The Ukrainian city of Izyum was invaded and, after 163 days, liberated. Those who coöperated with Russian forces face ostracization and, in some cases, criminal charges—but some claim they had no choice.
When I tracked down Zubko, he remembered the story differently. He said that the offer of evacuation came only after the arrival of Russian forces, and that shortly before Marchenko left Izyum he had told Zubko, “Hang in there, and make sure the people have water.”
At the city’s administration building, I found a childhood friend of Golub’s, Maxim Strelnik, who was in charge of sports and youth programs. He left Izyum in March and had returned days before. Near the start of the occupation, when Strelnik was in a Ukrainian-controlled city elsewhere in the Kharkiv region, he called Golub and urged him to leave. Golub demurred. “He said he had to protect his warehouse full of goods,” Strelnik recalled.
It wasn’t Golub’s work with the burials that got him into trouble, Matsokin went on: “If he was merely a volunteer who sorted through some ruins, that would be no big deal. But taking a post in this fake administration? That’s a different step entirely.” Matsokin also noted the photograph with Prilepin. “And, excuse me, you should understand under whose flag you’re standing.”
A further complication embedded in Ukraine’s law on collaboration is the question of motive. “Was a person moved to act out of personal belief or under the barrel of a gun?” Kravchenko said. “The first would be a crime, the second not.” In Izyum, government workers stopped receiving their Ukrainian salaries in March. Those who agreed to work for the Russian-backed administration often point to the unforgiving financial reality of occupation.
Most of the cases Shokun was working on involved residents who directly aided the Russian invasion force. A local pro-Russian politician was charged, in absentia, for giving directions to the Russian Army as it approached Izyum. Another man had pointed out Ukrainian troop positions and used his car to deliver munitions to Russian forces.
Later that spring, a Russian officer visited Dzhos’s house and asked him a series of questions about his age, his job, his salary. As Dzhos answered, the officer appeared confused about why Dzhos had been marked for questioning in the first place. He stopped Dzhos, saying, “Excuse me, do you happen to have enemies here?” Dzhos told him he had an erratic neighbor. “Ah,” the officer replied, and got up to leave. “Now I understand.
A couple of weeks later, Izyum was liberated. Sidorova is still at home, and Dzhos occasionally passes her in the street. “How can she look at me with a smirk?” he said. “I don’t understand it.” At one point, he reached under the kitchen table and pulled out the black hood wrapped in duct tape, a drooping mask laden with quiet horror. Dzhos has tried to let the events of last summer fade away, to find comfort in tending his garden and working on his car.
Farther down the road, I came to the house of Iryna Slabospytska, an optometrist in her forties. In September, a contingent of Ukrainian troops had come to the neighborhood looking for a man who, during the occupation, distributed Russian humanitarian aid to those who were running out of food. He was on a list of suspected collaborators. Slabospytska defended him and urged the troops to arrest Sidorova instead.
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