“What do you do?” Wendell23 asked. “We kill the bad guys,” the saboteur hunter replied. From 1843mag
n the first day of the war, Sasha woke up to the sound of bombing at 4am. It was roughly “the same time that Hitler began his invasion” of the Soviet Union in 1941, he told me. From the direction of the explosions, Sasha reckoned that the Russians might be attacking the airport at Hostomel, several kilometres from his apartment in central Kyiv. He drove his wife and two sons out of the city. They went with his brother-in-law’s family to the border, where they crossed into Poland.
Sasha sounded both proud and regretful. To me, it seemed that he needed to say out loud what he did to truly believe it. His life had turned from peace to war so recently, so fast and so thoroughly that he had no time to catch his breath. He is in his late 30s, a father who in peacetime worked as a manager in a construction company. His hair was cropped close in a military style, but his blue eyes were large and boyish, simultaneously sad, sure and scared.
The nightly curfew in Kyiv is partly designed to make it easier to identify suspicious activity, though inevitably a few ordinary Ukrainians drive about after dark. “Of course we can’t shoot at every car. We have to stop them, check their documents, listen to their explanation. If it’s a medical emergency we might follow them to the hospital.”
The unit has not yet suffered any casualties. “We work very fast and we are very precise,” said Sasha. The closest he came to being killed was in his first operation. It was dark and when he scanned an area through his night-vision goggles he saw a sniper, just at the edge of a field. Everyone ducked for cover behind a car, as a single shot rang out. The sniper turned out to belong to another Ukrainian unit taking out their target.
In Kyiv, Sasha stays with a friend from his unit, whose wife cooks for them. He eats well, but only once a day. When he is there he watches the news and calls his family. He sleeps fitfully. “All you need is 30 minutes a day,” he said, not very convincingly. “The apartment is very close to one of our air-defence batteries.” The worst noise is when the Ukrainians manage to intercept a Russian missile and all the windows shake.
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