UKRAINE’S HARDEST WINTER
Weary soldiers and citizens express fatalistic optimism while preparing for the loss of U.S. military support.

The soldier, a lanky, dark-haired sergeant named Vitalii Ovcharenko, met me at a gas-station café on an otherwise deserted stretch of highway near Sumy, not far from Ukraine’s northern border with Russia. He looked tired. His unit had been fighting in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukraine captured a swath of territory in August in hopes of trading it for some of the land it had lost in the east.
Ovcharenko first volunteered in 2014, and he has been involved in some of the fiercest battles of the past decade. But when I asked him to name the hardest moment he had faced, his answer surprised me.
“The most difficult time is now,” he said. The past year had been hard enough, with the Biden administration slow-walking the military support it had promised. “Every bullet that doesn’t arrive leads to the death of my friends,” he said. But ever since the election of Donald Trump, “the uncertainty is the hardest part.” The commanding officers said they would fight regardless of the American position. But the soldiers were troubled, because “the American politicians want to do a deal,” he said. “And we know it would not be peace—it would be a tactical pause that would allow the Russians to regroup.”
As if to illustrate his point, a huge explosion lit up the night sky, followed by a loud boom. All the lights went out, even the streetlamps on the highway. The Russians had hit a power station nearby, the latest strike in a continuing effort to destroy Ukraine’s power grid and demoralize the population as winter sets in. Ovcharenko flipped his phone light on and continued talking, as if nothing had happened.
Some of the people I met in Ukraine told me that the country could be facing its toughest winter yet—despite a history that includes some of the worst famine and human carnage of the 20th century. The Russians are pressing forward relentlessly in the east, even though in October alone, more than 1,500 of their soldiers were killed or wounded every day. This fall, Russia fired more than three times as many missiles and explosive drones as it had during the summer months.
Ukraine’s troops are exhausted after nearly three years of warfare. They are heavily outnumbered by the Russians, who have been bolstered by about 10,000 North Korean troops and thousands of mercenaries from other countries, some of them trafficked to the front against their will. Ukrainian civilians are exhausted too, especially now that they face the prospect of more power cuts in a season of bitter cold and darkness.
Ukrainians are watching Trump nominate his Cabinet, scouring each official’s past utterances for hints about future American policies. They can’t do much to influence the encounter that is coming between the Russian and American presidents—both mercurial men, each in the grip of very different delusions about how Ukraine’s war will end. Instead, Ukraine’s soldiers and politicians are taking a hard look at what it would mean to lose American military support, and how they might make up the difference, in a war where victory is being slowly redefined as mere survival.
Ovcharenko first volunteered in 2014, and he has been involved in some of the fiercest battles of the past decade. But when I asked him to name the hardest moment he had faced, his answer surprised me.
“The most difficult time is now,” he said. The past year had been hard enough, with the Biden administration slow-walking the military support it had promised. “Every bullet that doesn’t arrive leads to the death of my friends,” he said. But ever since the election of Donald Trump, “the uncertainty is the hardest part.” The commanding officers said they would fight regardless of the American position. But the soldiers were troubled, because “the American politicians want to do a deal,” he said. “And we know it would not be peace—it would be a tactical pause that would allow the Russians to regroup.”
As if to illustrate his point, a huge explosion lit up the night sky, followed by a loud boom. All the lights went out, even the streetlamps on the highway. The Russians had hit a power station nearby, the latest strike in a continuing effort to destroy Ukraine’s power grid and demoralize the population as winter sets in. Ovcharenko flipped his phone light on and continued talking, as if nothing had happened.
Some of the people I met in Ukraine told me that the country could be facing its toughest winter yet—despite a history that includes some of the worst famine and human carnage of the 20th century. The Russians are pressing forward relentlessly in the east, even though in October alone, more than 1,500 of their soldiers were killed or wounded every day. This fall, Russia fired more than three times as many missiles and explosive drones as it had during the summer months.
Ukraine’s troops are exhausted after nearly three years of warfare. They are heavily outnumbered by the Russians, who have been bolstered by about 10,000 North Korean troops and thousands of mercenaries from other countries, some of them trafficked to the front against their will. Ukrainian civilians are exhausted too, especially now that they face the prospect of more power cuts in a season of bitter cold and darkness.
Ukrainians are watching Trump nominate his Cabinet, scouring each official’s past utterances for hints about future American policies. They can’t do much to influence the encounter that is coming between the Russian and American presidents—both mercurial men, each in the grip of very different delusions about how Ukraine’s war will end. Instead, Ukraine’s soldiers and politicians are taking a hard look at what it would mean to lose American military support, and how they might make up the difference, in a war where victory is being slowly redefined as mere survival.

Ukrainians are immensely grateful for the backing they got from the Biden administration after Russia invaded in 2022. At the start of the war, frontline soldiers commonly wore the Stars and Stripes pinned to their chests. But almost three years later, many have come to see the American arms pipeline as a kind of torture: allowing just enough through to keep up a war of attrition, with no real hope of victory. One member of the Ukrainian Parliament described it to me as “feeding by teaspoons.” A pollster in Kyiv called it a policy of “slow death.” Viktor Yahun, a former Ukrainian intelligence officer, answered my question about how Ukrainians received Trump’s election by reciting a Russian proverb: “Better a horrible end than an endless horror.”
Despite that grim forecast, I heard a surprising degree of fatalistic optimism about Trump among many of the Ukrainians I met. This is partly a measure of their deep frustration with the status quo, and may also reflect the national habit of bravely shrugging off long odds. against all hope, i hope is a phrase spray-painted on walls throughout Ukraine (it’s a quote from Lesya Ukrainka, a beloved poet from the turn of the 20th century). Everyone knows about Trump’s worrisome promises to reach a quick deal with Vladimir Putin, which would entail a cutoff of American military support. But many people seem confident that Trump’s looming tête-à-tête with the Russian president will work to their advantage by demonstrating the Kremlin’s unreliability as a partner.
“They are incapable of cutting a deal,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, the president of the Kyiv School of Economics, told me of the Russians. “Whenever there’s any symptom of negotiations—let’s say a grain deal, or the Istanbul agreement—they immediately ask for more.” He reminded me that Ukraine has twice made deals with Russia in exchange for security guarantees: first in 1994, when it gave up its nuclear weapons, and again in 2014, when it tried to end the fighting in the Donbas region. Russia violated both agreements. Mylovanov and others told me that they were confident Trump will eventually understand that Putin cannot be trusted, and that he will then take a harder and more realistic line.
In Kyiv, the very mention of the word negotiations elicits a dismissive wave of the hand. Yet this posture may mask a deeper pragmatism. President Volodymyr Zelensky and his aides have maintained that Ukraine will stop fighting only if it is granted NATO membership—a position widely understood to be an opening gambit for talks. (Zelensky’s office declined my requests for an interview; I was told that his administration has adopted a policy of strict discretion in preparation for the transfer of power in Washington.) In the same way, Zelensky’s refusal to cede any territory conceals the reality that many Ukrainians—perhaps most—are ready to accept the loss of the areas Russia now occupies in exchange for a durable peace. Anton Grushetskyi, a Kyiv-based pollster, told me that to say you will accept the loss of Ukrainian territory is still socially unacceptable, which makes people’s real feelings difficult to assess.
Defining a security guarantee will be the crux of any deal. Roman Kostenko, the chair of the Defense and Intelligence Committee in the Ukrainian Parliament and a decorated soldier, told me that a meaningful agreement would require a permanent defense structure along the front line, “so that within hours of a Russian attack, military operations can start. Without that, the security guarantees won’t work.”
Despite that grim forecast, I heard a surprising degree of fatalistic optimism about Trump among many of the Ukrainians I met. This is partly a measure of their deep frustration with the status quo, and may also reflect the national habit of bravely shrugging off long odds. against all hope, i hope is a phrase spray-painted on walls throughout Ukraine (it’s a quote from Lesya Ukrainka, a beloved poet from the turn of the 20th century). Everyone knows about Trump’s worrisome promises to reach a quick deal with Vladimir Putin, which would entail a cutoff of American military support. But many people seem confident that Trump’s looming tête-à-tête with the Russian president will work to their advantage by demonstrating the Kremlin’s unreliability as a partner.
“They are incapable of cutting a deal,” Tymofiy Mylovanov, the president of the Kyiv School of Economics, told me of the Russians. “Whenever there’s any symptom of negotiations—let’s say a grain deal, or the Istanbul agreement—they immediately ask for more.” He reminded me that Ukraine has twice made deals with Russia in exchange for security guarantees: first in 1994, when it gave up its nuclear weapons, and again in 2014, when it tried to end the fighting in the Donbas region. Russia violated both agreements. Mylovanov and others told me that they were confident Trump will eventually understand that Putin cannot be trusted, and that he will then take a harder and more realistic line.
In Kyiv, the very mention of the word negotiations elicits a dismissive wave of the hand. Yet this posture may mask a deeper pragmatism. President Volodymyr Zelensky and his aides have maintained that Ukraine will stop fighting only if it is granted NATO membership—a position widely understood to be an opening gambit for talks. (Zelensky’s office declined my requests for an interview; I was told that his administration has adopted a policy of strict discretion in preparation for the transfer of power in Washington.) In the same way, Zelensky’s refusal to cede any territory conceals the reality that many Ukrainians—perhaps most—are ready to accept the loss of the areas Russia now occupies in exchange for a durable peace. Anton Grushetskyi, a Kyiv-based pollster, told me that to say you will accept the loss of Ukrainian territory is still socially unacceptable, which makes people’s real feelings difficult to assess.
Defining a security guarantee will be the crux of any deal. Roman Kostenko, the chair of the Defense and Intelligence Committee in the Ukrainian Parliament and a decorated soldier, told me that a meaningful agreement would require a permanent defense structure along the front line, “so that within hours of a Russian attack, military operations can start. Without that, the security guarantees won’t work.”

Kostenko did not seem to think a deal of any kind was imminent; he said the Russians were gearing up for an effort to capture the remainder of the Donetsk region by mid-winter. The recent rush of military supplies from the Biden administration following Trump’s election had been helpful, he said. But he added, a little grimly, that if the supplies continued at the current rate, “we may get through the winter” without major losses of territory.
American military hardware has been essential to Ukraine’s self-defense, and the soldiers and volunteers I met recited the most badly needed items like Christmas wish lists. Bradley fighting vehicles, armored against mines and gunfire, are often at the top of the list, as are Abrams tanks and parts to keep them running. Long- and medium-range missiles are seen as essential to striking at the Russian bases that fire on Ukrainian cities. And “you can never have too many drones,” a frontline soldier told me.
One of Ukraine’s most valuable resources is the goodwill of the West, and many people I met seemed acutely conscious that everything could depend on the way their war is framed in Trump’s mind. They plied me so assiduously with reasons for supporting Ukraine that I sometimes had the odd feeling that the whole country was gearing up for a life-and-death audition with an unpredictable boss. Their pitches ranged from simple arguments (“Trump likes success—surely he wouldn’t want Ukraine to fail?”) to more sophisticated ones about the impossibility of separating Ukraine from one of Trump’s top priorities: countering China. The idea here is that China, which has become an indispensable supplier for Russia, would be emboldened if Russia wins, and might go on to challenge American power in the Pacific.
American military hardware has been essential to Ukraine’s self-defense, and the soldiers and volunteers I met recited the most badly needed items like Christmas wish lists. Bradley fighting vehicles, armored against mines and gunfire, are often at the top of the list, as are Abrams tanks and parts to keep them running. Long- and medium-range missiles are seen as essential to striking at the Russian bases that fire on Ukrainian cities. And “you can never have too many drones,” a frontline soldier told me.
One of Ukraine’s most valuable resources is the goodwill of the West, and many people I met seemed acutely conscious that everything could depend on the way their war is framed in Trump’s mind. They plied me so assiduously with reasons for supporting Ukraine that I sometimes had the odd feeling that the whole country was gearing up for a life-and-death audition with an unpredictable boss. Their pitches ranged from simple arguments (“Trump likes success—surely he wouldn’t want Ukraine to fail?”) to more sophisticated ones about the impossibility of separating Ukraine from one of Trump’s top priorities: countering China. The idea here is that China, which has become an indispensable supplier for Russia, would be emboldened if Russia wins, and might go on to challenge American power in the Pacific.

Perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson I encountered was Sviatoslav Yurash, who became the youngest-ever member of Ukraine’s Parliament when he was first elected five years ago, and is now 28 years old. Yurash is tall and very thin, with clunky glasses and thick brown hair swept fully sideways, as if he’d been standing in a gale. When I met him in a Kyiv café, he had just returned from the front line, where he mans a Browning M2 machine gun when Parliament is not in session. “Mr. Putin is very clear—he sees us the way Hitler called the Swiss: renegade Germans,” he told me. Yurash likened Putin’s Russia to “a big icebreaker that is destroying the international order,” adding that the ultimate beneficiary will be China.
Yurash told me he’d been in touch with Americans across the political spectrum in his effort to promote the Ukrainian cause. He mentioned Tucker Carlson, who interviewed him early in the war, and Jordan Peterson’s daughter, who spoke with him for a documentary she was making. “I’ve met people who organized prayer breakfasts,” Yurash said with an amused grin. He seemed intensely curious about America’s tribal divisions but a little baffled by what he’d encountered, both on the left and the right. At one point his assistant, Kateryna Doroshyna, held up her phone with a puzzled expression and showed me a social-media post that read, in English: “How can I show Ukrainians that they benefit from white privilege?”
I wasn’t sure how to begin explaining that to someone who regularly risks her life delivering supplies to soldiers on the front line. But both of them shrugged and laughed it off. “We just need to tell our story,” Yurash said. “For us, the idea that Trump could persuade the Europeans to do more is quite welcome.”
Unlike trump, many European leaders see Russia’s war in Ukraine as a threat to their own safety and have acted accordingly. The Baltic states have given their entire stock of some weapons types to Ukraine. One Polish official told me that his country—which has provided more tanks to Ukraine than any other in Europe—has no more to give now, “because we are next on the front line.” Tomas Kopecny, the Czech envoy for Ukraine reconstruction, told me that Czech factories had increased their production of large-caliber ammunition elevenfold in the first two years of the war. Kopecny also leads the Czech Ammunition Initiative, which acts as a broker for states with ammunition to sell, including some that would not be willing to sell directly to Ukraine out of fear of angering Russia. The Czech initiative has delivered about 500,000 rounds of 155-millimeter artillery to Ukraine in 2024, Kopecny said, and will deliver more next year.
And yet, even if the Europeans were to give everything they have, they could not supply enough matériel to compensate for an American cutoff. Ukraine will need a prolific weapons industry of its own. As it happens, some of the rudiments are already in place, because Ukraine was an engine of the Soviet Union’s military industry during the Cold War, with 750 factories. After the wall fell, Kyiv transferred much of its arsenal to Russia, and some of those weapons are now being used against it. Some friendly states have begun injecting money into Ukraine’s domestic arms plants. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have collectively allocated about $680 million to Ukrainian defense production so far, including money from the interest on Russian financial assets frozen in Europe.
Yurash told me he’d been in touch with Americans across the political spectrum in his effort to promote the Ukrainian cause. He mentioned Tucker Carlson, who interviewed him early in the war, and Jordan Peterson’s daughter, who spoke with him for a documentary she was making. “I’ve met people who organized prayer breakfasts,” Yurash said with an amused grin. He seemed intensely curious about America’s tribal divisions but a little baffled by what he’d encountered, both on the left and the right. At one point his assistant, Kateryna Doroshyna, held up her phone with a puzzled expression and showed me a social-media post that read, in English: “How can I show Ukrainians that they benefit from white privilege?”
I wasn’t sure how to begin explaining that to someone who regularly risks her life delivering supplies to soldiers on the front line. But both of them shrugged and laughed it off. “We just need to tell our story,” Yurash said. “For us, the idea that Trump could persuade the Europeans to do more is quite welcome.”
Unlike trump, many European leaders see Russia’s war in Ukraine as a threat to their own safety and have acted accordingly. The Baltic states have given their entire stock of some weapons types to Ukraine. One Polish official told me that his country—which has provided more tanks to Ukraine than any other in Europe—has no more to give now, “because we are next on the front line.” Tomas Kopecny, the Czech envoy for Ukraine reconstruction, told me that Czech factories had increased their production of large-caliber ammunition elevenfold in the first two years of the war. Kopecny also leads the Czech Ammunition Initiative, which acts as a broker for states with ammunition to sell, including some that would not be willing to sell directly to Ukraine out of fear of angering Russia. The Czech initiative has delivered about 500,000 rounds of 155-millimeter artillery to Ukraine in 2024, Kopecny said, and will deliver more next year.
And yet, even if the Europeans were to give everything they have, they could not supply enough matériel to compensate for an American cutoff. Ukraine will need a prolific weapons industry of its own. As it happens, some of the rudiments are already in place, because Ukraine was an engine of the Soviet Union’s military industry during the Cold War, with 750 factories. After the wall fell, Kyiv transferred much of its arsenal to Russia, and some of those weapons are now being used against it. Some friendly states have begun injecting money into Ukraine’s domestic arms plants. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have collectively allocated about $680 million to Ukrainian defense production so far, including money from the interest on Russian financial assets frozen in Europe.

