Four Let Ters From Ukraine

Abstract

Four Let Ters From Ukraine Elliot Ackerman (bio) March 15, 2022 We arrived in Lviv last night, at around 3:00 a.m. The bus ride from Warsaw took ten hours. I’m traveling with Matt again, my old friend from reporting trips to Iraq and Syria. The city remains under a blackout ordinance and a curfew, so when the bus’s interior lights came on, all I could really see in the window was my reflection. The streets were deserted. Google Maps showed us near the intersection of Shevchenka and Yeroshenka Streets, about a mile from our hotel. The bus was continuing to the main depot, which is farther outside the city, so we decided to hop off. We soon regretted the decision. The territorial defense forces patrol the streets, and if they stopped us, I would have little more than my press pass and a few words of Ukrainian to explain why we were out after curfew. Iraqis and Syrians would often confuse Matt for Russian when we’d traveled together in the past. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, and standing well over six feet, Matt is a former college rower who had once driven a trailer from Germany to Iraq at the height of that [End Page 720] country’s war to deliver sculls to a burgeoning Iraqi national crew team. A Farsi speaker, he’d also studied in an exchange program at Tehran University, which he failed to complete after the Iranian authorities accused him of espionage and imprisoned him for forty-one days in 2015. He spent thirty of those in solitary confinement and was released as a concession to the Obama administration during negotiations for the Iran nuclear agreement later that year. When we first met, he was leading a firm that evaluated the efficacy of humanitarian responses in Syria. When I told him I was heading to Ukraine and wanted him to come, he didn’t say yes right away. He explained that he was hesitant to rush off to another war zone, that war zones attract what he calls the three m’s: missionaries, mercenaries, and misfits. He’d had enough of all three. I told him there was a fourth m. “What’s that?” “Matt,” I’d said. After a few blocks trundling our suitcases over the cobblestones, I spied a black sedan idling on the roadside. When Matt knocked on the glass, the driver woke with a start. “Taxi?” Matt asked. The driver nodded glumly. We piled our bags in his trunk, and he sped us through town to the hotel I’d booked on Expedia a week before. It never ceases to amaze me that you can e-book your rooms in a war zone. Wars can often feel to me like distant, far-off things, even though I have experience writing about them and fighting in them. With a war I’ve never seen, I usually feel this distance. The stream of headlines, the assault of images—it commodifies war, condenses it into a packageable story. When I feel that distance—whether I’m planning to head to that war or not—I’ll often pull out my phone and see what it would take to get to the front line. In nearly every instance, I discover I could arrive at the war with a place to stay within twenty-four hours. And suddenly, the war feels closer. [End Page 721] Before we left the States, I had reserved the last two rooms at our hotel. I’d also phoned ahead, just to make certain everything was in order. However, when we arrived, the hotel doors were locked, the lights were out, and the receptionist was nowhere to be seen. Technically, we didn’t have rooms until the next night, but I thought we could at least sleep in the lobby until breakfast. I was growing worried and thought we’d have to sleep in the street, in temperatures that hovered around freezing, until curfew lifted. After a third phone call, a light went on in a back room. A bleary-eyed receptionist emerged, a young woman with platinum-blond hair and the look of a Eurovision singer...