SOMEWHERE IN UKRAINE — None of the taxi apps on my phone work right now, understandably.
The only way to travel is to hire a taxi at train stations. I proceeded to ask a local woman for directions. The combination of my accent and my clearly foreign dress sense had set her on edge. She asked me to pronounce the word “Palyanitsa” — the Ukrainian word for a traditional loaf of bread — three times. The word is composed of sounds that native Russian speakers cannot pronounce correctly. It has emerged as a shibboleth in this war. Which I knew having spent that morning watching the social media videos of alleged Russian saboteurs being taken by Ukrainian men at gunpoint in Kharkiv.
The woman looked me in the eyes and asked me directly if I was an infiltrator. I barely passed the test, but my American passport and press credentials helped. As did the fact that I had an Odessa-born wife. Her own husband was from the Odessa region and I knew his home town.
One hears stories of real or imagined infiltrators being questioned and physically restrained by an understandably paranoid citizenry. These incidents are often fairly ugly. At worst, they sometimes include vigilante violence or men being stripped and taped to telephone poles before the police arrive.
The drive to Chernowitz was supposed to take four to five hours. It wound up taking twice as long because of the numerous checkpoints that had sprung up along the highway next to the entrance to every town and village. A dozen men with machine guns — usually half army and half local police — would man these. They would check your paperwork and the trunk for guns every 30 miles or so. Many were curious about me and would engage me in conversation. An army officer instructed my driver to take the memory card out of his dashboard camera. “You do understand why I am telling you to do this?” the army man asked my driver sternly.
After an exhausting day on the road, I arrived in the southern Ukrainian city of Chernowitz toward the evening. This was right before the start of the mandatory nighttime curfew. Every hotel room in the region had been packed with fleeing refugees, so I had to stay with the relatives of a friend. No sooner than I had put down my bags, the air sirens began to ring. We were supposed to rush to a bomb shelter. My hosts told me to ignore the sirens and began cooking spaghetti. They claimed to have special information about the risks, but this turned out to be based entirely on rumors that they had read in a Facebook group. I saw no reason to argue after a day on the road.
The city had not yet been hit with a rocket, and watching the news seemed preferable to spending half the night in a basement. The political commentary shows were broadcasting interviews with frightened-looking Russian conscripts who were surrendering to Ukrainian forces in droves.
All the Russian POWs told a variation of the same story: They had been brought to the Ukrainian-Belarus border on military maneuvers and told to give up their passports and cellphones. Eventually they were told to march. They all claimed that they had only figured out that they were in Ukraine when they saw the Ukrainian troops who were shooting at them.
They all insisted that their battalions were demoralized and they did not want to be here. Many pleaded with their mothers to bring them home.
Brooklyn-born Vladislav Davidzon is the author of “From Odessa with Love.”