Sumy National University
Sooner or later, some Ukrainians say, the country will have to rely entirely on its own resources. Trump may just be hastening that day. One Ukrainian who thinks this way is Maria Berlinska, a driven 36-year-old from western Ukraine and a prominent figure in the domestic drone industry. One Ukrainian general labeled her the “mother of drones” last year.
Berlinska met me in her Kyiv office, an atticlike space with the flags of various military units pinned to the walls and ceiling. She’d been getting a graduate degree in Jewish history when the 2014 revolution started, and later that year she joined the army on a volunteer basis. She spent much of the following three years on the front lines in the east, teaching soldiers how to fly drones and integrate them with other military technologies. She also lobbied politicians to support the industry.
“My message was very simple: Sooner or later, Russia will return,” she told me. “We should invest in technology, because we can’t rely only on Western countries.” She always brought a sample drone with her, explaining to ministers and lawmakers that it could be a dangerous weapon not just against enemy soldiers but against tanks and armored vehicles as well.
“They were laughing,” she told me. “They said it’s just toys.”
They are not laughing anymore. Ukraine now has at least 100 active drone companies in different stages of production, says Kateryna Bezsudna, a co-founder of a nonprofit, called Defence Builder, that assists start-ups in Ukraine’s defense sector. Bezsudna told me that Ukraine has become a testing ground for new drone technologies that it could eventually export abroad. At a dinner party in Kyiv, I met a couple who work for a new firm called Hard Cat Drones, which makes marine drones specifically designed to destroy enemy drones, boats, and mines—a useful weapon on the Black Sea, where Ukraine has had some remarkable successes in beating back the Russian navy.
Berlinska met me in her Kyiv office, an atticlike space with the flags of various military units pinned to the walls and ceiling. She’d been getting a graduate degree in Jewish history when the 2014 revolution started, and later that year she joined the army on a volunteer basis. She spent much of the following three years on the front lines in the east, teaching soldiers how to fly drones and integrate them with other military technologies. She also lobbied politicians to support the industry.
“My message was very simple: Sooner or later, Russia will return,” she told me. “We should invest in technology, because we can’t rely only on Western countries.” She always brought a sample drone with her, explaining to ministers and lawmakers that it could be a dangerous weapon not just against enemy soldiers but against tanks and armored vehicles as well.
“They were laughing,” she told me. “They said it’s just toys.”
They are not laughing anymore. Ukraine now has at least 100 active drone companies in different stages of production, says Kateryna Bezsudna, a co-founder of a nonprofit, called Defence Builder, that assists start-ups in Ukraine’s defense sector. Bezsudna told me that Ukraine has become a testing ground for new drone technologies that it could eventually export abroad. At a dinner party in Kyiv, I met a couple who work for a new firm called Hard Cat Drones, which makes marine drones specifically designed to destroy enemy drones, boats, and mines—a useful weapon on the Black Sea, where Ukraine has had some remarkable successes in beating back the Russian navy.

Maria Berlinska at the offices of Dignitas Fund, in Kyiv
Berlinska has no illusions about what drones can and cannot achieve. Her highest priority now, she told me, is an ambitious effort to compensate for Ukraine’s personnel shortages by training civilians to help build and deploy drones and other kinds of defense technology, a project she calls the “technological militarization of society.”
That phrase gave me pause. It sounded more like North Korea than the vibrant democracy Ukraine hopes to maintain. Berlinska conceded the point. “I would like to be wrong in my predictions,” she said. But with the prospect of losing American support, Ukrainians need to get used to the idea of being citizen-soldiers. She was one of several people in Kyiv who invoked Israel—with its mandatory conscription for men and women—as a model.
Ukraine’s survival may depend as much on strength of will as on weapons. The spirit of national unity on display in 2022, when so many citizens took part in their country’s defense, is being tested as fissures widen between those fighting the war and the rest of society. There is a greater reluctance to serve, and I heard stories in Kyiv about young men who stay off the streets during the day because they fear being forcibly conscripted. Ovcharenko, the soldier I met in Sumy, made clear that he had questions about “some parts of society” that were not pulling their weight.
Russian hackers and trolls work constantly to exacerbate these divisions, largely through social media. “We can see that the enemy is doing massive psyops,” Kostenko, the Parliament member, told me. “They try to discredit the military and the institutions.” Real frustrations can be hard to distinguish from propaganda that plays on them. Not long ago, Ovcharenko told me, he was evacuating a wounded soldier in a car, driving very fast. “Usually other drivers understand,” he said. “But there was a video online accusing the military of abusing its privileges, that they’re reckless and drive drunk.” He couldn’t help wondering what the civilians on the roadside were thinking as he went past.
That phrase gave me pause. It sounded more like North Korea than the vibrant democracy Ukraine hopes to maintain. Berlinska conceded the point. “I would like to be wrong in my predictions,” she said. But with the prospect of losing American support, Ukrainians need to get used to the idea of being citizen-soldiers. She was one of several people in Kyiv who invoked Israel—with its mandatory conscription for men and women—as a model.
Ukraine’s survival may depend as much on strength of will as on weapons. The spirit of national unity on display in 2022, when so many citizens took part in their country’s defense, is being tested as fissures widen between those fighting the war and the rest of society. There is a greater reluctance to serve, and I heard stories in Kyiv about young men who stay off the streets during the day because they fear being forcibly conscripted. Ovcharenko, the soldier I met in Sumy, made clear that he had questions about “some parts of society” that were not pulling their weight.
Russian hackers and trolls work constantly to exacerbate these divisions, largely through social media. “We can see that the enemy is doing massive psyops,” Kostenko, the Parliament member, told me. “They try to discredit the military and the institutions.” Real frustrations can be hard to distinguish from propaganda that plays on them. Not long ago, Ovcharenko told me, he was evacuating a wounded soldier in a car, driving very fast. “Usually other drivers understand,” he said. “But there was a video online accusing the military of abusing its privileges, that they’re reckless and drive drunk.” He couldn’t help wondering what the civilians on the roadside were thinking as he went past.

A resident of Bilopillia, near Sumy, in the courtyard of his apartment building; most windows have been damaged from multiple shellings.
Ukrainians know that any deal worked out by Trump and Putin is likely to be a respite rather than a resolution, and that knowledge carries its own psychic burden. A 31-year-old woman told me that she was dreading the uncertainty of a cease-fire. “When the war is happening every day, you’re used to it,” she said. “But I feel anxious knowing that when it stops, we will just be waiting and worrying until it starts again.” Others told me they feared that the adrenaline rush of war would give way to depression as the nation faced the scale of its destruction. The World Bank has estimated the cost of rebuilding Ukraine at $486 billion. And many refugees may be reluctant to return to their home in a cease-fire. “There is no trust,” Grusketshyi, the pollster, told me. “What if Russia attacks two years later? People will say, ‘Why live in a frontline city?’ Mariupol was rebuilt after 2015,” when the Russians first destroyed it. “Then it was destroyed again in two months.”
The greatest fear for Ukrainians is a true collapse. This could play out in a number of ways. Mylovanov, at the Kyiv School of Economics, told me that a Russian victory would surely send enormous numbers of refugees across Ukraine’s western border. Poland and other border states would “arm themselves to the teeth,” he said, and Ukraine itself might devolve into a patchwork of armed uprisings.
In Sumy, the city I visited near the Russian border, I met a number of Ukrainians who were preparing themselves for the worst-case scenario. Sumy had been encircled by the Russian military for two months after the 2022 invasion, and that period was a crucible for the city’s people. The Ukrainian military and local authorities all withdrew, leaving citizens to fend for themselves. They quickly organized themselves into civilian militias, one resident told me, “collecting money and food and bottles for Molotov cocktails.” In the end, the Russians withdrew without a direct assault on the city.
I saw a small example of the city’s resilience the day after I arrived. A Russian missile had struck the courtyard of a large housing complex, killing 11 people, including children, and injuring scores of others. When I got there, about 12 hours later, debris and shattered glass littered the area, and the missile had left a deep crater. The police and emergency services were there—but so were hundreds of local people, sawing boards to patch up broken windows, offering food and tea, and consoling the victims’ families. One woman told me that immediately after the strike the night before, groups of young volunteers had gone straight to the site to help out.
The greatest fear for Ukrainians is a true collapse. This could play out in a number of ways. Mylovanov, at the Kyiv School of Economics, told me that a Russian victory would surely send enormous numbers of refugees across Ukraine’s western border. Poland and other border states would “arm themselves to the teeth,” he said, and Ukraine itself might devolve into a patchwork of armed uprisings.
In Sumy, the city I visited near the Russian border, I met a number of Ukrainians who were preparing themselves for the worst-case scenario. Sumy had been encircled by the Russian military for two months after the 2022 invasion, and that period was a crucible for the city’s people. The Ukrainian military and local authorities all withdrew, leaving citizens to fend for themselves. They quickly organized themselves into civilian militias, one resident told me, “collecting money and food and bottles for Molotov cocktails.” In the end, the Russians withdrew without a direct assault on the city.
I saw a small example of the city’s resilience the day after I arrived. A Russian missile had struck the courtyard of a large housing complex, killing 11 people, including children, and injuring scores of others. When I got there, about 12 hours later, debris and shattered glass littered the area, and the missile had left a deep crater. The police and emergency services were there—but so were hundreds of local people, sawing boards to patch up broken windows, offering food and tea, and consoling the victims’ families. One woman told me that immediately after the strike the night before, groups of young volunteers had gone straight to the site to help out.

Yuri Shvydkyi and Anatoly Snihiriov
The man who drove me there was a 59-year-old local named Yuri Shvydkyi, who had lost a close friend in the bombing. He used to run a travel-goods store but had transformed it into a military outfitter. Shvydkyi told me that when the Russians invaded in 2022, he withdrew cash, got in his car, and drove his daughter and her children to relative safety in Kyiv. Then he turned around and drove back to Sumy to rejoin his wife, passing through Ukrainian and Russian checkpoints on the way. He described the return journey as “like The Metamorphosis—you feel you are slowly turning into an insect.” He was lucky to survive it; many Ukrainian civilians were shot and killed on that road.
Now he spends much of his time as a paramilitary defender at a guard post on the outskirts of town. From there, he and some other men shoot at the Russian drones that fly over the border. The city hasn’t compensated them for months, but they man their posts 24 hours a day anyway, Shvydkyi told me, “filling in the gaps where the army is not,” because “I know the Shahed drones are targeting my granddaughter.”
One evening, Shvydkyi invited me and my translator to join him at the home of some of his friends. The power was out, so we climbed the stairs to their 10th-floor apartment in the dark, using our phones to light the way. Our host, a ruddy-faced man named Anatoly Snihiriov, had retired from army service at the age of 60 a few months earlier. He and a female friend prepared an eclectic meal in the dark—cheese, sausage, mango-flavored cake, tea, cognac. Snihiriov showed me a framed photograph on the wall of him with his infantry unit, taken last year: a dozen or so men standing with autumn foliage behind them. “This guy was killed by a sniper,” he said. “This guy was killed by a mine. This guy is a prisoner of war. This guy is maimed on his whole right side.”
Now he spends much of his time as a paramilitary defender at a guard post on the outskirts of town. From there, he and some other men shoot at the Russian drones that fly over the border. The city hasn’t compensated them for months, but they man their posts 24 hours a day anyway, Shvydkyi told me, “filling in the gaps where the army is not,” because “I know the Shahed drones are targeting my granddaughter.”
One evening, Shvydkyi invited me and my translator to join him at the home of some of his friends. The power was out, so we climbed the stairs to their 10th-floor apartment in the dark, using our phones to light the way. Our host, a ruddy-faced man named Anatoly Snihiriov, had retired from army service at the age of 60 a few months earlier. He and a female friend prepared an eclectic meal in the dark—cheese, sausage, mango-flavored cake, tea, cognac. Snihiriov showed me a framed photograph on the wall of him with his infantry unit, taken last year: a dozen or so men standing with autumn foliage behind them. “This guy was killed by a sniper,” he said. “This guy was killed by a mine. This guy is a prisoner of war. This guy is maimed on his whole right side.”

A concrete barricade along one of the roads near Sumy
The conversation over the next two hours was an odd blend of apocalyptic and cheerful. Snihiriov and his friend, who had also served in the military, talked about the proper use of tourniquets; both of them knew people who had lost limbs because the dressings hadn’t been applied properly. They argued about which is worse, to die instantly in battle or to survive with debilitating injuries that leave you unable to care for yourself. When I asked about the future of their city, they said they expected all but the smallest businesses to fail or move away, because of the constant threat of Russian drones and glide bombs. “You need to be small enough that the Russians can’t find you or they think it’s not worth it,” Snihiriov said.
At one point, Snihiriov mentioned that they kept assault rifles in their home. “When you live in a border area, you have to be prepared,” he said.
Later, after saying goodbye and emerging into the frigid darkness, I found myself thinking about the painful uncertainty that these people faced, with their homes so close to the front lines of what looks more and more like a global war.
“We are grateful to the American people that we could win so far against Russia,” Snihiriov told me before I left. “Now we feel a bit betrayed. But we will keep fighting to the end.”
At one point, Snihiriov mentioned that they kept assault rifles in their home. “When you live in a border area, you have to be prepared,” he said.
Later, after saying goodbye and emerging into the frigid darkness, I found myself thinking about the painful uncertainty that these people faced, with their homes so close to the front lines of what looks more and more like a global war.
“We are grateful to the American people that we could win so far against Russia,” Snihiriov told me before I left. “Now we feel a bit betrayed. But we will keep fighting to the end.”
Ukraine Asks if Telegram, Its Favorite App, Is a Sleeper Agent
The messaging app’s popularity has soared during the war with Russia, leading Ukrainian officials to increasingly weigh Telegram’s upsides against its security risks.

Telegram’s Air Raids Map channel. Roughly 70 percent of Ukrainians use Telegram as a main source of news, according to a recent survey.
In the nearly three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the messaging app Telegram has been a lifeline for millions of Ukrainians. It provides information about coming attacks and helps communities organize food, medical aid and other support.
But what has been a salvation has increasingly turned into a major source of concern. In recent months, Ukrainian officials have become more alarmed by the country’s dependence on Telegram, as worries that the app was used as a vector of disinformation and a spying tool for Russia have mushroomed.
Ukraine is now trying to disentangle itself from Telegram. In September, authorities ordered the military, government officials and those working on critical infrastructure to limit their use of the app on work phones. More sensitive communications have been moved to encrypted apps like Signal. Some senior officials have proposed new restrictions for Telegram, including rules to disclose who is behind anonymously run channels with large followings.
“We understand we are dependent,” said Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament who has drafted a law to tighten regulation of Telegram. “It’s a problem for us.”

Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament who has drafted a law to tighten regulation of Telegram, said the country’s dependence on the app was “a problem.”
Ukraine’s experience with Telegram illustrates the benefits and drawbacks of being beholden to a single app. Rarely has a country been so reliant on a platform it has no control over for communication, information and other critical services, particularly during a war.
That dependence is emulated perhaps only in Russia, where Telegram is used by roughly half the population, including many in the military and government. That has made the app a central information battlefield in the war. In some cases, Ukrainian and Russian drone pilots use Telegram groups to taunt each other and share videos of attacks.
Ukraine’s concerns about Telegram parallel rising global scrutiny of the platform, which is approaching one billion users. Once seen as a haven for activists and those living under authoritarian governments, the app has angered governments as it has become a hub of illicit and extremist material. Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder, was arrested in France in August on charges related to the company’s failure to address criminal activity on the platform.
For Ukraine, distancing itself from Telegram will not be easy. Roughly 70 percent of Ukrainians use Telegram as a main source of news, according to a recent survey commissioned in part by the U.S. government. When air raid sirens wail and missiles descend on Ukrainian cities, people flock to Telegram groups for real-time updates. The government broadcasts official announcements and gathers intelligence inside Russian-occupied territories through the app.

Kyiv residents sheltering during a missile strike last year. When air raid sirens wail and missiles descend on Ukrainian cities, people flock to Telegram groups for real-time updates.Credit...Sasha Maslov for The New York Times
Yet in secret cybersecurity meetings this year, Ukrainian officials discussed putting new limits on Telegram, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. The country’s intelligence service concluded the app posed national security risks and was used by Russia for disinformation, cyberattacks, hacking, spreading malware, location tracking and adjusting missile strikes.
As a security measure, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who regularly posts war updates to his more than 700,000 followers on Telegram, does not use the app on his personal phone, a Ukrainian cybersecurity official said. In March, officials took the unusual step of asking Apple to rein in the platform because the Silicon Valley giant can leverage its app store — which Telegram needs for global distribution — to get the company to act.
In a statement, Telegram defended the security of its platform, saying Russia “has not — and cannot — access user information.” The company added, “Telegram is and always has been safe for Ukrainians and users around the world.”
But what makes Telegram so powerful also makes it a threat, Ukrainian officials said. Unlike other social media, Telegram has few guardrails. There is no algorithm determining what people see and little content moderation, enabling the rapid spread of lifesaving warnings but also exposing the app to exploitation. Broadcasting features allow users to quickly share text, videos and files with large groups.
“I have some relatives in the occupied territories and the only way to get in touch with them is Telegram,” said Maksym Yali, an analyst for Ukraine’s Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security, a government agency that monitors Telegram and other apps for disinformation. “But under the conditions of war, do the risks outweigh the benefits?”
He said Ukrainians visiting friends or family in Russia must hand over their phones at the airport to security officers who use specialized software to check their Telegram app, including deleted material, for pro-Ukraine content.
Telegram denied that deleted messages could be accessed and said any examples of intercepted communications by Russia that it had investigated were the result of a device being physically confiscated or infected with malware, not security weaknesses on the app.
Ukrainians’ affection for Telegram began in 2017. That was when the country banned the Russian-controlled social media platform VKontakte, which was used to amplify Russian disinformation and propaganda.
Telegram’s prominence grew during Mr. Zelensky’s presidential run in 2019. His campaign deftly used the service to connect with voters, thanks partly to Mykhailo Fedorov, a young digital strategist who now leads the Ministry of Digital Transformation. In a 2020 interview, Mr. Fedorov said he had regular contact with Mr. Durov and his management team.

Mykhailo Fedorov, chief of Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, said in a 2020 interview that he had regular contact with Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder.
In 2022, just before Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian intelligence cautioned Mr. Zelensky about Telegram, two people with knowledge of the matter said. In a memo, military intelligence warned about the risks of Russian influence but said the threat did not merit an outright ban of the app.
Mr. Zelensky’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The war revealed that many Telegram channels were run from Russia. Accounts that appeared to be Ukrainian peddled disinformation, including unfounded claims that Mr. Zelensky had fled the country.
Still, the app’s popularity soared as traditional media struggled to keep pace.
“Telegram is the main source of information, more than television, radio and all the other media,” said Maksym Dvorovyi, head of digital rights with Digital Security Lab Ukraine, a civil society group. He said that was a “sad reality” because of the security risks and volume of unverified information and propaganda.
For many popular Telegram channels, the money flowed. With millions of followers, they charged thousands of dollars per ad, with promotions from cake shops and crypto boosters sitting alongside warnings of drone attacks and announcements of blackouts.
Few know the operators of some of the most-visited channels, which have names like “Legitimate” and “Cartel.” A September study by Detector Media, a European Union-backed watchdog group, found that 76 of the 100 most popular Telegram channels in Ukraine were operated anonymously.
Ukrainian officials have worried about the allegiances of Mr. Durov, who was born in Russia. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said in 2021 that the government had “reached an agreement” with Telegram after the authorities tried to block the app during a dispute over access to user data. Ukrainian officials fear Russia can get access to private data and communications on the app, pointing to examples when Russian authorities presented copies of private Telegram conversations to people under investigation.
Ukraine has not shown conclusive evidence linking Mr. Durov or the company to the Russian government, and Telegram said it had no ties to the Kremlin.
“Telegram has never been legally or physically connected to Russia,” the company said. “Telegram was founded specifically in the context of protecting user data from Russian surveillance.”
Early this year, disinformation on Telegram about the war was so rampant that Ukraine asked Apple to intervene. The government requested that the tech giant use its leverage to push Telegram to remove certain fake accounts run from Russia. By April, Telegram had taken down the accounts.
But the resolution came with a twist. Telegram also briefly blocked several Ukrainian government-run accounts that let citizens share information about Russian troop movements. Ukrainian officials viewed the move as a thinly veiled warning: Pressuring the company too hard could come at a cost.
“It was unspoken, but it was a threat,” Mr. Yurchyshyn said.
Telegram confirmed it took down the fake accounts after receiving a request from Apple, but said the Ukrainian channels were erroneously removed and were reinstated within hours. The company said it was developing tools to combat disinformation, including new fact-checking features.
Mr. Fedorov, the digital minister, said in a statement that he had requested assistance from Apple in communicating with Telegram as “part of our ongoing work with all platforms that have such extensive reach and cover the war in Ukraine.”
Apple declined to comment.

After a September meeting of Ukraine’s National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity, use of the app was limited in the government and military. Some universities have also banned the app.
Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s top intelligence official, publicly warned about Telegram’s threats, but said he did not believe it should be blocked altogether. He has called for the abolishment of anonymity for administrators of large channels. Telegram has long argued that anonymity is key to protecting users.
Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, has publicly warned about Telegram’s risks and has called for a prohibition on anonymity for administrators of large channels.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
Russia has its own concerns about Telegram. After Mr. Durov’s arrest in France in August, Russian commentators and military analysts publicly raised alarms about the country’s own reliance on the app, saying he could give Western intelligence services access to private data.
In Ukraine, Mr. Durov’s arrest emboldened efforts to curtail Telegram. Mr. Yurchyshyn said he was working on legislation to add warnings, akin to those on cigarette packets, that remind users that the information on the platform may be unreliable and that the operators of channels are anonymous.
But he acknowledged that any new rules were unlikely to diminish Telegram’s sway.
“Who wants to be the politician or leader to take responsibility for banning such a popular network?” Mr. Yurchyshyn said.
Sasha Maslov contributed reporting from Kyiv.
Drones swarm Kyiv every night. These volunteers shoot them down.
A searchlight, a World War II-era machine gun and lots of caffeine help a band of volunteers protect the night skies over Ukraine’s capital.

December 15, 2024 - By Siobhán O'Grady, Serhii Korolchuk and Serhiy Morgunov
Nearly three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv is still using unpaid volunteers manning antiquated weapons to shoot down the daily swarms of drones targeting the capital, underscoring the government’s urgent requests to partners for new air defense systems.
In the past two months, Russia has dramatically ramped up its air assaults on Kyiv and other major cities, killing and wounding civilians and destroying energy infrastructure across the country. At least 165 civilians were killed and nearly 900 wounded in Ukraine in November, the United Nations reported. Ninety-three percent of those casualties occurred in Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Despite Russian threats to deploy nuclear-grade missiles against Ukraine, Moscow more often targets Ukraine with Iranian-designed drones called Shaheds. Use of these 11-foot-long winged drones that crash into their targets has nearly doubled since September: That month, Russia launched about 1,300 of them. By November, the count had reached 2,500.
![]()
In Kyiv, Territorial Defense volunteers spend cold December nights on a rooftop monitoring the skies for Russian drone attacks.
The few U.S.-made Patriot missile air defense systems Ukraine has received are largely dedicated to shooting down more dangerous guided missiles. Shaheds, however, are small enough — and slow enough — that they can be taken down by machine guns.
This job often falls to civilian volunteers working several 12-hour shifts a week, manning guns at mobile and static air defense positions around the city. Many work regular jobs by day and shoot down drones by night.
Washington Post journalists embedded with one such unit from Ukraine’s Mriya volunteer formation for a 12-hour overnight shift in Kyiv starting at 9 p.m. on Dec. 1. That night, Russia launched 110 attack drones, including Shaheds. Ukrainian forces shot down 52. Another 50 were lost en route, which Ukraine’s air force attributed to its military’s successful disruption of their signals through electronic warfare.
By 8:30 the next morning, one Shahed was still circling over Ukraine.
![]()
Mriya volunteers with a machine gun on a rooftop. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
It was just after 9 on a Sunday night, and maps on a Ukrainian military app showed a swarm of drones heading toward the capital.
Seven men in military uniforms, ranging in age from mid-30s to late 60s, huddled inside a small room on the roof of a high-rise building in Kyiv. They made coffee and tea and started cutting up a cake to eat as they awaited orders to man their World War II-era Maxim 7.62mm twin machine gun.
![]()
Oleksandr Muzyka, 53, commander of a Mriya formation. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
Artem, a musician from the eastern city of Donetsk, monitored the drones on a tablet as they moved toward the capital.
“We are on high alert; drones are already in the Kyiv region,” he said. Then he pointed to the table: “We should eat the cake now, while it’s fresh.”
For two years, Mriya volunteers have used this location, which The Post agreed not to reveal because of concerns it would be targeted, as an air defense position to protect the city against Russian drones. Story continues below advertisement
From the roof, the volunteers monitor the live military maps and then move to the gun outside if the air alert goes off. They scan the sky for drones with their searchlight and listen carefully for the distinctive hum. If it gets within their designated shooting zone, one volunteer mans the Maxim gun and another feeds the bullets, like a scene from an old war movie.
At 9:41 p.m., the map showed a Shahed was approaching Ukraine’s long-shuttered international airport just outside the capital. By 9:49, the air raid sirens were blaring.
The men rushed outside, fastening their helmets and removing a cover hiding the gun from view.
![]()
Mriya volunteers before their shift starts. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
Two years ago, this rooftop was empty. Then Russia started launching Shaheds at Ukraine.
Serhii Sas, a former Constitutional Court judge who now serves as the commander of Mriya, saw one fly right over his head — and realized he might not need much more than a gun to shoot it down.
The military agreed to provide Sas’s volunteer unit with bullets and weapons, including the 1944 Maxim twin machine gun. The rest, the volunteers have bought themselves, such as the flak jackets, helmets, hand warmers, camouflage uniforms and food supplies — including the cake.
In 2022 and 2023, the city of Kyiv provided bonuses to the unit’s volunteers of about $550 over two years. They have not been paid yet this year.
![]()
Serhii Sas, 67, a former judge on Ukraine's Constitutional Court and former air assault soldier in the Soviet military. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
“We would like to see much more support, not so much in monetary terms but in technical assistance,” Sas said. “I believe this is within the capability of the Kyiv city government.”
The volunteers say they need more gear, such as thermal imagers, tablets, projectors and laser pointers. “These are not large expenses, really. But this is exactly what would improve the effectiveness of our work,” Sas said.
Roman Tkachuk, director of the security branch of Kyiv City Council, said bonuses are planned again for 2024. Material and technical support for such units, he wrote in a message, can be facilitated through territorial defense commanders.
![]()
A Mriya volunteer checks his tablet for drones. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
Outside, the sound of gunfire echoed in the distance as other air defense positions fired at the drone. The Mriya volunteers stood on the ready — they could hear its hum nearby through the fog. But it never entered their firing zone.
When the siren shut off, they stepped back inside to warm up from temperatures hovering around freezing.
Then it blared again. And again. And again. The threats came and went all night long: air alert, increased air alert, all clear.
The men moved in and out, helmets off, helmets on. They took turns warming up inside, boiling water for tea, grabbing hand and foot warmers — and telling stories of how they get sick again and again from standing in the cold.
Around 12:30 a.m., Oleksii Tkachenko, 50, came inside for his break. He described how his wife, Anastasiia, and 4-year-old son, Mark, moved to Ireland to avoid these sleepless nights. “It’s better to live separately and eventually win than to live together under Russia.”
![]()
![]()
Serhii Zamidra, 46, former mayor of a small town in the Kyiv region, is now a Mriya volunteer. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
Like many in Ukraine, Tkachenko sees the nightly flocks of drones as a sign that Moscow lacks enough missiles to regularly strike its targets deep inside Ukraine. Instead, it stockpiles them for occasional large-scale attacks. In the meantime, it relies on the cheaper drones to exhaust Ukraine’s air defense systems and provoke general anxiety among civilians.
Serhii Zamidra, 46, came in for his turn to warm up. The drones had split off to the west, and the next alert might come in 40 minutes, he said as he boiled more water for coffee.
At 1:10 a.m., explosions were reported in the western city of Ternopil. A Shahed had struck a residential building, killing one person and wounding several others.
![]()
Mriya volunteers try to spot drones approaching Kyiv. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
The Shaheds often change course again and again, triggering air alarms in various regions of the country before they strike a target or are shot out of the sky. These attacks have helped Russia destabilize Ukraine’s energy system during the coldest and darkest days of the year, with recent strikes plunging some cities into days-long blackouts and forcing others, including Kyiv, to adapt to rolling power outages.
“Every time, the team must stay up all night like this,” Zamidra said. “Then go home and go to work.”
The near-nightly assaults also terrify civilians, who wake up to sirens and rush to cold basements, corridors and train stations to take cover. Often, just after the alert is declared over, another wave of drones will trigger a new one, sending them scrambling for cover again.
At 1:39 a.m., the siren sounded again.
“It sometimes lasts the whole day,” volunteer Maksym Krutsevych, 49, said. “We feel it physically. We have to stay in all the gear. It takes a toll.”
![]()
Maksym Krutsevych, 49, a lawyer who owns an auto shop. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
At 2:37 a.m., after the air raid alarm had shut off, Ihor Bielski, 67, carried the light inside. Maybe the volunteers would now get a bit of rest.
Four hours later, the alarm was back on. The men stood by the gun as the sun rose over the city.
At 7:06 a.m., the air alert shut off. The shift was almost over.
Some would go home to rest; others would go home to shower and head to work. At least one would come back that night. Others would return to the cold rooftop in the coming days.
Zamidra sometimes gets home in time to drop his 4-year-old daughter off at kindergarten on his way to work.
The air raid alerts he monitors all night, he said, have turned into a game for Ukrainian children.
“They sit in the sandbox, and then someone shouts, ‘Air raid!’” he said. “They start running around the playground, hiding, playing tag — just like we used to play back in the day.
“But for them, the game now is air raid alerts, unfortunately.”
Nearly three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv is still using unpaid volunteers manning antiquated weapons to shoot down the daily swarms of drones targeting the capital, underscoring the government’s urgent requests to partners for new air defense systems.
In the past two months, Russia has dramatically ramped up its air assaults on Kyiv and other major cities, killing and wounding civilians and destroying energy infrastructure across the country. At least 165 civilians were killed and nearly 900 wounded in Ukraine in November, the United Nations reported. Ninety-three percent of those casualties occurred in Ukrainian-controlled territory.
Despite Russian threats to deploy nuclear-grade missiles against Ukraine, Moscow more often targets Ukraine with Iranian-designed drones called Shaheds. Use of these 11-foot-long winged drones that crash into their targets has nearly doubled since September: That month, Russia launched about 1,300 of them. By November, the count had reached 2,500.

