put up their own.” Applebaum said there was “one new twist” in Russia’s Ukraine takeover: “Because modern Russia stands for nothing except corruption, nihilism, and Putin’s personal power, they have brought back Soviet flags as well as Lenin statues to symbolize Russian victory.”

In southern areas still under Ukrainian control, Putin’s invasion triggered a campaign to replace Russian names and monuments. Numerous streets were named after USSR generals, air force pilots, and scientists. Metro stations commemorated Soviet victories. There were parks honoring Pushkin and Tolstoy. How might these references be interpreted today? Was Pushkin a representative of Russian colonial culture or a universal artist? And what about Bulgakov, a writer of genius whose epoch—in Lytvyn’s opinion—was over?

In the days after February 24, the Russians came close to capturing Mykolaiv. Some of their convoys bypassed Kherson and raced to cut off the city. At the time, Kostenko was in Kyiv. He swapped a politician’s suit and tie for a uniform and drove south. By the time he reached Mykolaiv, Russian troops were camped nearby. They had struck Kulbakino air base in the southeast and were advancing from the north. “I was the last car in,” Kostenko said. Citizens were preparing for bloody street-to-street fighting. They had piled up tires and were making homemade bombs. The Ukrainian army withstood the assault and pushed the invaders back. Kostenko showed me a video he took of a Russian position on Mykolaiv’s outskirts. It showed him walking through a hellish brown field. There were abandoned field guns, mangled trucks, an engine, and the bodies of enemy soldiers, scattered amid debris and shells—victims of a Ukrainian aerial barrage. “They didn’t retrieve their dead. We buried them,” Kostenko said of the Russians. The victorious Ukrainians seized the Russians’ cannons and pointed them toward their former owners. Since this unsuccessful pincer attack, fighting in the south had turned into a battle of rockets and artillery. There were fewer direct encounters. “It’s like the Second World War with modernized tanks and weapons,” Kostenko told me. The Russians had plenty of everything, he added—tanks, ammunition, reserves, Smerch and older S-300 rockets. He was confident Ukraine could win...

One idea in particular characterized Russian military thinking: razgrom. It means crushing defeat, devastation, a rout. The best way of achieving razgrom, according to classical and twentieth-century Soviet doctrine, was to encircle the other side’s forces. Encirclement offered the swiftest path to victory. It worked in Berlin and Stalingrad. You could bypass the enemy’s strongest defense lines and sweep in around the back. The troops caught in this cauldron might surrender. Or be annihilated. It didn’t really matter. Any breakout would be costly.

Ukrainian divisions, Gerashchenko told me, had typically lost around half of their soldiers killed or wounded, including a large proportion of officers.

Away from the battlefield the conflict was transforming Russia itself. Over three decades Moscow had experienced various forms of government: a semi-democracy, soft authoritarian rule, and a thuggish mafia state. Putin’s special military operation meant a return at home to something not seen on the European continent since the twentieth century. It was familiar to Russians from history. That was full-blown dictatorship. In this totalitarian world of Big Brother slogans and Z symbols, dissent was a crime and love of the leader a civic duty.

Social media and these few independent news sources provided real information about a regime that had no qualms about lying; indeed, the KGB regarded the concept of truth itself as a ludicrous bourgeois construct. In the Kremlin’s relativistic universe, what mattered was the story you told. Control that story and society would surely follow. Putin’s onslaught against Ukraine threw up new challenges, however. His sovereign version of what was going on next door was wildly at odds with reality. To shore up this far-fetched account, the presidential administration resorted to drastic measures, unprecedented since Russia’s modern independence. Almost overnight, it closed down accurate sources of news. All of them. A strange, unsettling silence descended on Moscow and the Russian Federation.

The new post-invasion laws had a chilling effect on press freedom, not only for Russian journalists but also for their foreign counterparts. Talented correspondents made their reputations in Moscow throughout the Soviet period and in the tumultuous years afterward—among them New Yorker editor David Remnick, the author of Lenin’s Tomb; Canada’s deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland, a Financial Times reporter in the 1990s; Guardian journalist turned novelist and essayist James Meek; and many others.

In February 2011, the Federal Migration Service stopped me when I flew back to Moscow. My visa was annulled and I was deported. A border guard informed me: “For you, Russia is closed.” In 2022, my persona non grata status was confirmed when the foreign ministry published a list of twenty-nine UK nationals banned from Russia. It included five colleagues, among them the Guardian’s editor in chief, Katharine Viner. Similar lists were published for North America, featuring the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul and 398 members of Congress.

