Mykola Hryhoryan was on the front lines before being gravely injured. Now, with American support in question and the country’s troops depleted, he’s preparing for the possibility of going back.
One morning last month, while I was waiting at a bus stop on the western edge of the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, I struck up a conversation with a man in his early forties named Mykola Hryhoryan. Across from the bus stop was a bombed-out museum. I asked if he knew what had happened to it. “It was hit by a Russian drone,” he said. Mykola was wearing jeans and a black parka with the hood pulled over his head. He told me that he was a soldier. He had been wounded last summer, not far from the Russian border in northeastern Ukraine, when a blast from a grenade fractured his right shoulder blade, a bullet hit him just below his right collarbone, another tore through his left shoulder, and a third broke three ribs. He pulled out his phone to show me a series of photos of his injuries. “I’m lucky to be alive,” he said.