In Kyiv, Territorial Defense volunteers spend cold December nights on a rooftop monitoring the skies for Russian drone attacks.
The few U.S.-made Patriot missile air defense systems Ukraine has received are largely dedicated to shooting down more dangerous guided missiles. Shaheds, however, are small enough — and slow enough — that they can be taken down by machine guns.
This job often falls to civilian volunteers working several 12-hour shifts a week, manning guns at mobile and static air defense positions around the city. Many work regular jobs by day and shoot down drones by night.
Washington Post journalists embedded with one such unit from Ukraine’s Mriya volunteer formation for a 12-hour overnight shift in Kyiv starting at 9 p.m. on Dec. 1. That night, Russia launched 110 attack drones, including Shaheds. Ukrainian forces shot down 52. Another 50 were lost en route, which Ukraine’s air force attributed to its military’s successful disruption of their signals through electronic warfare.
By 8:30 the next morning, one Shahed was still circling over Ukraine.

Mriya volunteers with a machine gun on a rooftop. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
It was just after 9 on a Sunday night, and maps on a Ukrainian military app showed a swarm of drones heading toward the capital.
Seven men in military uniforms, ranging in age from mid-30s to late 60s, huddled inside a small room on the roof of a high-rise building in Kyiv. They made coffee and tea and started cutting up a cake to eat as they awaited orders to man their World War II-era Maxim 7.62mm twin machine gun.

Oleksandr Muzyka, 53, commander of a Mriya formation. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
Artem, a musician from the eastern city of Donetsk, monitored the drones on a tablet as they moved toward the capital.
“We are on high alert; drones are already in the Kyiv region,” he said. Then he pointed to the table: “We should eat the cake now, while it’s fresh.”
For two years, Mriya volunteers have used this location, which The Post agreed not to reveal because of concerns it would be targeted, as an air defense position to protect the city against Russian drones. Story continues below advertisement
From the roof, the volunteers monitor the live military maps and then move to the gun outside if the air alert goes off. They scan the sky for drones with their searchlight and listen carefully for the distinctive hum. If it gets within their designated shooting zone, one volunteer mans the Maxim gun and another feeds the bullets, like a scene from an old war movie.
At 9:41 p.m., the map showed a Shahed was approaching Ukraine’s long-shuttered international airport just outside the capital. By 9:49, the air raid sirens were blaring.
The men rushed outside, fastening their helmets and removing a cover hiding the gun from view.

Mriya volunteers before their shift starts. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
Two years ago, this rooftop was empty. Then Russia started launching Shaheds at Ukraine.
Serhii Sas, a former Constitutional Court judge who now serves as the commander of Mriya, saw one fly right over his head — and realized he might not need much more than a gun to shoot it down.
The military agreed to provide Sas’s volunteer unit with bullets and weapons, including the 1944 Maxim twin machine gun. The rest, the volunteers have bought themselves, such as the flak jackets, helmets, hand warmers, camouflage uniforms and food supplies — including the cake.
In 2022 and 2023, the city of Kyiv provided bonuses to the unit’s volunteers of about $550 over two years. They have not been paid yet this year.

Serhii Sas, 67, a former judge on Ukraine's Constitutional Court and former air assault soldier in the Soviet military. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
“We would like to see much more support, not so much in monetary terms but in technical assistance,” Sas said. “I believe this is within the capability of the Kyiv city government.”
The volunteers say they need more gear, such as thermal imagers, tablets, projectors and laser pointers. “These are not large expenses, really. But this is exactly what would improve the effectiveness of our work,” Sas said.
Roman Tkachuk, director of the security branch of Kyiv City Council, said bonuses are planned again for 2024. Material and technical support for such units, he wrote in a message, can be facilitated through territorial defense commanders.

A Mriya volunteer checks his tablet for drones. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
Outside, the sound of gunfire echoed in the distance as other air defense positions fired at the drone. The Mriya volunteers stood on the ready — they could hear its hum nearby through the fog. But it never entered their firing zone.
When the siren shut off, they stepped back inside to warm up from temperatures hovering around freezing.
Then it blared again. And again. And again. The threats came and went all night long: air alert, increased air alert, all clear.
The men moved in and out, helmets off, helmets on. They took turns warming up inside, boiling water for tea, grabbing hand and foot warmers — and telling stories of how they get sick again and again from standing in the cold.
Around 12:30 a.m., Oleksii Tkachenko, 50, came inside for his break. He described how his wife, Anastasiia, and 4-year-old son, Mark, moved to Ireland to avoid these sleepless nights. “It’s better to live separately and eventually win than to live together under Russia.”

Serhii Zamidra, 46, former mayor of a small town in the Kyiv region, is now a Mriya volunteer. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
Like many in Ukraine, Tkachenko sees the nightly flocks of drones as a sign that Moscow lacks enough missiles to regularly strike its targets deep inside Ukraine. Instead, it stockpiles them for occasional large-scale attacks. In the meantime, it relies on the cheaper drones to exhaust Ukraine’s air defense systems and provoke general anxiety among civilians.
Serhii Zamidra, 46, came in for his turn to warm up. The drones had split off to the west, and the next alert might come in 40 minutes, he said as he boiled more water for coffee.
At 1:10 a.m., explosions were reported in the western city of Ternopil. A Shahed had struck a residential building, killing one person and wounding several others.

Mriya volunteers try to spot drones approaching Kyiv. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
The Shaheds often change course again and again, triggering air alarms in various regions of the country before they strike a target or are shot out of the sky. These attacks have helped Russia destabilize Ukraine’s energy system during the coldest and darkest days of the year, with recent strikes plunging some cities into days-long blackouts and forcing others, including Kyiv, to adapt to rolling power outages.
“Every time, the team must stay up all night like this,” Zamidra said. “Then go home and go to work.”
The near-nightly assaults also terrify civilians, who wake up to sirens and rush to cold basements, corridors and train stations to take cover. Often, just after the alert is declared over, another wave of drones will trigger a new one, sending them scrambling for cover again.
At 1:39 a.m., the siren sounded again.
“It sometimes lasts the whole day,” volunteer Maksym Krutsevych, 49, said. “We feel it physically. We have to stay in all the gear. It takes a toll.”

Maksym Krutsevych, 49, a lawyer who owns an auto shop. (Sasha Maslov for The Washington Post)
At 2:37 a.m., after the air raid alarm had shut off, Ihor Bielski, 67, carried the light inside. Maybe the volunteers would now get a bit of rest.
Four hours later, the alarm was back on. The men stood by the gun as the sun rose over the city.
At 7:06 a.m., the air alert shut off. The shift was almost over.
Some would go home to rest; others would go home to shower and head to work. At least one would come back that night. Others would return to the cold rooftop in the coming days.
Zamidra sometimes gets home in time to drop his 4-year-old daughter off at kindergarten on his way to work.
The air raid alerts he monitors all night, he said, have turned into a game for Ukrainian children.
“They sit in the sandbox, and then someone shouts, ‘Air raid!’” he said. “They start running around the playground, hiding, playing tag — just like we used to play back in the day.
“But for them, the game now is air raid alerts, unfortunately.”
The Unicorn Battalion
LGBTQ soldiers of Ukraine fight for the country and their rights amidst the chaos of war.
On a rainy June day in the center of Kyiv, pride flags, Ukrainian and European Union flags were getting soaked. About 500 people gathered for a Pride march that will last only an hour and will span just about a hundred meters. The city of Kyiv and the police gave a permit for the march but limited it to one and a half city blocks, citing security concerns.
It wasn't a typical pride the residents of New York, Berlin, or Amsterdam would expect to see on the streets of their cities. The first two rows of the parade goers were either active duty military or veterans holding signs calling upon the EU and other partners of Ukraine to provide more weapons. Other signs were calling for an end to the Russian genocide of Ukrainians, for demining systems, and to free Azovstal defenders - prisoners of war held in Russia and reportedly tortured. There were slogans for equality, for a bill to legalize civil partnerships, and to give protections to LGBTQ people.
Now, with her fiancé, Diana Harasko, by her side, Maria embodies resilience and defiance, having faced overwhelming homophobia and challenges on the frontlines.
Maria Volia, 31, and her fiancé Diana Harasko, 25, stood in the first rows holding hands. For Maria, a servicewoman of the 47th Brigade, this moment had been a long way coming.
Last year, on October 24th, 2022, Maria has given up. She was on the phone with Diana and told her she would be taking her life. She planned to do it with an overdose of Gidazepam, a selectively anxiolytic benzodiazepine, which is typically prescribed for anxiety and panic attacks.
LGBTQ soldiers of Ukraine fight for the country and their rights amidst the chaos of war.
On a rainy June day in the center of Kyiv, pride flags, Ukrainian and European Union flags were getting soaked. About 500 people gathered for a Pride march that will last only an hour and will span just about a hundred meters. The city of Kyiv and the police gave a permit for the march but limited it to one and a half city blocks, citing security concerns.
It wasn't a typical pride the residents of New York, Berlin, or Amsterdam would expect to see on the streets of their cities. The first two rows of the parade goers were either active duty military or veterans holding signs calling upon the EU and other partners of Ukraine to provide more weapons. Other signs were calling for an end to the Russian genocide of Ukrainians, for demining systems, and to free Azovstal defenders - prisoners of war held in Russia and reportedly tortured. There were slogans for equality, for a bill to legalize civil partnerships, and to give protections to LGBTQ people.

Now, with her fiancé, Diana Harasko, by her side, Maria embodies resilience and defiance, having faced overwhelming homophobia and challenges on the frontlines.
Maria Volia, 31, and her fiancé Diana Harasko, 25, stood in the first rows holding hands. For Maria, a servicewoman of the 47th Brigade, this moment had been a long way coming.
Last year, on October 24th, 2022, Maria has given up. She was on the phone with Diana and told her she would be taking her life. She planned to do it with an overdose of Gidazepam, a selectively anxiolytic benzodiazepine, which is typically prescribed for anxiety and panic attacks.
Diana and Maria have been dating for just a few weeks. It's been about three months since Diana, a civilian volunteer from Bila Tsekrva, messaged Maria on Instagram, responding to one of the stories from muddy trenches near Bakhmut. "How are you? Although it's probably a stupid question given your circumstances", the message said. After a couple of weeks of exchanging messages online, Diana came to Kramatorsk and proposed on a first date.
Now she listened to Maria's raspy voice saying her final goodbye. Diana panicky dialed the number of Maria's commander. Thankfully he picked up the phone. A few minutes later medics were rushing to Maria.
Three weeks after her suicide attempt, I met Maria for the first time. In the visitor's room of the Acute Psychiatric Ward for Women at a large hospital complex outside of Dnipro, she was sitting at a table with a plastic tablecloth, wearing her fleece with a rainbow badge, not exactly sure how she got there.

"I don't have a home anymore, I don't have any rights. What am I fighting for?", she asked me. Her frustration built up from a feeling of not being accepted or understood by her people and her country even after almost ten years of service.
Maria volunteered in the Army at 22 after seeing Russia taking Crimea and sparking the war in Eastern Ukraine. Her city, Mariupol, was briefly taken over by pro-Russian separatists, and liberating it was one of the more significant wins for the Ukrainians in the summer of 2014. After signing up for the service, it wasn't long before she noticed signs of sexism from the soldiers around her. She'd hear things like "war is not a place for a woman" and see how male soldiers were treated with more trust and respect by the command.
She wanted to prove herself. Full of idealism, she fought for the right to be assigned to the front. Eventually, she got deployed to Pisky as a radio specialist with the 56th Brigade, where one of the fiercest battles for the Donetsk airport took place.
After active deployment, she stayed in the service and was stationed in her hometown with the 56th Brigade until winter 2022. And that is when the city became a place of a brutal stalemate between encircled Ukrainian troops and the massive, overwhelming force of the invading Russian Army. After taking heavy losses, her unit, along with the soldiers from the 36th Marine Brigade and the 1st Marine Battalion, got barricaded in the Illych metal factory. They attempted to break through the encirclement and leave the city. On the first attempt, they used armored vehicles and failed. The second attempt, this time on foot, paid off, and they could bypass the Russian patrols and checkpoints unscathed and unnoticed and sneak out from the besieged city shortly after midnight of March 12.
They were a group of 45 soldiers walking silently in the dead of night. Ahead laid an arduous journey through the forests and steppe of the Donetsk region to reach Ukrainian-controlled territory. With no cell reception, limited provisions and no information on where the current front line is, they ventured into freezing thick darkness.
The group stayed in abandoned houses, hunted for rabbits, and cooked chickens they stole from deserted farms. They split into three groups of fifteen to avoid detection - one later being captured by the Russians. Maria's group got spotted by Russian soldiers on the 8th day of their march when they were attempting to cross a river near the village of Staromaiske - just a few kilometers away from the Ukrainian-controlled territories at the time. A firefight ensued, and Maria took a bullet in her left arm. But the river crossing was a success. They reached Velyka Novosilivka and a Ukrainian checkpoint five hours after that fight.
On the edge of passing out and with a tourniquet on her arm, she was taken to a hospital. On the 21st of March, Maria sat on a hospital bed, filmed by her friend Nastya smiling and saying that she couldn't wait to go to Dnipro and get a takeaway from McDonalds.
But the McDonalds in Dnipro was closed, like most other businesses. The country was scrambling to fight its land-hungry neighbor's massive invasion, and the ever-changing frontline was burning. Ukraine needed its soldiers, and Maria, yet again, was sent into the thick of it, now towards Bakhmut in the Donetsk region.
The previous experience made Maria reevaluate things, and she decided to speak freely about her sexuality. Her injury and the realization of how fragile everything around her was made her not care about other people's opinions.
After coming out as a lesbian to her brothers-in-arms, she started talking publicly about her experience of being a queer person in the service. Her posts on social media about life in trenches near Bakhmut attracted attention from both supporters and critics.
Homophobic comments and messages were piling up and were so overwhelming that they were pushing Maria to depression. Her fragility, caused by her recent experience in Mariupol, her coming out, and being sent back to the front were among the things that pushed her to attempt suicide. “I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I didn’t want to even try…” she said.
Maria, with support from Diana, has eventually recovered and recently transferred to the 47th Brigade. She now serves on the Eastern front and took a leave to visit the Kyiv Pride. A day before the Pride march in Kyiv, she came upon a group of young people, most of them teenagers holding banners supporting "Traditional Values," and argued with them, filming herself. The next day, during Pride, she held her fiancé's hand in defiance of all those who disapprove of her way of loving someone.
After the speeches were over, flags and banners folded, the crowd slowly dispersed. Not five blocks away on Khreschatyk Street, a few hundred people - mostly young men wearing black shirts and hoodies spilled out of another gathering for "Traditional Values." Tipped off where the Pride was held, they ran, clashing with the police and desiring to reach the Pride goers. It didn't matter to them that they were running to fight people who were actively defending their country.
Most Ukrainians had generally disapproving views on non-heterosexual unions before the war, but polls show that public opinion has shifted considerably during the full-scale invasion. The most recent poll conducted by the National Democratic Institute and released in February 2024, had more than 70 percent positively answering the question "Should LGBT+ people have the same rights as others?" while in 2019, the number was below 30%.
But Ukrainian legislation is lagging far behind. Despite years of campaigning from various human rights and LGBTQ organizations as well as well as pressure from the EU, the Ukrainian Parliament hasn't passed hate-crime laws to include acts against gay or trans people. Besides that, any non-heterosexual union is not recognized by the law, and the Ukrainian Constitution states that marriage is a union of a man and a woman.
Inna Sovsun, a 39-year-old Ukrainian MP from the Holos party, is trying to address the most pressing issue for non-heterosexual couples in the time of the war, especially those who serve - to pass a law that will give the same protections a traditionally married couple would have under Ukrainian laws. One of the most urgent needs for LGBTQ service members in wartime Ukraine is basic legal recognition for their partners or spouses as a family member.