Kara-Murza reserved his bitterest comments for the West. He and Nemtsov, a deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, had spent hours with policy makers explaining Putin’s intentions. Their thesis: internal repression ends in external aggression, inevitably. “We tried to warn the West what this man was about. He brought back the Soviet anthem in 2000, destroyed media and elections, invaded Georgia, and stole Crimea. Why did the West do nothing? He was going to invade Ukraine from the beginning,” he said. “I’m a historian. This is the only way the appeasement of dictators goes.”

In his twelve years in the border service, Bohdan Hotskiy had seen many wild places. In his view, Ukraine was the most beautiful country in the world. It had the sea and mountains, forests and steppes, marshes and abundant lakes. All was perfect, and so complete in its perfection that Hotskiy—a twenty-nine-year-old captain—had never felt the inclination to go abroad. After all, why bother? “We have everything,” he told me. We met in August in the town of Izmail, his current base, next to the Romanian border. Hotskiy’s career meant moving around. In late 2021, he had received orders to deploy to a new maritime location. He was to command a force of twenty-eight men. They were being sent to a strategically important mini-territory thirty-five kilometers off the coast and east of the Danube River estuary. It was a rocky outpost in the Black Sea. An ancient place known in Ukrainian as Ostriv Zmiinyi. English translation: Snake Island.

Hotskiy arrived just before Christmas, at a time of new imperial threat. It was obvious that the territory would be hard to defend in the event of a large-scale Russian attack. So great was the concern that Zelenskiy came to see for himself, dropping in twice by helicopter. Fifty soldiers were sent as reinforcements. The island’s population grew to eighty, including the border service men and two janitors. There were dogs, feral cats, and seagulls.

The plucky “fuck off” of the Snake Island defenders did nothing to alter the grim facts out in the Black Sea. The bombardment continued all day: from the Moskva and Vasily Bykov came thunderous booms. At around 6:00 p.m., two groups of Russian commandos stormed the island in darkness, Hotskiy said. Eighty enemy soldiers swarmed along the pier. A second party landed close to the lighthouse, shinning up the cliffs. He was reluctant to explain what happened next. Outnumbered and cut off, and with the situation hopeless, the garrison appears to have laid down its weapons. Hotskiy said his captors blindfolded him. He and other border service personnel were loaded into a service tugboat and brought to the naval base in Sevastopol—a journey of nearly twenty-four hours. “They didn’t say anything. We didn’t see anything,” he said. They spent the next two weeks in a barracks located somewhere in the port area. The conditions were tolerable. Hotskiy said he had no idea what was happening back home—if Kyiv had fallen, whether the Russians had steamrollered Ukrainian resistance. In early March, Hotskiy was blindfolded again, put on a plane, and taken to Stary Oskol, a Russian city in Belgorod Oblast. His colleagues were dispersed. He found himself in a prison, locked in a cell with “two guys from Kharkiv.” “It was a terrible place, worse than before. There were bars. I had no idea what had happened to my relatives, whether they were alive.” He assumed he would remain in Russia for a lo...

Down in the packed central hall, I talked to Nataliia Tkachenko, who said she managed to buy stamps on the first day they were released. “It’s a symbol. It shows our inner patriotism. I feel this,” she added. “Snake Island didn’t surrender. I’m not going to surrender. Nor is my husband. Take a look at the queue. The stamp is a bit of paper. It may be small but it’s powerful, just like Ukraine.” On my way out, I also spoke to Viktor Fyodorovych, a Kharkiv pensioner who was buying stamps for his relatives. They were stuck in a bomb shelter, he told me, and couldn’t venture out. “I’m sixty-three years old. I’ve never felt so much pride before in our nation. It’s a symbol of our courage and steadfastness. Putin is mad.” Viktor paused and then clarified: “Scratch that. Better to say he is a bad worm.”

The border crossing was busy in both directions. In the early weeks after the invasion, more than sixty thousand Ukrainian expatriates returned home, moving east. Most were young men who had come to defend their homeland.

The Molotov cocktail was named after Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. The students called their 2022 version a “Bandera smoothie,” a reference to the militant nationalist Stepan Bandera. “My parents know about the bombs. I haven’t told my granny. She’s worried enough about things already,” Daniil said. He acknowledged his improvised weapon would probably not halt a Russian tank. But he stressed: “It will break Russian soldiers mentally and show them they’re not welcome here.”

