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On an upper floor of a gray prefab high-rise, in an apartment behind a door with no name on it, a man wearing a T-shirt that reads "Just Chill" is cooking pelmeni, meat-filled dumplings. The man smiles, the T-shirt stretched over his belly. Next to the pot lies a knife with a long, pointed blade. The knife, the man says, is from the first person he killed. A Russian in his 40s with thinning hair. He says he hit him in the neck from 80 meters away.
The man at the stove is 36 years old. We’ll call him Taras to protect his true identity. Taras gazes out the kitchen window as he stirs the pelmeni. From up here, he has a good view over Kryvyi Rih, a city of smokestacks and arrow-straight streets in southeastern Ukraine, 70 kilometers from the front line. It is midday on a Tuesday in late January, but with the streets almost empty and cars few and far between, it feels more like a Sunday morning. Down in the courtyard a skinny teenager pets a tailless cat. The boy is not a threat, Taras says, adding that he has known him forever, he lives next door.
The knife Taras took off of the very first Russian soldier he killed.
Taras often looks out the window to watch for people who might pose a threat. Anyone might rat you out these days, he says: the mail carrier, the garbage collectors, the grandma in the apartment downstairs on the left. The military police are constantly on the lookout for people like him. They stop men on the sidewalk and demand to see their papers. If you have the wrong ones, they throw you into a bus and take you straight to the barracks. From there, it’s off to the front. Ukrainians have coined a word for it: busification. You get busified no matter how much you might already have bled for your country.
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Taras does not want to be busified. He does not want to return to the front. Which is why he has not left his high-rise apartment for five months. The army is looking for people like him.
People like him: Some in Ukraine would call him a coward. An able-bodied man who is hiding while others die in the trenches. A timer rings, the pelmeni are done. Taras fishes them out of the pot with a ladle and covers them completely with butter and sour cream. He says he could eat pelmeni every day.
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