Just before dawn on Sunday March 13th, a little over two weeks into the war, around two-dozen cruise missiles hit a military base in the west of Ukraine, 20km from the Polish border. At least 35 people were killed and dozens more were wounded. Though there had been previous sporadic bombardments in the region, this strike was on a different scale: a ferocious blitz on a transit hub for arms arriving from the West and processing centre for foreign volunteers signing up to Ukraine’s new international legion. The war had come uncomfortably close to NATO’s doorstep.

The following day I drove to Novoyavorivsk, a town near the military base. I arrived at the council office just as Volodymyr Matseliukh (above), the mayor, was ending a meeting with the commander of the base. “Yes of course, I will speak to you,” he said, ushering me into his office. His trousers and fleece were military green, a string of prayer beads threaded through his fingers and he had shadows under his eyes. On his bookcase was a wooden replica of a Cossack battle mace, a model tank (a gift from a local army officer), a mug commemorating the 33rd Infantry Brigade of the Illinois National Guard, which had trained on the base in 2020, and a gilt bust of Taras Shevchenko, a Ukrainian poet with receding hair and a moustache. “No! It’s not Lenin,” he exclaimed. “One journalist asked me why I had a bust of Lenin!”

Matseliukh apologised for not speaking English – “I should have studied at school instead of smoking in the corridor” – and for the circumstances under which we met. He’d have preferred to talk about his town and its people.

On the day the base was attacked, he and his family had woken in the dark to the sound of sirens. I asked him what he’d done next. “I am the mayor,” he said, “I sent my family into the basement and I got to work.” He went to the hospital, where dozens of wounded people were arriving. (A trauma doctor there told me that the men’s injuries were so numerous and extensive that he had flashbacks to his time working in Afghanistan.) Matseliukh posted a video on Facebook advising citizens to stay calm and remain indoors, then went to the base to see what help the town could offer. “I saw destroyed buildings, many, many injured people, all of them soldiers and military. There are more than 40 dead. We still haven’t found all of them.”

“You think anyone feels safe?”

The army base was expanded by the Soviets after the second world war. Matseliukh claims that the inhabitants of more than 100 villages were evicted to make room for it. Matseliukh’s own grandmother was forced from her home with only a day’s notice. She would point out a big oak tree as they walked past the base, the only remaining trace of her childhood.

“We will defeat the Russians with or without the help of NATO countries,” Matseliukh sighed heavily and there were tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I haven’t cried yet. I’ve seen such terrible things.” Outside on the street, people were craning their necks at the sounds of aeroplanes high in the blue sky.

Ukrainian mayors and governors have been at the forefront of the war effort, bridging civilian and military operations, and leading by example. Vitali Klitschko, the 50-year-old mayor of Kyiv, has been rallying locals to the city’s defence. In Voznesensk in the south the 32-year-old mayor, Yevheni Velichko, helped co-ordinate volunteers to repel an attack by Russian forces seeking to advance on Odessa. In the besieged port of Mykolaiv, the 41-year-old governor of the region, Vitaly Kim (below), has won himself a cult following as an inspirational presence in the face of constant bombardment. And when Russian troops kidnapped Ivan Fedorov, the 33-year-old mayor of Melitopol, townspeople demonstrated until he was released, after several days, in a prisoner exchange.

Elected mayor two years ago, Matseliukh, aged 42, exemplifies this new generation of politicians: energetic, informal, can-do. His candidacy was supported by a Christian democratic party, Ukrainska Galitzka, but he says he is not a member. “I don’t call myself a politician,” he told me. “I think at this local level we don’t need political parties. I come from the community I lead, that’s what is important.”

Matseliukh has witnessed the convulsions of Ukrainian history since the Soviet era. In 1985, when he was six, his family moved to Novoyavorivsk. At that time, it was a typical Soviet new town with apartment blocks clustered around a giant sulphur factory, where both his parents worked. “All of this was woods,” he gestured from his office window in the centre of town. “I remember barbed wire around the unfinished housing blocks and a guard with a gun.”