For now - a same-sex couple, or any non-heterosexual couple, has zero legal rights as a unit. For military families it plays a particular importance in cases of death, disappearance, being taken prisoner or being seriously injured. Your partner, in the eyes of the law, is a stranger to you and, therefore, can not make legal, medical, posthumous, or any other decisions a heterosexual partner in a moment of crisis would have access to.
The bill with the number 9103 was registered in the Ukrainian Parliament in March 2023 but has yet to make its way to the Ukrainian Parliament's floor for the vote. It has passed some important milestones, receiving approval from the Minister of Justice and the Ministry of Defense. However, after a year and a half since its registration, it is still unclear when the bill will be voted on, if ever. As of now, it seems hopelessly stuck in the Ukrainian Parliament’s Committee on Legal Policy, which is tasked to give the bill a legal mark and vote for it to be either passed on to the floor of the Parliament or to another committee or to be killed altogether.
Inna Sovsun co-wrote the bill with a lawyer Maria Klyus, whose close friend, Petro Zhyrukha is a bisexual man serving in the Ukrainian Army. Petro is one of a rather small group of Ukrainian servicemen who are open and public about their sexual orientation.
Petro is 28. He is a classically trained musician who never imagined being in the army. However, he felt compelled to defend his homeland against Russian aggression and volunteered immediately after the invasion.
Initially, his sexuality wasn't an issue, but as homophobic jokes began to surface, Petro found himself needing to adjust his behavior to fit in with his new surroundings. He'd laugh at the jokes and try to fit in.
Once, his commanders said he hoped that his unit had none of "those people". Petro felt queasy. On another occasion, a soldier from his unit said that he'd "kill a faggot” if he saw one.
His parents never knew, and neither did his fellow soldiers. But at some point, Petro got tired of hiding this part of his identity and decided to come out. "I chose this hetero-membrane and had to modify my speech, behavior… I didn't want to do it anymore". In June of 2022, after four months of service, he told the people from his unit. The reaction was bad. There were looks and whispers. Other soldiers didn't want to stand in line for showers with him or sit next to him. But little by little, conversation by conversation, things have shifted. A guy who said he'd "kill a faggot” if he saw one, after meeting Petro said that now he would not. He'd never met a gay person before, he explained.
Maria Klyus, Petro's friend and a deputy of Inna Sovsun was worried about him. Petro thought she was losing sleep over his coming out. One day, Maria called Petro and told him about the bill they were drafting. He was shocked. He was in disbelief that someone would do such a titanic amount of work to protect him and others like him. Although the bill covers a wide area and benefits any civil partnership, he took the gesture very personally and wanted to support it however he could.
At that point, not many outside his unit knew about his sexuality, and he initially intended to keep it that way. But after a phone call with Maria, he decided he would start a government petition to support the bill. This meant putting his name on a piece of paper that would reveal his sexual orientation to everyone. "If I'm not ready now, when will I be?" he asked himself.

However, he never came out to his parents. Understanding the impact and publicity this gesture would result in, he knew his name would become public, and he didn't want them to find out from the news.
Petro placed a call to his father and asked to be put on speakerphone. After an exchange of How are you's, he said, "I have to share something very important to me," and paused before saying that he likes men as well as women. His mom immediately yelled at him, saying, "Petro, my god, I thought someone died!". His father said calmly that he will always shake his hand no matter who he liked.
Petro's heart soared. His whole adult life, he had been afraid of this moment, and there it was—a gigantic stone had been lifted off his chest.
With the help of an NGO, he drafted a petition in support of Bill 9103 and registered it on the President's website. Petitions like that have no legal ramifications, but they are intended to show support from the public. Once a petition collects 25000 signatures, it lands on the President's desk, and the President writes their recommendations and comments. Once the petition was online, the social media frenzy has started. Petro's phone started lighting up every few minutes - dozens of messages and calls with words of support, appreciation and, sometimes, disbelief. Now Petro has come out to the entire country.
"I was free", he said. The soldier who wanted to "kill a faggot” when he saw one, said that he'll sign the petition.
The Army officials try to avoid the subject of LGBTQ rights like it's an infectious disease, and when the circumstances require addressing any questions regarding gay or trans service members, the Ministry and the Army officials typically try to exhibit plausible deniability. In a note of non-support that the Ministry of Defense issued in response to Bill 9103 shortly after its introduction, it originally was stated that "the information about thousands of military servicemen who cannot officially formalize their relationships with same-sex partners, set out in the explanatory note to the draft law, needs additional study due to the lack of relevant data in the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine."
In a move that was seen as awkward and cringeworthy by many LGBTQ rights activists, the Ministry of Defence has decided to conduct such a study by issuing a poll among some of the service members, basically asking, "Are you gay?".
"Questionnaire for the study of issues of sexual orientation, the need for registering of civil partnerships and issues in this specific area" - a printed form containing seven questions about gender discrimination within the unit where the respondent served, sexual preference in choosing a partner, and question on either a respondent, if in a same-sex relationship, potentially would face "problems" with inheritance if they were to be injured, killed or declared missing in action.
Maksym was one of the servicemen who received this questionnaire. His description of the process painted a picture of a lack of education, empathy, and basic humility among those tasked with collecting answers.
Maksym, a closeted gay man in the ranks of the Ukrainian Air Force, recounted how, one morning, a senior officer in his company distributed the questionnaire without any explanation. The attitude seemed to be: here is a pen and paper, do whatever you want. The crowd around Maksym became rowdy, with gay insults and jokes filling the room. Some airmen declined to fill out the questionnaire. Maksym later saw one form lying on a table marked with big block letters saying, "I'M NOT A FAG."
The officer returned later to collect the forms, sometimes peering at them as he picked them up from the pilots. "That was a mockery of anonymity," said Maksym. Later, the same officer returned with a few more forms, saying they needed to be filled out to meet the quota. A few airmen were absent—either injured or on leave—and the command required the exact number of forms to be returned. "Who wants to help out with the fag test?" the officer asked.
It's unclear what the fate of this poll was, and whether it led to anything. The body tasked with addressing equality within the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Department of Humanitarian Support of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, has not responded to repeated attempts to contact them regarding this article.
After speaking with four MOD staffers, none of whom wanted to go on record, and after going through Ministry's documents online, I was not able to find a single official program dedicated to fighting discrimination against LGBTQ personnel or educating rank and file on the LGBTQ topics, or even an acknowledgment that queer people are in the ranks. The Ministry of Defense does have a hotline for sexual abuse and violence, as well as mechanisms for handling it.
An openly gay staffer of the Ministry of Defence who also did not want to go on record told me that people who are responsible for equality and gender issues often lack basic knowledge about anything that goes beyond the manual issued by the Ministry.

At the same time, the same person told me that they understand that there are much more pressing issues for the country in times of war, and unless there is an overwhelming problem in the Armed Forces that needs addressing, it's often put on the back burner.
Questions related to LGBTQ issues in Ukraine have already created some headaches for the current government. A recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights involved two Ukrainians, Andriy Maymulakhin and Andriy Markiv, who claimed that the Ukrainian government denied them the same rights afforded to heterosexual couples. The couple has cohabitated since 2010 but has been unable to register as domestic partners. According to their filing, they attempted to register as a married couple on seven occasions, but all applications were denied. After the Russian invasion in February 2022, Mr. Mykhaylovych joined the National Guard and served for a year before being discharged for health reasons.
A Ukrainian judge in the European Court, Mykola Gnatovskyy, voted in favor of the decision. The Ukrainian government defense council used bill 9103 as a defense, claiming that Ukraine is already implementing the necessary laws to protect same-sex couples. The court, however, rejected the argument, citing that the bill is not yet a law. The European court's decision is now a pain in the neck for the Ukrainian government. Besides the restitution they must pay the couple, it now hangs over Ukraine's head on the path to the much-desired membership in the EU.
But from the Brussels courtrooms to Kyiv government corridors to muddy trenches near Avdiivka lies a great distance. While lawmakers, generals, and judges weigh in, LGBTQ Ukrainians who serve are experiencing not only a lack of recognition in the eyes of the law but also severe discrimination. Their stories and personal suffering often disappear into the abyss of endless death and destruction that overwhelms the entire country every single day. "It's not timely" rings across comments on social media from critics. "It's not timely," repeat the lawmakers at the Committee on Legal Policy, according to the transcripts of their most recent deliberations discussing Bill 9103 in July 2024. After having the bill on their agenda for over a year, it still has not been voted on.
But for those individuals, the personal trauma of not being recognized or respected for who they are is very timely. More so, it is ever-present.
Henadzi Aprosimau, a 25-year-old bisexual Belarusian man and a soldier in the ranks of the International Legion, crossed the Ukrainian border on a warm July night in 2020. He carried papers indicating he was entering the country for a medical procedure. Packed light, his belongings—slippers, shampoo, and a few pairs of underwear—fit into a single backpack.
Five days earlier, while at home in Minsk, Henadzi received a phone call from a nearby police precinct requesting he appear for a "friendly conversation." He knew what that meant. Several of his friends who attended such conversations were threatened with incarceration if they continued any "recidivist" activity, and some were already jailed.
Belarusian authorities were cracking down on any form of dissent following the ongoing anti-government protests in the country that summer, gradually imprisoning activists one by one. Journalists, students, doctors, and college professors were getting whisked from their apartments or off the streets, starting with those who were more visible.
Henadzi was an active participant in the protests, and his name appeared as an organizer in several social media posts; he knew the role that was already scripted for him by the Belarusian authorities. So he packed his bag and, after arranging logistics with BYSOL, an organization that helped Belarusian dissidents find a way out of the country, headed to Kyiv.
A newly found home suited Henadzi. After a few months had passed, he stopped being spooked by black vans and people in police uniforms. He found a place to live and continued with his activism from Kyiv. He surrounded himself with people from the diaspora, which had grown considerably after the new wave of repressions started in Belarus. "I was continuing to fight for Belarus", he says about his time in Kyiv.
But he was not planning to fight for Ukraine. The Ukrainian government had continued flirting with Lukashenko's dictatorship, and even though many Belarusian expats ended up in Kyiv seeking protection from the regime, it wasn't a safe space. Visa-free travel and lax security allowed Russian and Belarussian intelligence services to operate in Kyiv almost freely. In August 2021, one of the most vocal Belarusian activists, Vitaly Shishov, was found hanged in a forest not far from his apartment. The death was ruled a homicide and never solved. In 2022, Dzianis Stadzhi, a Belarusian journalist critical of the Belarusian regime who had lived in Ukraine since 2018, was beaten, tortured, and drugged for several days in his own apartment in Kyiv. When Dzianis stopped answering his wife's calls, she rushed to Kyiv from their family hideout in Western Ukraine and found him unconscious, tied up, and wrapped in plastic bags, inches from death. Their apartment was turned upside down, and electronic storage devices were stolen. Suspicion fell on Belarusian government operatives, but Ukrainian police did not arrest anyone in connection with the assault and torture.

Henadzi saw the war in Ukraine as the start of the liberation of Belarus. In March 2023, he enrolled in the International Legion, partially motivated by the thought that he would gather experience to continue the fight to liberate Belarus from the dictatorship when the time came. After three months of training, he was sent to the northern border with Russia, and then joined the fight on the Eastern Front.
Henadzi had been open with people in his life about his sexuality. It caused problems in the past - particularly a fallout with his religious family. But in the Army's structure, he felt it wasn't safe to talk openly about this part of his life. The rank and file in the International Legion are mostly foreign volunteers - mainly Americans and Europeans who, on average, have more progressive views, with Ukrainian commanders who are significantly more conservative and, according to Henadzi, occasionally openly homophobic. "I am trying to avoid this subject altogether," he told me. "I don't want to be shot in the back".
That seems like an overly dramatic fear, but in an environment that is numb to violence and where homophobia is rampant, being gay presents a real threat. In war, you rely on a person next to you for your well-being and, oftentimes, your life.
So besides being courageous and setting an example, for a service person who is open about their sexuality, it often means putting a target on their back.
When Henadzi was transferred to a new outpost in December 2023, a new deputy commander of the battalion noticed him wearing a patch featuring a unicorn - a symbol of the Ukrainian union called LGBT Military, and asked him, "What's this faggot thing doing on your uniform".
Henadzi held his tongue. His life depended on the decisions that this commander would make in the future.
The unicorn patches became a uniting symbol and an identifying mark of the LGBTQ community among the service members in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Issued by the LGBT Military Union - a grassroots organization fighting for the rights of the queer members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, both open and closeted - it has about 400 members, with less than a quarter of them being open. Victor Pylypenko, the founder of the union and the first openly gay man in the Ukrainian Military, has been at the forefront of defending those who decided to come out and protecting those who are not ready to do so.
Not carrying any specific weight besides being open about their sexuality, these patches are a statement. However, they open both doors for allies and homophobes, and by wearing them on their uniform, these soldiers accept a level of risk of being targeted.
"I know there are gay people in the military who are not interested in joining our group either maybe because they don't know about us or they aren't interested in potential unwanted publicity," says Viktor. Being outspoken himself, he has been paid back with multiple public attacks, mainly from the members of conservative groups, far-right organizations, pundits, as well as members of the clergy.

The most recent scandal was the recall of an award that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church decorated several members of Viktor's unit of the 72nd Mechanized Brigade for "Self-sacrifice and love for Ukraine," and then recalled his medal saying that the Philaret "did not know about the sinful tendencies" of one of the recipients of this medal. Then it was noted that "Patriarch Filaret and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church without exception takes a principled negative stand on the sin of Sodom and condemns the propaganda of the so-called same-sex marriages." After this embarrassing medal pirouette, several members of the 72nd Brigade have given back the award, most with harsh public criticism of the Church.
This is neither the first nor likely the last instance of confusion and tension over the divide in Ukrainian society on LGBTQ issues. Viktor has borne the brunt of these attacks as the public figure representing LGBTQ members of the Military. He has become a target not only for critics within the country but also for Russian propaganda, which tends to portray homosexuality as one of the poisonous fruits of the sinister Western World.
In the summer of 2021, even before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a rant by Olga Skabaeva, a Russian propagandist and pundit on Russian TV, really took the cake when she announced on her program that "President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, on the advice of American leader Joe Biden, is sending 'columns of Ukrainian homosexuals to Donbas'." This was based on an earlier announcement on the LGBT Military Facebook page that said, "We invite motivated LGBT+ people, military personnel, specialists, as well as people friendly to the LGBT+ community, who want to sign a contract with one of the motorized infantry units of the Armed Forces."
That announcement was immediately picked up and taken apart by right-wing and conservative powers in Ukraine and eventually made its way to Russian TV. A totally fictitious tale of the "Unicorn Battalion" was born.
Viktor, again, was fiercely criticized by people inside the country as an "agent of the Kremlin" while simultaneously providing more fuel to the never-idling Moscow propaganda and disinformation machine.
Neither the Unicorn Battalion nor a gay-friendly platoon was ever formed, but Viktor continued his fight. He recalls the words of one commander he served with who said to him "If the gays create their unit and call it the battalion of unicorns, then I will accept them." In a sort of cheeky response to criticism and falsehoods, the logo of the LGBT Military featuring a unicorn was created.

Victor's fight is a fight of other union members. One of the most prominent cases has become one of former sailor Pavlo Lagoyda.
Pavlo is 23 and now lives in Kyiv. He is one of the most outspoken members of the LGBT Military union, but, like Victor, he has been harassed and prosecuted for it. The same way he suffered for his desire and willingness to be open.
After being excommunicated from his family by his mother after being outed, Pavlo joined the Navy. It was September 2021, and he was just 19 years old. The big war loomed over Ukraine. A few months later, when the missiles were raining down on towns and villages all over the country, his mother called him: "I accept you for who you are," she said crying, "Just come back home alive." He wondered why the war and his being in the service was what it took his mother to appreciate him and show acceptance, but Pavlo now had to go to war.
According to Pavlo, the issues with his commander, Lieutenant Major Leonid Bondarenko, started soon after he found out about Pavlo's sexual orientation. Pavlo says he was outed by other sailors in his orlop when he left the phone unlocked and open on the communication with his ex. When he returned, he found his shipmates laughing. "So you're a fucking faggot?" one of them grinned at Pavlo.
Soon, everyone knew, including his direct superiors. Lieutenant Bondarenko not only allowed other soldiers to beat Pavlo but became an abuser himself. It started with jabs at his sexuality and verbal harassment and eventually escalated to physical violence.

