Paranoia stalking the tower block stairwell
US-born John Marone has lived and worked in Ukraine since 1998, when he got a job with the BBC covering Ukrainian, Belarusian and Moldovan politics. He has since worked as a journalist for a variety of publications. He has a Ukrainian wife and two children. Since his wife refused to leave their flat he has forged ties with the local Territorial Defence team.
FIGHTING in Kyiv is already up close and personal. As a massive Russian army snakes south into Ukraine to encircle the sprawling capital, ordinary Kyivites are taking the defence of their homes and neighbourhoods into their own hands.
And the first line of attack that they are confronting are saboteurs – not Spetsnaz in camouflage and flak jackets, but ordinary looking men, and sometimes women, willing to mark targets with fluorescent paint, plant explosives or otherwise serve the Russian invaders.
Late on Tuesday night, neighbours in a nine-storey block of flats in the city’s Podil district waylaid a suspected saboteur as he exited his position at the top of their dusky and largely deserted tower block.
“This is war, I tell my son. You cannot let down your guard for a minute,” says Yura, a lean, hard-faced 59-year-old who saw combat with the Soviet army in Afghanistan.
His son Vlad, 20, had noticed the stranger in their building last week, around the same time that a massive Russian army began pummelling the Kyiv region and then the city outskirts with rocket fire accompanied by cruise missiles launched from Belarus.
“We all know each other here. And then this guy shows up, staying in a flat on the top floor and only going out at night,” Vlad explains. The father and son decided to act when Vlad learned from neighbours that the stranger had been seen in the building with a firearm.
The target, they said, was likely a huge nearby bakery that may be the difference between starvation or survival when the city is encircled.
Many of the building’s residents, a mixture of pensioners, low-income families and young urban professionals, have already fled to the country or are hunkered down in the basement of a school across the street.
Residents occasionally make brisk sorties back to their flats to collect something left behind in a hurry, but the corridors are silent, especially at night, which makes the air raid sirens sound all the more shrill, the pounding of missiles in the distance all the more menacing.
Unlike Iraq, where the army melted into the population and then started planting IEDs, or Paris in 1940, where the Germans entered the city in a parade, Ukrainians fight like a people, a community, a village under attack. You are either with them or not.
Civilians across the country are joining the army, taking up arms as private citizens and gathering in groups to make Molotov cocktails. Some jump in front of tanks or berate occupying soldiers on the streets, telling them in Russian to go home. This is not so much a war between Russia and Ukraine, where some identify as Russians, as it is a war between outsiders and locals.
In Kyiv, the Government has handed out Kalashnikovs to young men who don yellow armbands and stand guard at barricades set up all over the city.
They are known as the Territorial Defence and can shoot dead looters or suspected saboteurs. Most just check documents and respond to local threats.
But before the local Territorial Defence team could arrive at Yura and Vlad’s building, the father and son decided to gather with two other men on the staircase and apprehend the suspected saboteur themselves. First they blocked the elevator and gathered on the stairwell to smoke. When the suspect tried to go past them he was manhandled and interrogated.
“Where are you from? What are you doing here? Give me your phone? Don’t move.”
The idea of the questioning is not to elicit secret information – that’s handled by the professionals and often pointless given the imminence of all-out assault.
It’s enough to establish that the man is not from the neighbourhood and has no good reason for being there.
Twenty minutes later, the Territorial Defence arrive armed with Kalashnikovs and accompanied by the police.
The suspect is overwhelmed with confusion and fear. He’s no soldier and doesn’t have to be.
“They pay any scum they can find to create havoc, sow fear,” Yura explains.
“Three days ago, the guys caught two men going into the bomb shelter across the street with grenades in their bags. There are women and children huddled in there already scared out of their wits.”
Soon a few women from the nine-storey block are in the corridor discussing the night’s events. One elderly woman, Tamara, says the Russians won’t kill innocent civilians. It’s all the lies of the authorities in Kyiv.
But the others argue back. “You don’t know what you are talking about,” says her neighbour.
“Tamara is a good woman,” says a young woman in the mix. “She helps out everyone in the building. She just believes what they tell her in church.
“I have family in Russia and they don’t understand all this either.”