He later learned that part of the town had been built by prisoners and conscripts from the base. Matseliukh remembers joining the Pioneers, the Soviet version of the Boy Scouts, and learning a poem about Lenin, which he rattles off at comically fast speed. In 1990, when the Soviet empire was on its last legs, his father formed part of an enormous human chain, organised by a liberal group, which stretched from Lviv to Kyiv in the name of Ukrainian unity.

On December 26th 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved itself. Ukraine, for centuries wedded to and embedded in the history, culture and language of “mother Russia”, was now independent. At first it didn’t even have a currency; people cut out “coupons” from sheets of paper to exchange.

“People were looking for some small island where they could be safe”

Over the next few years state services collapsed and industrial plants closed. The sulphur factory where Matseliukh’s parents worked shut in stages, completely ceasing operations in the early 2000s. His mother “retired” at 43; his father, like many in the area, found work on building sites in Poland. They couldn’t afford to send Matseliukh (below) to university in Lviv, so he studied law at a local college. During his holidays he sold cheap Ukrainian cigarettes over the border in Poland “like everyone did” and picked up odd jobs in construction. When he went to work at the regional administration in 2000, his salary was the equivalent of $30 a month.

Just as his assistant was bringing us cups of tea, the siren sounded. The nearest shelter was over the road in the basement of the old Soviet Palace of Culture, now a concert hall, where the council had set up a distribution centre for clothes and food for refugees. Underground, I passed through a series of rooms. There were dusty shelves of broken things and women hefting children in their arms. I found a small alcove that had been turned into a makeshift recording studio. Several teenagers were scrolling on their phones.

Marko, 17, spoke English haltingly but with precise grammar. His family, who lived in the village next to the military base, had been woken by the siren at 3.30am on the morning of the strike, but there had been so many false alarms over the previous two weeks that they had gone back to sleep. The missiles struck at 5.30am. “I was in the yard when the second explosion hit. I saw the mushroom cloud. I put my hands over my ears,” he said, “but I think this only helps with the sound of gunshots, not with blast waves.”

Half an hour passed as we chatted. We talked about the feeling of being hemmed into a basement room without windows. I said I didn’t feel any safer down here, imagining myself being buried in rubble. “You think anyone feels safe?” another teenager replied. “Last night there was an alarm that lasted for four hours.” Finally, after about 45 minutes, the all-clear sounded and we emerged gratefully back into the sunlight.

Novoyavorivsk has changed spiritually as well as materially in the years since independence. Father Roman Lahish (below), of the Church of St Peter and Paul of the Redemptive Order, a Catholic congregation, is 40. He remembers the Soviet era of his childhood as the “persecution times”. Priests, especially Catholics, were harassed and masses had to be conducted in secret. The population of western Ukraine has always been conservative and devout: in the past three decades, sparkling golden domes have sprung up in many villages, as well as roadside statues of Mary and other saints, garlanded with flowers. Father Roman’s own church, with yellow walls and green cupolas, was built in the early 1990s.

Father Roman was overseeing the construction of sandbag walls to protect the lower windows. Inside, volunteers were making coffee and handing out food; refugee women wove olive-green strips of fabric into a fishing net to serve as camouflage. “Really it’s something to help them take their minds off the war,” he said. Few of the surrounding blocks of flats had cellars, so the church had become the local air-raid shelter. When missiles hit the base, many residents ran to the church with their children. “People were looking for some small island where they could be safe.” He nodded sadly. He knew several locals whose relatives died and one of his parishioners was in hospital in a critical condition.

“I haven’t cried yet. I’ve seen such terrible things”

I met Nadia, a 45-year-old psychologist, who had just returned from ferrying refugees across the border to Poland. “The men are not allowed to leave the country,” she said, “so we women have to drive.” She spoke in a quiet, shaky voice. Her brother-in-law had been killed by the recent strike and she was worried that her husband and 25-year-old son would be called up. “I try to keep busy, but being a psychologist doesn’t help!” she said jokingly. “We are only human.”