The first beating took place on a night watch in the spring of 2022 when Pavlo was approached by Lieutenant Bondarenko and reprimanded verbally for looking at his phone. Pavlo said they argued, Lieutenant Bondarenko tackled him, pinned him on the floor, and beaten him. The second beating happened later in November in front of witnesses - this time over a quarrel on how to best unload a supply truck. Bondareko's superiors couldn't ignore it and re-stationed Pavlo but did not reprimand Bondarenko.
The text chain between Pavlo and his commander is volatile. Mr. Bondarenko calls Pavlo "a sociopath" and tells him he should be studied for medical journals because of his "sickness." Using profane terms, Pavlo responds with threats to sue him and the unit. Then it switches to even-toned conversations about reports and questions about switching units and demobilization. Strings of unanswered texts and calls appear first from Pavlo, then from Mr. Bondarenko.
From the phone and paper trail between them it seems like Mr. Bondarenko doesn't want Pavlo to go anywhere and enjoys the intricate and routine torture through his power over his subordinate. He sends him on meaningless tasks, to various medical and psychological examinations, but doesn't allow him to transfer or change the contract. Pavlo said he had sent him on two psych evaluations where doctors, without examining him, gave him a diagnosis that categorized him as "not fit for active duty." Lieutenant Bondarenko says the psych evaluations were not initiated by him and were done independently because sailor Lagoyda was trying to switch to contract service and switch to another unit.
Pavlo later appealed through the Ministry of Defence and was sent to an examination in Kyiv where the decision was overturned, and he was deemed healthy and fit for active duty. His lawyer confirms his account.
Lieutenant Bondarenko claims that he never saw the final diagnosis of psychiatric evaluation that Pavlo received on appeal, even though in the private text exchange with Pavlo he admits seeing the results simultaneously accusing Pavlo that they are a fake.
Lieutenant Bondarenko has also said to me that Sailor Lagoyda was just a bad soldier and an insubordinate one and was beaten by others not for being gay but for his general attitude and behavior. He also accused his subordinate of selling sex to other sailors. He didn't deny beating him himself.
In the sprint of 2024, a law was signed by President Zelenskyy allowing all conscripts who started their compulsory service before February 2024 to be demobilized. Pavlo at the time was desperately trying to change units. He jumped on the opportunity and put in his papers. A month later, he flipped his middle finger leaving his base. He was free from under his oppressor.

Bullying, harassment, and even physical violence are not unheard of in the Army. In many cases, the fate of a vulnerable person under someone's command depends on how the commander handles the situation. With the absence of education on LGBTQ+ topics among the rank and file of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, it often comes down to whether the commander will allow abuse or, as in Pavlo's case, perpetrate it himself.
But it's not always like that.
Oleksandr Zhuhan, 39, and Antonina Romanova, 38, met on a clear and warm September day of 2014. One of those autumn days when you still try to catch a last bit of disappearing summer. It was another era in Ukraine. A telltale sign of that was that they met through a Russian dating website that was still widely used in Ukraine even as Crimea was annexed, and the war in the East of Ukraine had already started.
Antonina has recently moved to Kyiv from Crimea, where, after being an active participant in pro-Ukrianian protests, her activism landed her on arrest lists. One of her activist friends, Oleg Sentsov, advised her to leave the peninsula. She did, while Oleg stayed, later being arrested himself and imprisoned for five years on bogus terrorism charges.
Oleksandr wasn't in a festive mood that evening. He was coming from a meeting where he was consoling a friend whose child was diagnosed with a complex form of autism. Antonina was wearing an old-fashioned ribbed jacket over a sweater. Oleksandr thought she looked ridiculous. They walked around with oversized takeaway cups, drank lattes, and talked. As it turned out, they had few things in common: kids with disabilities, their dispassion for Kyiv's broken infrastructure, and love for theater and art. They talked about Antonina's complex childhood, the multiple surgeries she had to undergo as a child, and her path from her lost home in Crimea to the capital. They sat by a group of teenagers, admiring the music kids played from a portable speaker. They caught the last subway train home.
Ten years later, Antonina and Oleksandr share a room in a dilapidated house a couple of kilometers from the active frontline. It's been a long journey since their first date on that warm Kyiv evening. Behind - an experimental theater troupe they started, plays and performances they staged together and separately, endless soirées and long nights after premieres. Their lives were full - teaching, performing, loving. They got a small apartment together and they were happy.
From that apartment, they were calling their actors to cancel the February 24th performance in the winter of 2022.
The big war has come to their lives. That night, Antonina asked "Should we join in?" and Oleksandr reluctantly agreed. The next day, they were signing their names onto the volunteer sheets at a local Territorial Defence chapter. There were men and women of all ages - some looked like they came straight from work; someone had come carrying their belongings in a suitcase, a burly-looking man was wearing a cowboy hat, and one guy brought a hunting rifle.
Looking at this motley crew, Oleksandr thought to himself, "If they can do it, we can, too."
Fear of not being understood was, undoubtedly, present. "I thought to myself - there will be all these combat-ready meatheads, and who am I, a little theater teacher," Oleksandr says. But to their surprise, their status as a queer couple was met with understanding. They were open about it from the start of their deployment, and the word spread. By the time they got sent to the South after the Kyiv campaign, their commanders and fellow soldiers all knew that "there are gays" serving with them.
At the end of May 2022, their company was sent to Mykolaiv. Antonina and Oleksandr reported to the morning alignment, where a new master sergeant introduced himself. "I know there is a gay couple among your ranks", he barked. Antonina's heart fell. "I do not care! As long as you are good soldiers, we won't have any issues". He followed, "I won't tolerate any discrimination".

Without an official policy on same-sex couples from the Ministry of Defense, things like that are up to lower-ranking commanders. Some, like that master sergeant, addressed what he treated as a potential issue among his rank and set the record straight from the get-go, but most often it falls on the shoulders of people like Oleksandr and Antonina to educate their fellow soldiers on LGBTQ+ topics.
"It isn't our job to teach them," says Oleksandr. But when Oleksandr starts talking about LGBTQ community online, he faces criticism, and often from the military personnel - that he is using his uniform to propagate LGBTQ values. And that annoys him. "I would have had a much wider platform elsewhere to fight for equal rights," Oleksandr notes. "And my goal in the Army is the same as everyone else here: to win this war."
Thus, each individual experience varies depending on a commanding officer's education and prejudices. In Antonina and Oleksandr's cases, they lucked out at every stage of their service. In June 2022, they were introduced to a new commanding officer, who asked Antonina which pronounce he should use when addressing her. "It was his first question to me," Anotnina recalls. "I was stunned".
Antonina is a non-binary person who uses "she/her" pronouns. She and Oleksandr are incredibly close, although they stopped dating about a year ago. "We've been together for 10 years through fire and water," Antonina says. I am certain I will never have a tighter relationship with anyone else in this life."
They sit together in a dimly lit room like they sat ten years ago on cold asphalt listening to teenagers play music with their lattes in paper cups on that warm Kyiv evening. The active front, where they were just hours ago, is a short drive away. They will repeat that drive shortly after I leave, not as a couple, or lovers, or old friends but as two service members of the Ukrainian Armed Forces heading on another task fighting for their country and for their right to be who they are for themselves and for the generations ahead of them. Despite the difficulties they have faced, their love keeps them going. It fights for them as they fight for their country.
Love is what also kept Anna Kazhan going all her life. Anna is a medic in the 47th Brigade and someone who has gone against the grain most of her life. Her call sign, Kazhan, means Bat in Ukrainian. She likes the sound of it, but more so - the bats themselves. Anna is now 31 and has been studying nocturnal winged creatures since her early 20s - she got a Bachelor's degree in Molecular biology and biotechnology and a Master's in Vertebrate zoology. She was in her 4th semester in Gent, Belgium, studying Tropical Biodiversity and Ecosystems when the full-scale invasion started. That event made her return to Ukraine and enlist in the Army, something that she would never think of doing before.

If there was a dictionary illustration for a left-wing activist in Ukraine, Anna would probably be it. Since her adolescence, she has been brewing in the leftist stew of her native Kharkiv. She took part in organizing an anarchist squat (which also helped house LGBTQ activists as well as displaced people from the annexed Crimea and the Eastern regions of Ukraine in 2014), she was a co-founder of the Kharkiv Pride, an organization advocating for LGBTQ rights in Ukraine, and she took part in organizing the first Pride parade in Kharkiv in 2019.
That first Pride was pivotal in her life. On Freedom Square in the center of Kharkiv, there she stood with some 2000 others who came to support the event. Around them, a police in riot gear and a line of trucks separating them from another group - a variety pack of right-wing crusaders from various groups and organizations including Freikorps, the National Corpus as well as Tradition and Order. "Every Pride event is used by these right-wing guys as a team-building exercise", Anna says with a dash of dark humor "they get together, meet up, hang out and show what they're capable of".
And on that day they were capable of a lot of violence. They clashed with the police and the LGBTQ activists, one teenage boy got severely beaten in a nearby park, and several arrests were made. It made splashes in the Ukrainian media, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine issued a note of condemnation, and Amnesty International typed up a public statement.
Four years later, when Anna was already in the 47th Brigade, she met Kostya, who served in her medical unit. Kostya was also on the Freedom Square in 2019, except he was on the other side of the barricades. An admirer of right-wing views, he was a part of Freikorps - a far-right group that, on that day, was fighting with the police and hunting parade-goers. Kostya and Anna talked, trying to keep a safe distance. These conversations became regular. Kostya was an intellectual guy who wrote poetry, a stark contrast with other right-wing-oriented people Anna encountered in her life and through her service.
One day, trying to sum up one of these debates, Kostya pointed to a battle map hanging on the wall of their medical headquarters. "This is the only thing that matters now," he said.
They were discussing an incident with one of the Kharkiv pride founders Anna Sharyhina who publicly spoke against renaming of a street in Kharkiv in honor of Georgi Tarasenko, who was a member of Freikorps and who was killed in action near Kharkiv in March, 2022. Then, Sharyhina posted on Facebook that Tarasenko was a known right-wing figure and violently targeted LGBTQ activists on multiple occasions. Her post also evoked a question - who should be the people Ukrainians put on the pantheon of heroes in this war, and what should be written off or forgiven to those who give their life defending their country.

