On the day the Russians invaded Ukraine, Patol Moshevitz, a landscape architect and painter, woke early and looked out the window of his apartment on the fourteenth floor of one of the newest, most desirable buildings in the city of Irpin. He could see for miles in almost every direction: Kyiv, Bucha, most of Irpin, and the Hostomel airfield just across the marsh to the north. A big bear of a man with a shaved head, he saw a swarm of Russian helicopters descending on the airport. The noise was deafening even where he was, and a dark plume of smoke rose on the horizon. Moshevitz dressed hurriedly and went into town, hoping to sign up with a Territorial Defense unit and fight alongside the regular army. But the recruitment center was swamped with volunteers, and there were no guns, so he went back to his apartment. “I decided to help in my own way,” he told me later. He spent the next nine days in his crow’s-nest flat observing the region with binoculars and providing detailed reports on enemy positions — approaching tanks, gun placements, checkpoints, and other vital information — to the fighters defending Irpin. I met Moshevitz in early June, eight weeks after the battle of Irpin. We sat in his apartment, subsequently shelled and now partially restored, as he narrated the month-long fight, using a spoon to point out strategic locations on a map I pulled up on my iPad. If he had been found and caught, he understood by then, he would almost surely have been tortured and shot. At the time, he didn’t stop to think. “I was caught up in the moment,” he said. “It seemed like a game — the little tanks and armored vehicles seemed so far away. I can’t call myself brave. I just found a place for myself — a way to be useful.” Before the Russian invasion, Irpin was a charming commuter town — a mix of old Soviet-style dachas and new high rises ringed by forests and scenic marshland. Many poems have been written about the beauty of its surroundings. By the time the Russians left in March, Irpin was a patchwork of charred ruins. Almost all of the city’s hundred thousand residents had evacuated in the weeks after the invasion, leaving Russian and Ukrainian troops to battle for a month at close range. Seventy percent of the buildings were severely damaged or destroyed. Hundreds of civilians were killed. But ultimately the defenders prevailed. Strategically located between Bucha and Kyiv, less than five miles from the outskirts of the capital, Irpin was one of a handful of places that prevented the Russian army from reaching Kyiv. The savage battle of Irpin was a pivotal battle of the war. I spent a month in Irpin after the battle, talking to people about it and listening to their stories. Ukrainian acquaintances introduced me to friends, who introduced me to other friends — doctors, nurses, priests, small business owners, city officials, soldiers and volunteers like Moshevitz. People were eager to talk. The conversations lasted two, three, four hours — and even when the talk ran out, some people wanted to meet again the next day. Several fighters walked or drove me around town, pointing out where they had fought or where a friend had died. I asked everyone the same questions. Why did you do what you did? What were you fighting for? What is the war about for you — and what do you hope will come of it if Ukraine wins? Many people, like Moshevitz, started with a simple answer. “It was my duty.” Or, “It seemed obvious — I couldn’t imagine doing otherwise.” As Orwell wrote about going to fight in Catalonia, “at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.” But almost everyone I spoke with in Irpin, from the deputy mayor to the cook at the university, also had a more complicated answer — something to do with freedom and democracy and their vision of what those grand ideas could mean for Ukraine. 
By the time I arrived in Irpin, the city was starting to rebuild. Some thirty to forty percent of the residents had returned. Shops were open; there was traffic in the streets. Lilacs were blooming and children were playing in the parks — so it wasn’t always easy to imagine the fighting that had taken place in the same streets just weeks before. Yet even in the spring sunshine, it was hard to not to fixate on the mutilated buildings. Some had been burned to the ground. Many others were missing their top stories. Very few had all their windows — much of the city’s glass had been shattered by shock waves. At first, the destruction seemed inconceivable, then infuriating — how can you train human beings to be this brutal, especially at close range? I often spent evenings in my rented flat watching news videos of the fighting, and after a while I felt I was living in parallel universes: one green and recovering, the other cold and gray — desolate streets, fires raging on the horizon, rubble strewn chaotically everywhere you looked, a tank waiting around every corner. One soldier with whom I walked the city was suffering from the same kind of double vision. “It used to be all black and white,” he said. “Now, it’s in color. I can’t get used to it.” Then he reminded me that war was still raging in eastern Ukraine: just four hundred miles away, many cities still looked like the Irpin of late February. This was not the first battle of Irpin — far from it; and almost everyone I met mentioned history, either of the city or of Ukraine. Unlike in most other places where people look back on the birth and blossoming of a nation, for Ukrainians history means an old longing for a nation-state that rarely existed until the Soviet Union collapsed
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