The biggest change since independence is cultural, she reckons. “We are more European now,” she said. “In a word, it is freedom. We can travel. We are not under control like in Russia. We have changed, even if we don’t exactly understand how. We don’t have Soviet culture any more.”

But it took some time to shake off the Soviet hangover. “For a long time corruption was our disease,” said Father Roman. “Everyone from the top politicians to the man in the morgue was waiting for their envelope. The question was always: how much?” Things slowly improved. People who had worked in Europe returned with money to invest, and different attitudes. A new border crossing opened nearby in 1998 and locals established small trading businesses. Salaries began to rise. Today, a lorry driver can earn roughly the same as the mayor – between $1,200 and $1,500 a month.

Novoyavorivsk is now a thriving town of young families (there were 3.5 times more births than deaths last year). Businesses there make everything from ice-cream cones to dog food, metal roofing and clothes. There is a cinema, an ice rink, a swimming pool and a new amusement park. The city is selling land for development; blocks of apartments are being built. Father Roman laughed that he was much in demand for blessing new businesses: “Hairdressing salons, dentists – as well as all the new checkpoints that have gone up in the last two weeks.”

A little later in the day we met the mayor again. Our cups of tea were still on the table in his office, now cold. He was organising for more coffins to be delivered to the morgue and signing documents. The commander of the base needed construction equipment if the council could spare it; Matseliukh was co-ordinating local firms that wished to donate items. The next day he was meeting a group of businessmen from the east of Ukraine who wanted to move their businesses to the area.

Ukrainians have spent 30 years teaching themselves democracy. Matseliukh remembers watching polling officers stuff votes into ballot boxes at early elections, but in 2004, with the Orange Revolution, Ukrainians pushed back against the rigged presidential run-off and Russian interference. “And things changed a lot after 2014,” said the mayor, referring to the national protests in Kyiv, sparked by the refusal of the pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovych, to sign an agreement for closer ties with the European Union. “After Maidan, everyone understood that there was no way back.

Reform accelerated domestically in the years that followed, even as the country battled Russian-backed separatists in the east. Public services have been digitised and the boundaries of many councils have changed. Crucially, municipal budgets have been decentralised, so mayors no longer have to go begging to regional capitals or Kyiv for funding. “For the first time”, said Matseliukh, “we were faced not with the problem of how to get money, but with the problem of what to most effectively spend it on.”

At the beginning of the year, Matseliukh had plans to open a kindergarten and a sports hall, and to repair, at long last, the chronically potholed roads. “Everything was just starting,” he said, with one of his heavy sighs, “now everything is interrupted”. In the past week he had authorised a few road repairs “just as a way to keep people busy”.

Matseliukh encouraged us to visit the new Centre of Administrative Services, which opened just a month before the war. The office was bright and clean, with multicoloured signs of positive words on a wall: Cheerful. Approachable. Fast. Transparent. Secure. Here, citizens could access 254 different state services – from pensions to property deeds. Since the war began, however, almost all services have been suspended so that the national data system cannot be hacked.

Birth, marriage and death certificates are now written by hand on paper forms. Social-security benefits are still being paid automatically into people’s accounts, but no new claims can be processed. Ukrainians cannot legally buy or sell property, adopt or divorce, register new businesses or receive identity cards. The last was the hardest, the director of the centre said, standing sadly in the empty foyer, because so many people now want passports to leave the country.

The next day there was a funeral for two soldiers from a nearby village who had been killed in the missile attack. The cemetery was on the edge of the base. Matseliukh stood respectfully at the back of a crowd of several hundred villagers and soldiers. A military band played a funerary march. Soldiers carried baskets of red carnations and white chrysanthemums. The father of one of the slain soldiers dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief and held the hand of a small girl. Priests in long black cassocks and black conical hats intoned the liturgy; an officer said a few words about heroes. The coffins were lowered into the graves and six soldiers lined up and raised their rifles to their shoulders. Three volleys cracked sharply in the still air. ■

Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. She is sending regular dispatches for 1843 magazine from Ukraine. You can read her previous dispatches, and the rest of our coverage of the war, here

PHOTOGRAPHS: MAGNUM, GETTY, REUTERS