It was a nuanced post that sparked a very lively but difficult discussion, dashed with hateful messages and threats, as well as words of support fr Mrs. Sharyhina. It's easy to understand her motivation - for her, people like Georgi Tarasenko were a threat to her very existence. He wasn't just a person opposed to gay marriage or equal rights for LGBTQ people - he was a violent individual who targeted her and the people she advocated for. But he also died fighting the Russians who came to invade the city they shared with the intention to occupy it and make it part of Russia, where any LGBTQ activism is now criminalized.
In war-time Ukraine, the military is a reflection of the Ukrainian society itself; it's a country within a country - with all its complexities and inner conflicts, its many voices and camps. Tens of thousands of people from all walks of life have volunteered, been mobilized and drafted in the last two and a half years. And just like in the Ukrainian society itself, LGBTQ people in the Ukrainian Armed Forces are a minority - a minority that is easier to target and discriminate against but needs to be protected.
Anna Kazhan disagreed with the Facebook post of her former colleague, with whom they organized Kharkiv Pride back in 2019. But she knows the feeling of being threatened, criticized, and argued with for being who she is. Recently, she found herself in a car with yet another sympathizer of far-right ideology on their way to visit a medical base of the Azov Brigade. Her former girlfriend worked there and arranged the visit. Anna joked that it's the LGBTQ community bringing the far-right to Azov base. They talked about issues and values. They argued and joked around.
"Next pride we'll drop a charge from a drone on you guys", the far-right guy said laughing. "We'll get the jammers installed", she rebottled. And then there was silence. They both knew that they might not live til the next pride. They kept driving.
Cory Booker’s unflagging joy
The senior senator from New Jersey is one of the Democratic Party’s OGs of believing in our better angels. Where does all that optimism come from? And how can we get some?
October 30, 2024
![]()
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) at his office in downtown Newark, N.J. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)
By Robin Givhan - PLAINFIELD, N.J.
On the second Sunday of August, Shiloh Baptist Church takes its morning service outside and turns West Fourth Street into the site of both a revival and a block party. The choir raises its voices; the praise dancers spin their colorful banners and congregants in rows of canvas lawn chairs and metal fellowship hall chairs listen to the Word of the Lord. For this plein-air service, choir members dress casually in tees declaring Shiloh “the place of peace” and the choir director, who has quickly sweated through his shirt, lets his powerful tenor soar skyward as he shouts: “Hallelujah!” As he does so, Sen. Cory Booker (D), the state’s once junior now senior senator, closes his eyesin the front row. The sun shines brightly on his broad shoulders and bald head, beads of perspiration erupt, and he sways to the music.
These are Booker’s constituents and he’s here to commune with them, but even if they were not, he’s in his element because this is church, and Black church in particular is about perseverance and hope. And Booker, 55, may well be the modern Senate’s most faithfully glass-half-full kind of guy. He was selling joy as a political philosophy long before the Democratic Party claimed it as their 2024 brand and essence of its White House ambitions. He’s kept his chin tilted toward the light even as former president Donald Trump shared his vision of an American “carnage” and strained our neighborly instincts.
Booker is certainly partisan, as everyone in his chamber is, but he also represents a viable model for escaping the debilitating rancor of the current moment. He does not just say he has friends on the other side of the aisle. He genuinely does.
He projects a consistent sunniness and optimism that’s hard to fake. Is he as ambitious as he ever was, even after his failed 2020 presidential bid? Yes. Is there a significant market for what he’s selling? Maybe not. He could be hopelessly naive.
Booker has been a joyful political warrior since he graduated Yale Law School in 1997. A year later, after winning a seat on Newark’s city council, Booker proceeded to sleep in a tent in the midst of a housing project strafed by violence and later in a mobile home stationed in a community struggling with crime — both acts of earnest theatricality intended to draw attention to intractable urban problems. As mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013, his national reputation took root thanks to his prodigious use of Twitter and his extreme attentiveness to the needs of local residents. “On it!” he’d respond to concerns big and small that landed in his feed. Booker shoveled snow, helped folks get into rehab and once pulled a woman from a burning building.
![]()
While attending an outdoor church service at Shiloh Baptist Church in Plainfield, N.J., on Aug. 11, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) stands alongside two of the young men he mentors. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)
Booker stands out as the rare prominent voice on Capitol Hill who publicly, plaintively and consistently uses words like “love” as a form of political engagement. When he arrived in the Senate after winning a 2013 special election, he attended Bible study with his colleague James M. Inhofe, the late conservative Oklahoma Republican remembered as someone who characterized climate change as a hoax. Booker — a vegan — made a concerted effort to dine with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who considers his right to eat hamburgers practically inscribed in the Constitution. Cruz, who fellow senators seem to dislike with a rare gusto, referred to Booker as “a friend,” not just a colleague, in recent remarks on the Senate floor.
Booker calls Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who auditioned to be Trump’s running mate, his “brother.” Scott returned the favor: “Real friendship in DC is rare but Cory is a friend of mine! We started as the new guys in the Senate together back in 2013 and have worked on a handful of important legislation together,” he said in a statement. “We may not always agree, but we both love our country and serving the American people.”
Booker has remained undeterred in focusing on uplift rather than denigration through a pandemic, the summer of George Floyd’s murder, the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the painful aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, too many school shootings and a Congress that seems to be perpetually stalled on every issue that requires a moral compass and a backbone. Booker has been called a glory seeker. His critics and his chroniclers have suggested that his aggressive earnestness is little more than a performance. If so, it’s been a reality show to which he’s devoted 26 years.
So in a time of woe and uncertainty, when Trump has called America “a garbage can for the world,” we come to Booker seeking lessons of encouragement and reassurance. We come looking for the secret to his optimism. For guidance in being hopeful but also realistic.
Booker put his rejection of disillusionment on the record during Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s contentious confirmation hearing. It wasn’t the Supreme Court nominee’s Republican antagonists on the Senate Judiciary Committee who brought her to tears; it was Booker. He took 10 minutes to recognize the magnitude of her being the first Black woman nominated to the high court and to acknowledge the poise, confidence and backbone it took to navigate the highly political process.
“I’m not letting anybody in the Senate steal my joy,” Booker said with a broad smile as he bounced in his seat. “You did not get there because of some left-wing agenda. You did not get here because of some dark-money groups. You got here how every Black woman in America who has gotten anywhere has done. By being like Ginger Rogers said, ‘I did everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in heels.’”
And then Booker leaned forward and delivered a message that was both powerful and intimate. “I know what it takes for you to sit in that seat,” he said to Jackson. “You have earned this spot. You are worthy. You are a great American.”
Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson wipes away tears during remarks from Booker on the third day of her confirmation hearing. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
The hardest thing to believe is a politician who says they just want to help — but sometimes, you want to avail yourself of Booker’s unshakable faith. On Instagram, where he has more than 1 million followers, his account overflows with videos offering up corny jokes or parables based on a serendipitous encounter on the street or train. On TikTok, where he has more than 426,000 followers, he’s an enthusiastic supporter of Vice President Kamala Harris and he has FaceTimed with donors on her behalf at a phone bank in Michigan all while solemnly reminding folks, “It’s okay not to like someone but it’s never okay to dehumanize, degrade or humiliate someone.” He’s also been campaigning — on social media and in real life — for his Senate colleague Bob Casey (D), using good-natured ribbing about sports, Wawa and pizza as Casey seeks reelection in the swing state of Pennsylvania.
In a downpour of bad news and political violence, at a time when half the country sees the other half as an existential threat to democracy, what keeps Booker from flagging? What keeps his hope vigorous from one devastating news cycle to the next? Exactly what kind of joy juice is he drinking?
First of all, Booker does not view the world through rose-colored glasses. In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, Booker recalled the lessons his elders taught him about how being a 6-foot-tall Black man should inform his interactions with police officers.
He isn’t immune to a little schadenfreude. There’s memorable video footage of Booker looking on with an expression of admiration and amusement when Harris, then a senator from California, vigorously interrogated — and flustered — William P. Barr, the former attorney general about his knowledge of and role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. And his politics can still be bruising. Just recently, Cruz accused his “friend” of engaging in junior high gamesmanship by objecting to a widely supported bipartisan bill on digital bullying and artificial intelligence that would have given Cruz a legislative win in the midst of his neck-and-neck race against Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), whom Booker supports.
“Absent a single substantive objection,” Cruz said, “the obvious inference is that this objection is being made because we’ve got an election in six weeks.” But sometimes, a politician has to engage in politics.
“I don’t have much patience for Pollyanna-ish, optimistic people who seem to ignore heartbreak, who seem to paint a picture that is numb and, even worse, dangerously ignorant of the suffering and struggle going on in America,” Booker said. “Hope, to me, is the active conviction that despair won’t have the last word.”
And so who is the fool? The man who argues with that? Or the people who believe it?
![]()
Booker politicking and preaching in front of the congregation at Shiloh Baptist Church during an outdoor service. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)Lessons from Newark
The senator’s appearance at Shiloh Baptist Church was part of his annual summer road trip to visit each of New Jersey’s 21 counties. In the previous days, Booker had been to Cumberland County to celebrate funding for a new sewage system. He went to a fossil museum in Gloucester County and learned that one of the most significant archaeological digs in the country was a few hundred yards behind a Lowe’s. And in Atlantic County, he posed with an oversized check for $500,000 for the upkeep of Lucy the Elephant, a six-story roadside pachyderm and tourist attraction dating to 1881.
“Since I was a kid coming down to this incredible community, this elephant has stood out in my life,” said an enthusiastic Booker. “Elephants don’t forget, and neither do I. I won’t forget my childhood!”
Shiloh is in Union County. Booker lives in Newark, which is in Essex County. He’s been there for more than two decades. But he and his older brother Cary grew up about 25 miles away in the much wealthier and much Whiter town of Harrington Park. His hometown voted for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney before finally throwing a Democrat a bone in a presidential election and supporting Hillary Clinton. Much has been written about how Booker’s parents were among the first Black employees hired by IBM, as well as among the first Black folks to buy a house in Harrington Park, which they did, in part, by sending in a White family as their surrogates.
But Booker was no stranger to Newark. He visited the city often when he was younger and talks about his political rise in Newark as his own road to Damascus — a journey of enlightenment and conversion. If there’s any singular explanation for his political philosophy, he said, it’s rooted in lessons he learned from the city, its residents and their struggles — particularly the story of Hassan Washington, a young man Booker befriended and then lost track of until Washington’s name appeared in a police report as a homicide victim.
“I could go through all these moments that Newark and my experiences there have shattered my being. And I feel shame for some of these things. I feel a lot of shame about Hassan’s death. Shahad Smith, from the same group of little boys I saw grow up, got murdered on my block while I was a senator — in 2018. Shot with an assault rifle,” Booker said. “It was like his head exploded; these bullets are not like you see in the movies. And so I carry unhealed wounds in me.”
When Booker adopted Newark as his home, the residents were predominantly Black and notably young, and the city was burdened by the same systemic ills that plagued many urban centers during the turn of the previous century, and in some cases, still do: struggling schools, violent crime, illegal drugs. Booker’s decision to move to Newark — and into an affordable housing complex named Brick Towers — was a form of radical optimism, laced with ambition and naiveté.
![]()
Booker checks his notes in the car on the way from his home in Newark to a church service at Shiloh Baptist Church. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)
From his first days, through his years as mayor and even now as a U.S. senator, Newark has challenged Booker. He’s often told the story of Virginia Jones, a community activist and neighbor who became a friend, teacher and confessor. When he met Jones, she asked him to describe her neighborhood. He pointed out the crack houses, the vacant houses, the problems. She scolded him for his narrow vision, telling him that if all he could see was despair, that’s all there would ever be.
“Newark has gifted me a sense of urgency and a focus, and a deeper definition of love and forgiveness and redemption,” Booker said. “I feel like it’s afforded me, for all the mistakes I’ve made, a sense of those things. And it’s made me more forgiving of others.”
Booker no longer lives in a housing project. Brick Towers was demolished years ago. But the city gives him a regular reminder that hope grows from want rather than abundance. It grows in rocky soil. He uses stories about Newark to speak to his own fallibility, mutual forgiveness and second chances. Booker might not walk a mile every day in his constituents’ shoes, but he continues to live alongside them in a neighborhood that exists below the poverty line.
His narrow three-story flat sits shoulder to shoulder with other modest houses. His home’s only distinguishing feature is the Newark police car parked out front. It isn’t separated from the street by a moat of well-manicured grass, a circular drive or frankly, anything at all. The house is regular and unshielded from the vicissitudes of city life.
“I go home to gun violence,” Booker said. “I go home and live across the street from a drug-treatment center. I go home to realness. And people keep it real with me.”
It takes a different understanding of hope, a different magnitude of it, when you live in a community where gun violence is something you’re trying to interrupt rather than in a picket-fence idyll where you’re convinced that such terrible things could never happen. You don’t have to be particularly hopeful when the stars seem aligned in your favor. You can indulge in the petty outrages of gated communities and high-tax-bracket suburbs. Hope is what fills great chasms of need. Booker is surrounded by hopeful people. And so, he is hopeful, too.
![]()
Booker greets his mentees who surprised him at the outdoor church service at Shiloh Baptist Church. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)
That’s the message Booker brought to Shiloh. After minister Danielle Brown finished her sermon, a rousing call to inclusivity and uplift that could have been a stump speech, she invited Booker to address the congregants. Dressed in a black suit and red tie, and wearing a pair of Cole Haan sneakers masquerading as wingtips, Booker moved to the lectern and without notes in hand, spoke in a raspy but booming alto.
He began with a note of praise and thanks to the minister for taking him on a spiritual journey. He emoted and enthused. He joked about his lack of children. “The Lord has not blessed me with children and I hear about it about every day from my mom, ‘When is that happening?’” He continued on to describe a phone call from the White House. “I miss Obama. And I miss her husband, too. But I really miss Obama. Michelle! Michelle! If she had married me I might be president right now.”
Then he told a story about 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which tore through New Jersey. Booker was riding around Newark in his mobile command center; the storm was whipping the vehicle as the driver struggled to keep it on the road; and at the top of a hill littered with downed power lines, he spotted an elderly man in a yellow slicker waving a flashlight. When Booker’s car pulled up, the man explained that the scene was extremely dangerous, so he was standing on the road in the torrential weather to make sure no one was injured before emergency crews arrived.
“I had just talked to the president of the United States of America. I’d just talked to the governor of our state. I’m the mayor of the largest city. But the greatness I most saw that night,” Booker said, “was the man that was standing on that hill, holding up a light so that no one else would get hurt, risking his life.”
“No greater love has a man than this, than to give his life, than to give his life,” Booker said as his speech reached a crescendo and he moved from amateur preacher to professional politician. “We are here because of the foot soldiers for justice! Who stood on the hill! Who carried us over! Who stood in the breach! Who wept for us! Who sweat for us! Who bled for us! ”
“But now is our time. Where will we stand? Will we stand for health care? Will we stand for the right to vote? Will we stand for reproductive rights? Will we stand for public education? Will we stand with Kamala? Will we stand up and vote?
“Let us do our work,” Booker said, “because faith without work is dead.”
The minister had allotted him 10 minutes of speaking time. He came in at a respectable 11.
“There are a lot of concerns and anxieties about what we hear on television and surrounding this election,” Brown told me. “He gave people a sense of hope. A sense that we’ve made progress. And no matter what we’re seeing now, it doesn’t negate that. And if we can connect those dots, we can do even more.”
With the church service ended, the day gave way to a block party where the line to take a selfie with Booker rivaled the one for barbecue. “Look at that,” said Howard Wilson, who was taking in the scene from his lawn chair while Booker was patiently politicking in the summer heat. “He’s everything that we expected of him. Some people let politics go to their head and they forget who got them there,” said Wilson, a Shiloh member and former Newark resident. “He don’t forget. He don’t. You can talk to him.”
Don’t look to Washington
While Booker’s home in Newark is unassuming, his suite of offices on Capitol Hill is stately. The entry is marked by an exhaustive display of flags — American, New Jersey, POW, United States Senate, Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride. Inside, the sofas are deep, the armchairs are traditional and the wood is dark. The mood is leavened with family photos, baseball caps from his and his parents’ alma maters and memorabilia celebrating Star Trek, that ultimate paean to a future filled with diversity and guided by a directive to do no harm.
On this particular day, however, his main office doors were locked. The Capitol was on high alert. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been invited to address Congress, and the streets surrounding the Capitol were teeming with law enforcement. Just beyond the phalanx of officers, protesters were marching against the war in Gaza and America’s culpability in it.
Booker was unperturbed by the police and protesters. After all, he was in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when insurrectionists heave-hoed their way through locked doors, shattered windows and stalked the hallways as if they were hunting prey. If you ask Booker how he keeps his chin up in these unprecedented times — how any of us can — he will immediately challenge the premise of the question. Everything, he says, is precedented.
“Every generation has a demagogue. We just forget it. You know that the majority of Americans— I’m not talking about the number one radio show, I’m talking the majority of Americans — more than fifty percent of people went to sleep at night listening to a guy named Father Coughlin who spewed the most hateful antisemitic rhetoric,” Booker said, referring to the Catholic priest who in the 1930s voiced admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. “There were actually military leaders in the 1930s, in the midst of the Depression, when fascism was spreading in other places, U.S. military leaders were calling for a military overthrow of the country. Madison Square Garden, the Nazi Party packed it. New York! They packed it to the rafters with people chanting Nazi propaganda.”
“People talk about Brown versus the Board of Education,” the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ruled school segregation unconstitutional. “They forget that unleashed a backlash in the South that was a reign of terror,” Booker continued. “We have come through the most unimaginable possibilities. Yet every generation has had the experience my grandmother had when she was here during Obama’s inauguration.”
“She was asked by a reporter, ‘Did you ever think you would live to see a Black man about to swear [the oath of office]?’ And she said, ‘No, this is beyond my dreams.’ And would later say it was a dangerous dream to even articulate something like this. … I am so confident that when I’m 95, like my grandmother was, that we will create a reality beyond my dreams even now.”
Booker, one of four Black senators in Congress, recalled this history in his anchorman voice with soft vowels, deep inflections and a hint of gee-whiz amazement.
“I am not here because of a bunch of senators in the 1960s,” said Booker, who abruptly adopts a thick Southern drawl to impersonate South Carolina’s segregationist former senator. “You know Strom Thurmond didn’t come to the Senate floor and say, ‘I’ve seen the light. Let those Negro people have the right to vote.’”
“So when people say, ‘I’m looking to Washington for hope’ — look in the mirror for hope.”
![]()
Booker photographed at his office in downtown Newark. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)
Hopeful politicking
Afew days after his New Jersey road trip, Booker was onstage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago’s United Center rallying the crowd on behalf of his former Senate colleague. As he surveyed the audience, Booker considered the moment in the context of the country’s history.
“Look at this arena. Look around you right now,” Booker said. “We are all our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
“There are people that doubt our collective strength. They want to tell us how bad we are. They want to say that they alone can save us,” he continued. “We know that the power of the people is greater than the people in power. And we’re not going to lose our faith.”
Booker’s insistent call for optimism echoed the sentiment of civil rights activist and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, now 82 and slowed by Parkinson’s, when he spoke at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta and exhorted those listening to “keep hope alive.”
Booker’s disposition parallels that of former president Barack Obama, who spoke about “the audacity of hope,” during his seminal speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston. He won the White House on that poetry.
Booker gavels in the program at the United Center on the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (Joe Lamberti for The Washington Post)
Booker is part of that lineage. This year, he co-sponsored a resolutionthat would, perhaps, move the country another step closer to its most dangerous dream, to an act of forgiveness and reconciliation. He called for racism to be designated a public health crisis. For Booker, the resolution isn’t a matter of blame, it’s a statement of possibility.
“It’s always come down to two teams since humanity’s beginning: The us versus them,” Booker said. The resolution aims to stop people from saying “my people, my women, my family, and have a Republican saying, ‘I’m invested in this, in solving this [maternal health] problem about why Black women are dying at higher rates. I’m invested in the problem that if a Black child and a White child have an asthma attack, the Black kid is 10 times more likely to die of the asthma attack.’”
“People don’t understand that we belong to each other,” Booker added. “We need each other.”
Booker didn’t come up as a hardscrabble activist bootstrapping it out of poverty on a wing and a prayer. He did not have an atypical, international youth with a mostly absent father. Instead, Booker embodies the traditional American ideal: a kid from a nuclear family who grew up in the suburbs.
His stubbornly fizzy style of politics feels as unlikely and implausible — and dangerous — as the very idea of America. Yet, it’s caught on again. Or at least, it hasn’t completely disappeared. That’s worth remembering. Not because the future is assured, but because it most certainly is not.
These are Booker’s constituents and he’s here to commune with them, but even if they were not, he’s in his element because this is church, and Black church in particular is about perseverance and hope. And Booker, 55, may well be the modern Senate’s most faithfully glass-half-full kind of guy. He was selling joy as a political philosophy long before the Democratic Party claimed it as their 2024 brand and essence of its White House ambitions. He’s kept his chin tilted toward the light even as former president Donald Trump shared his vision of an American “carnage” and strained our neighborly instincts.
Booker is certainly partisan, as everyone in his chamber is, but he also represents a viable model for escaping the debilitating rancor of the current moment. He does not just say he has friends on the other side of the aisle. He genuinely does.
He projects a consistent sunniness and optimism that’s hard to fake. Is he as ambitious as he ever was, even after his failed 2020 presidential bid? Yes. Is there a significant market for what he’s selling? Maybe not. He could be hopelessly naive.
Booker has been a joyful political warrior since he graduated Yale Law School in 1997. A year later, after winning a seat on Newark’s city council, Booker proceeded to sleep in a tent in the midst of a housing project strafed by violence and later in a mobile home stationed in a community struggling with crime — both acts of earnest theatricality intended to draw attention to intractable urban problems. As mayor of Newark from 2006 to 2013, his national reputation took root thanks to his prodigious use of Twitter and his extreme attentiveness to the needs of local residents. “On it!” he’d respond to concerns big and small that landed in his feed. Booker shoveled snow, helped folks get into rehab and once pulled a woman from a burning building.