As Andrey Kurkov suggested to me, Ukrainians were freedom-loving individualists who disliked being told what to do, habitually rejected their leaders, and had lived for many centuries in a state of what he called “organized anarchy.” They were rebels by nature, caustic and disrespectful. In contrast, Russians came from an autocratic system. They bowed to authority, followed orders, and loved the tsar—unless they didn’t like him, in which case they killed him. The Soviet state and its modern successor revolved around a single party, and a dictator. The Kremlin’s preferred method of negotiation was to use bullying force and to show who was master and who the slave. The Moskva’s ultimatum embodied this imperious attitude. These views clashed during the Maidan uprising of 2004—a grassroots street movement that led to political change and a return to the consensual model of government, familiar from Cossack times. When Yanukovych became president in 2010, he tried to rule like a tsar, in Russian style. The result was another Maidan and the popular revolution of 2013–2014. According to Riabchyn, the “spirit of the Maidan” came back in 2022. Civil society was enjoying an unprecedented moment. The question was, which structure would prevail: the lateral network of the Ukrainian ant army or the vertical hierarchy of the lumbering Russian state? It is a battle that has pitted group ingenuity against a behemoth.

Russia’s four-month occupation of Snake Island turned out to be a cursed experience. The naval command in Moscow made the outpost into a minifortress, to which it transferred missile batteries, anti-aircraft guns, radar, and reconnaissance vehicles. The military-strategic goal was to control airspace in the northwestern part of the Black Sea and to enforce a blockade of Ukrainian ships to stop them from leaving Odesa and other Black Sea ports. But the evil spirits said to roam the isle appeared to have returned—or so you might imagine. The Ukrainians used Bayraktar drones to strike the Russian contingent from the sky. The unmanned aerial vehicles blew up a helicopter delivering supplies and disabled a patrol vessel. Long-range rockets hurtled into the pier, its coordinates well known. Drone footage showed the Z-marked vehicles parked there disappearing in a roiling inferno. In late June, the Russians packed up and left. The Kremlin said it was abandoning Snake Island as a “goodwill gesture.” This was a significant Ukrainian victory. A week later, special forces commandos set off from the coast on a nighttime mission. Engineers found a mine-free sea path; the group walked at dawn across the island and raised the Ukrainian flag. They logged Russian hardware, rescued a cat, and departed in boats before Moscow’s ships counterattacked. A day later, Russia pummeled the island with phosphorus munitions. The museum—with its amphorae and other Greek relics—was destroyed, its exhibi...

Grads are notoriously inaccurate; they scatter over a radius of five hundred to seven hundred meters. Further up Viktor Usov Street, a missile had careened into a third-story property, leaving a neat hole shaped like two pieces of Lego. I went to see, but as I did, Nikopol’s air-raid siren sounded. I hurried to the mayor’s office and took cover in its shelter.

The destruction of Saky airfield was a sensation, as unforeseen by the Kremlin as the sinking of the Moskva. Zelenskiy declared that Ukraine intended to liberate Crimea, a peninsula that used to be a popular holiday destination for all Ukrainians. Russia had made it dangerous, degraded, and unfree, he said. He mentioned its ethnic Turkic Tatar residents, whom Putin’s intelligence agencies had persecuted since 2014. Zelenskiy promised more attacks. He urged residents to stay away from Russian bases.

The attack on the Kherson front was one of the greatest deception exercises in modern warfare. Yes, the operation was genuine. But it masked a stunning and much bigger counteroffensive around the city of Kharkiv in the northeast of the country. There, Ukrainian troops assembled unnoticed, punching through flimsy Russian defensive lines and advancing into territory held by Moscow for six months. Many Russian soldiers had been sent to the south; those left behind suddenly found themselves overwhelmed and swamped. In early September, Ukraine’s armed forces recaptured almost all of Kharkiv Oblast. They freed more than approximately eight thousand square kilometers of territory in a few astonishing days. It had taken Russia four months to capture a comparable area during its grinding assault in the east. The Ukrainians liberated towns and villages all the way up to the international border with Russia. First, they encircled Balakliia, raising the national flag. Then they pressed north into Kupiansk, a rail and supply hub. After that, they secured Izium, a major Russian base and arms depot that had been at the heart of the Kremlin’s operation to conquer the Donbas.

For Putin, the rout was an extraordinary humiliation. Russia’s ministry of defense claimed it was carrying out a “planned” transfer of units to separatist areas, relocating them east of the Oskil River, about ten miles from Izium. Far-right nationalist bloggers were furious. They accused the military leadership in Moscow of incompetence. The evidence was there for anyone to see. The Ukrainian side took possession of T-80 tanks, ammunition stores, and other equipment left behind by the retreating invaders during their flight from Izium. The supplies were a gift from “Russian Lend Lease,” Ukrainians joked on social media.

Ukraine had not won the war—or not yet. More trials lay ahead. But it was what you might call a proven state. It was one of history’s survivors: of two world wars, Stalin’s famines, the Great Terror, and the Chornobyl explosion. Then nearly a decade of subversion and occupation by Russia: first in the east, and then with a full-blown invasion. Ukraine had not yet perished, as the words of the national anthem put it. The hope lived on: of a free people living happily in their land.