Portrait of a Stubborn Ukrainian

“He was flanked by fields of dead sunflowers that could not be harvested because of the renewed Russian offensive.”

I remember an old man pushing a bicycle down a dirt road last fall. He had a plastic bag of what appeared to be potatoes hanging from his handlebar. We were about 120 kilometers east of Kharkiv. He was walking in the same direction we were driving, east, toward the invaders. As our battered pickup truck came up behind the man, our Ukrainian driver honked his horn, and the man turned. Recognition lit up his deeply lined face. He had to be well into his seventies. He waved.

The driver pulled up alongside him and stopped the truck. From our perch in the bed, the other foreign fighters and I could not understand a single syllable the old man unloaded into the cab. He spoke Surzhyk, a pidgin language used in the east of the country. It is part Russian, part Ukrainian, and part utter disdain for grammar, pronunciation, consistency…Disdain for rules of any kind, really. It is spoken mostly by older, more rustic people. It sounds ugly and unpleasant, especially in contrast to the rhythmical Ukrainian spoken by the well-educated young officer in the front passenger seat of the cab.

The old man looked as incomprehensible as he sounded. He wore work pants, a flannel shirt, a battered jacket, and tall rubber boots—a kind of uniform among the old men in the rural areas. You see them everywhere in the markets. But this man was far away from the nearest market, and he was walking his bicycle toward the front. Even seeing him was surprising to me, given that my colleagues and I had pulled over several kilometers ago to don our helmets and body armor. Most of us were already wearing our ear protection. Our rifles were loaded. This old man did not have protection from the rain, let alone the war.