While attending an outdoor church service at Shiloh Baptist Church in Plainfield, N.J., on Aug. 11, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) stands alongside two of the young men he mentors. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)
Booker stands out as the rare prominent voice on Capitol Hill who publicly, plaintively and consistently uses words like “love” as a form of political engagement. When he arrived in the Senate after winning a 2013 special election, he attended Bible study with his colleague James M. Inhofe, the late conservative Oklahoma Republican remembered as someone who characterized climate change as a hoax. Booker — a vegan — made a concerted effort to dine with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who considers his right to eat hamburgers practically inscribed in the Constitution. Cruz, who fellow senators seem to dislike with a rare gusto, referred to Booker as “a friend,” not just a colleague, in recent remarks on the Senate floor.
Booker calls Sen. Tim Scott, the South Carolina Republican who auditioned to be Trump’s running mate, his “brother.” Scott returned the favor: “Real friendship in DC is rare but Cory is a friend of mine! We started as the new guys in the Senate together back in 2013 and have worked on a handful of important legislation together,” he said in a statement. “We may not always agree, but we both love our country and serving the American people.”
Booker has remained undeterred in focusing on uplift rather than denigration through a pandemic, the summer of George Floyd’s murder, the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the painful aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, too many school shootings and a Congress that seems to be perpetually stalled on every issue that requires a moral compass and a backbone. Booker has been called a glory seeker. His critics and his chroniclers have suggested that his aggressive earnestness is little more than a performance. If so, it’s been a reality show to which he’s devoted 26 years.
So in a time of woe and uncertainty, when Trump has called America “a garbage can for the world,” we come to Booker seeking lessons of encouragement and reassurance. We come looking for the secret to his optimism. For guidance in being hopeful but also realistic.
Booker put his rejection of disillusionment on the record during Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s contentious confirmation hearing. It wasn’t the Supreme Court nominee’s Republican antagonists on the Senate Judiciary Committee who brought her to tears; it was Booker. He took 10 minutes to recognize the magnitude of her being the first Black woman nominated to the high court and to acknowledge the poise, confidence and backbone it took to navigate the highly political process.
“I’m not letting anybody in the Senate steal my joy,” Booker said with a broad smile as he bounced in his seat. “You did not get there because of some left-wing agenda. You did not get here because of some dark-money groups. You got here how every Black woman in America who has gotten anywhere has done. By being like Ginger Rogers said, ‘I did everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in heels.’”
And then Booker leaned forward and delivered a message that was both powerful and intimate. “I know what it takes for you to sit in that seat,” he said to Jackson. “You have earned this spot. You are worthy. You are a great American.”
Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson wipes away tears during remarks from Booker on the third day of her confirmation hearing. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
The hardest thing to believe is a politician who says they just want to help — but sometimes, you want to avail yourself of Booker’s unshakable faith. On Instagram, where he has more than 1 million followers, his account overflows with videos offering up corny jokes or parables based on a serendipitous encounter on the street or train. On TikTok, where he has more than 426,000 followers, he’s an enthusiastic supporter of Vice President Kamala Harris and he has FaceTimed with donors on her behalf at a phone bank in Michigan all while solemnly reminding folks, “It’s okay not to like someone but it’s never okay to dehumanize, degrade or humiliate someone.” He’s also been campaigning — on social media and in real life — for his Senate colleague Bob Casey (D), using good-natured ribbing about sports, Wawa and pizza as Casey seeks reelection in the swing state of Pennsylvania.
In a downpour of bad news and political violence, at a time when half the country sees the other half as an existential threat to democracy, what keeps Booker from flagging? What keeps his hope vigorous from one devastating news cycle to the next? Exactly what kind of joy juice is he drinking?
First of all, Booker does not view the world through rose-colored glasses. In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, Booker recalled the lessons his elders taught him about how being a 6-foot-tall Black man should inform his interactions with police officers.
He isn’t immune to a little schadenfreude. There’s memorable video footage of Booker looking on with an expression of admiration and amusement when Harris, then a senator from California, vigorously interrogated — and flustered — William P. Barr, the former attorney general about his knowledge of and role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. And his politics can still be bruising. Just recently, Cruz accused his “friend” of engaging in junior high gamesmanship by objecting to a widely supported bipartisan bill on digital bullying and artificial intelligence that would have given Cruz a legislative win in the midst of his neck-and-neck race against Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), whom Booker supports.
“Absent a single substantive objection,” Cruz said, “the obvious inference is that this objection is being made because we’ve got an election in six weeks.” But sometimes, a politician has to engage in politics.
“I don’t have much patience for Pollyanna-ish, optimistic people who seem to ignore heartbreak, who seem to paint a picture that is numb and, even worse, dangerously ignorant of the suffering and struggle going on in America,” Booker said. “Hope, to me, is the active conviction that despair won’t have the last word.”
And so who is the fool? The man who argues with that? Or the people who believe it?

Booker politicking and preaching in front of the congregation at Shiloh Baptist Church during an outdoor service. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)Lessons from Newark
The senator’s appearance at Shiloh Baptist Church was part of his annual summer road trip to visit each of New Jersey’s 21 counties. In the previous days, Booker had been to Cumberland County to celebrate funding for a new sewage system. He went to a fossil museum in Gloucester County and learned that one of the most significant archaeological digs in the country was a few hundred yards behind a Lowe’s. And in Atlantic County, he posed with an oversized check for $500,000 for the upkeep of Lucy the Elephant, a six-story roadside pachyderm and tourist attraction dating to 1881.
“Since I was a kid coming down to this incredible community, this elephant has stood out in my life,” said an enthusiastic Booker. “Elephants don’t forget, and neither do I. I won’t forget my childhood!”
Shiloh is in Union County. Booker lives in Newark, which is in Essex County. He’s been there for more than two decades. But he and his older brother Cary grew up about 25 miles away in the much wealthier and much Whiter town of Harrington Park. His hometown voted for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney before finally throwing a Democrat a bone in a presidential election and supporting Hillary Clinton. Much has been written about how Booker’s parents were among the first Black employees hired by IBM, as well as among the first Black folks to buy a house in Harrington Park, which they did, in part, by sending in a White family as their surrogates.
But Booker was no stranger to Newark. He visited the city often when he was younger and talks about his political rise in Newark as his own road to Damascus — a journey of enlightenment and conversion. If there’s any singular explanation for his political philosophy, he said, it’s rooted in lessons he learned from the city, its residents and their struggles — particularly the story of Hassan Washington, a young man Booker befriended and then lost track of until Washington’s name appeared in a police report as a homicide victim.
“I could go through all these moments that Newark and my experiences there have shattered my being. And I feel shame for some of these things. I feel a lot of shame about Hassan’s death. Shahad Smith, from the same group of little boys I saw grow up, got murdered on my block while I was a senator — in 2018. Shot with an assault rifle,” Booker said. “It was like his head exploded; these bullets are not like you see in the movies. And so I carry unhealed wounds in me.”
When Booker adopted Newark as his home, the residents were predominantly Black and notably young, and the city was burdened by the same systemic ills that plagued many urban centers during the turn of the previous century, and in some cases, still do: struggling schools, violent crime, illegal drugs. Booker’s decision to move to Newark — and into an affordable housing complex named Brick Towers — was a form of radical optimism, laced with ambition and naiveté.

Booker checks his notes in the car on the way from his home in Newark to a church service at Shiloh Baptist Church. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)
From his first days, through his years as mayor and even now as a U.S. senator, Newark has challenged Booker. He’s often told the story of Virginia Jones, a community activist and neighbor who became a friend, teacher and confessor. When he met Jones, she asked him to describe her neighborhood. He pointed out the crack houses, the vacant houses, the problems. She scolded him for his narrow vision, telling him that if all he could see was despair, that’s all there would ever be.
“Newark has gifted me a sense of urgency and a focus, and a deeper definition of love and forgiveness and redemption,” Booker said. “I feel like it’s afforded me, for all the mistakes I’ve made, a sense of those things. And it’s made me more forgiving of others.”
Booker no longer lives in a housing project. Brick Towers was demolished years ago. But the city gives him a regular reminder that hope grows from want rather than abundance. It grows in rocky soil. He uses stories about Newark to speak to his own fallibility, mutual forgiveness and second chances. Booker might not walk a mile every day in his constituents’ shoes, but he continues to live alongside them in a neighborhood that exists below the poverty line.
His narrow three-story flat sits shoulder to shoulder with other modest houses. His home’s only distinguishing feature is the Newark police car parked out front. It isn’t separated from the street by a moat of well-manicured grass, a circular drive or frankly, anything at all. The house is regular and unshielded from the vicissitudes of city life.
“I go home to gun violence,” Booker said. “I go home and live across the street from a drug-treatment center. I go home to realness. And people keep it real with me.”
It takes a different understanding of hope, a different magnitude of it, when you live in a community where gun violence is something you’re trying to interrupt rather than in a picket-fence idyll where you’re convinced that such terrible things could never happen. You don’t have to be particularly hopeful when the stars seem aligned in your favor. You can indulge in the petty outrages of gated communities and high-tax-bracket suburbs. Hope is what fills great chasms of need. Booker is surrounded by hopeful people. And so, he is hopeful, too.

Booker greets his mentees who surprised him at the outdoor church service at Shiloh Baptist Church. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)
That’s the message Booker brought to Shiloh. After minister Danielle Brown finished her sermon, a rousing call to inclusivity and uplift that could have been a stump speech, she invited Booker to address the congregants. Dressed in a black suit and red tie, and wearing a pair of Cole Haan sneakers masquerading as wingtips, Booker moved to the lectern and without notes in hand, spoke in a raspy but booming alto.
He began with a note of praise and thanks to the minister for taking him on a spiritual journey. He emoted and enthused. He joked about his lack of children. “The Lord has not blessed me with children and I hear about it about every day from my mom, ‘When is that happening?’” He continued on to describe a phone call from the White House. “I miss Obama. And I miss her husband, too. But I really miss Obama. Michelle! Michelle! If she had married me I might be president right now.”
Then he told a story about 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, which tore through New Jersey. Booker was riding around Newark in his mobile command center; the storm was whipping the vehicle as the driver struggled to keep it on the road; and at the top of a hill littered with downed power lines, he spotted an elderly man in a yellow slicker waving a flashlight. When Booker’s car pulled up, the man explained that the scene was extremely dangerous, so he was standing on the road in the torrential weather to make sure no one was injured before emergency crews arrived.
“I had just talked to the president of the United States of America. I’d just talked to the governor of our state. I’m the mayor of the largest city. But the greatness I most saw that night,” Booker said, “was the man that was standing on that hill, holding up a light so that no one else would get hurt, risking his life.”
“No greater love has a man than this, than to give his life, than to give his life,” Booker said as his speech reached a crescendo and he moved from amateur preacher to professional politician. “We are here because of the foot soldiers for justice! Who stood on the hill! Who carried us over! Who stood in the breach! Who wept for us! Who sweat for us! Who bled for us! ”
“But now is our time. Where will we stand? Will we stand for health care? Will we stand for the right to vote? Will we stand for reproductive rights? Will we stand for public education? Will we stand with Kamala? Will we stand up and vote?
“Let us do our work,” Booker said, “because faith without work is dead.”
The minister had allotted him 10 minutes of speaking time. He came in at a respectable 11.
“There are a lot of concerns and anxieties about what we hear on television and surrounding this election,” Brown told me. “He gave people a sense of hope. A sense that we’ve made progress. And no matter what we’re seeing now, it doesn’t negate that. And if we can connect those dots, we can do even more.”
With the church service ended, the day gave way to a block party where the line to take a selfie with Booker rivaled the one for barbecue. “Look at that,” said Howard Wilson, who was taking in the scene from his lawn chair while Booker was patiently politicking in the summer heat. “He’s everything that we expected of him. Some people let politics go to their head and they forget who got them there,” said Wilson, a Shiloh member and former Newark resident. “He don’t forget. He don’t. You can talk to him.”
Don’t look to Washington
While Booker’s home in Newark is unassuming, his suite of offices on Capitol Hill is stately. The entry is marked by an exhaustive display of flags — American, New Jersey, POW, United States Senate, Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride. Inside, the sofas are deep, the armchairs are traditional and the wood is dark. The mood is leavened with family photos, baseball caps from his and his parents’ alma maters and memorabilia celebrating Star Trek, that ultimate paean to a future filled with diversity and guided by a directive to do no harm.
On this particular day, however, his main office doors were locked. The Capitol was on high alert. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been invited to address Congress, and the streets surrounding the Capitol were teeming with law enforcement. Just beyond the phalanx of officers, protesters were marching against the war in Gaza and America’s culpability in it.
Booker was unperturbed by the police and protesters. After all, he was in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when insurrectionists heave-hoed their way through locked doors, shattered windows and stalked the hallways as if they were hunting prey. If you ask Booker how he keeps his chin up in these unprecedented times — how any of us can — he will immediately challenge the premise of the question. Everything, he says, is precedented.
“Every generation has a demagogue. We just forget it. You know that the majority of Americans— I’m not talking about the number one radio show, I’m talking the majority of Americans — more than fifty percent of people went to sleep at night listening to a guy named Father Coughlin who spewed the most hateful antisemitic rhetoric,” Booker said, referring to the Catholic priest who in the 1930s voiced admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. “There were actually military leaders in the 1930s, in the midst of the Depression, when fascism was spreading in other places, U.S. military leaders were calling for a military overthrow of the country. Madison Square Garden, the Nazi Party packed it. New York! They packed it to the rafters with people chanting Nazi propaganda.”
“People talk about Brown versus the Board of Education,” the 1954 Supreme Court decision that ruled school segregation unconstitutional. “They forget that unleashed a backlash in the South that was a reign of terror,” Booker continued. “We have come through the most unimaginable possibilities. Yet every generation has had the experience my grandmother had when she was here during Obama’s inauguration.”
“She was asked by a reporter, ‘Did you ever think you would live to see a Black man about to swear [the oath of office]?’ And she said, ‘No, this is beyond my dreams.’ And would later say it was a dangerous dream to even articulate something like this. … I am so confident that when I’m 95, like my grandmother was, that we will create a reality beyond my dreams even now.”
Booker, one of four Black senators in Congress, recalled this history in his anchorman voice with soft vowels, deep inflections and a hint of gee-whiz amazement.
“I am not here because of a bunch of senators in the 1960s,” said Booker, who abruptly adopts a thick Southern drawl to impersonate South Carolina’s segregationist former senator. “You know Strom Thurmond didn’t come to the Senate floor and say, ‘I’ve seen the light. Let those Negro people have the right to vote.’”
“So when people say, ‘I’m looking to Washington for hope’ — look in the mirror for hope.”

Booker photographed at his office in downtown Newark. (Sasha Maslov for the Washington Post)
Hopeful politicking
Afew days after his New Jersey road trip, Booker was onstage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago’s United Center rallying the crowd on behalf of his former Senate colleague. As he surveyed the audience, Booker considered the moment in the context of the country’s history.
“Look at this arena. Look around you right now,” Booker said. “We are all our ancestors’ wildest dreams.”
“There are people that doubt our collective strength. They want to tell us how bad we are. They want to say that they alone can save us,” he continued. “We know that the power of the people is greater than the people in power. And we’re not going to lose our faith.”
Booker’s insistent call for optimism echoed the sentiment of civil rights activist and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, now 82 and slowed by Parkinson’s, when he spoke at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta and exhorted those listening to “keep hope alive.”
Booker’s disposition parallels that of former president Barack Obama, who spoke about “the audacity of hope,” during his seminal speech at the 2004 Democratic convention in Boston. He won the White House on that poetry.
Booker gavels in the program at the United Center on the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (Joe Lamberti for The Washington Post)
Booker is part of that lineage. This year, he co-sponsored a resolutionthat would, perhaps, move the country another step closer to its most dangerous dream, to an act of forgiveness and reconciliation. He called for racism to be designated a public health crisis. For Booker, the resolution isn’t a matter of blame, it’s a statement of possibility.
“It’s always come down to two teams since humanity’s beginning: The us versus them,” Booker said. The resolution aims to stop people from saying “my people, my women, my family, and have a Republican saying, ‘I’m invested in this, in solving this [maternal health] problem about why Black women are dying at higher rates. I’m invested in the problem that if a Black child and a White child have an asthma attack, the Black kid is 10 times more likely to die of the asthma attack.’”
“People don’t understand that we belong to each other,” Booker added. “We need each other.”
Booker didn’t come up as a hardscrabble activist bootstrapping it out of poverty on a wing and a prayer. He did not have an atypical, international youth with a mostly absent father. Instead, Booker embodies the traditional American ideal: a kid from a nuclear family who grew up in the suburbs.
His stubbornly fizzy style of politics feels as unlikely and implausible — and dangerous — as the very idea of America. Yet, it’s caught on again. Or at least, it hasn’t completely disappeared. That’s worth remembering. Not because the future is assured, but because it most certainly is not.