Fleeing the front lines in Ukraine
The battle between good and evil…and a family that would not give up
Igor Papirov and his wife Larisa are 85 years old. For months, their home in Kharkiv was on the front lines of the battle between good and evil. Trenches appeared in front of the apartment building where they had spent much of their lives in a ground floor apartment surrounded by 5,000 books, some dating back to the 16th century, a collection begun by his father more than a century ago. Before they fled, they spent all too much time huddled together in the bathtub—the one location safe from the bombs and artillery that invading Russian forces rained down on their city and their neighborhood, all but indiscriminately. Most windows had long since been blown out, but still the concussions continued.
How they escaped and where they wound up is an epic story of courage, good will, love, and a family that simply would not give up.
Igor and Larisa are both academics. Igor was a chemical physicist—one of the world’s leading experts in arcane uses of beryllium, a metal vital to nuclear reactors and high energy physics. Larisa taught economics at the National Technical University.
They raised a lovely daughter, Marina, who would eventually fall in love with and marry a cousin of mine, Mikhail. When the Berlin Wall came down, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and Ukraine won its freedom as an independent nation, Marina and Mikhail emigrated, settling eventually in Denver. But her parents never wanted to leave. They loved their city—Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest and the nation’s intellectual heartland. They were valued members of the nation’s true academic elite, Igor the proud winner of the State Prize of Ukraine, his country’s highest honor.
In the course of his career at the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology, he wrote some 500 research papers and books on his specialty. The problem was that Igor also loved history. And he detested Vladimir Putin. So, under a thinly-disguised pseudonym of Igor Garin, he began writing a series of books, published in Russian by a Ukrainian publisher. Books like Russky Fascism and Aphorisms About Brothers, New Russians, Oligarchs became quite the rage in some circles in Russia.
Needless to say, Igor Garin came to the notice of certain circles in the Kremlin, the FSB, even Putin himself. Igor wore this popularity, and visibility, as the badge of honor that it is. Until, suddenly, Russian soldiers came knocking—and worse—at the doors of his beloved country and his cherished city.
The only time Igor ever had to flee was during the Second World War. Igor’s father, Isaac, was murdered by the Nazis. Six months after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa—his ill-fated invasion of Russia—on December 15, 1941, SS officers began exterminating Jews at the gorge known as Drobitsky Yar. Some 15,000 Jews were executed in an atrocity not unlike the far larger massacre at Babi Yar that had taken place three months earlier on the outskirts of Kyiv. Igor was four years old at the time. Hidden in the basement of a non-Jewish neighbor, he was eventually flown to Moscow and escaped the fate of his father and thousands of other Ukrainian Jews.
This time, however, in March 2022, flight was not a good option. There were only two possible directions. Thirty miles to the north was the Russian border. Ukrainians were welcome there—particularly Russian-speakers like Igor, many of them in fact ethnic Russians who are the norm in this region of Ukraine. But Igor feared he was on any number of lists—enemies of Putin and the Russian oligarchy Igor had been targeting for years in his writings. The moment he appeared, his trip to Moscow would not this time be one of freedom, salvation, and security—but retribution for everything he believed and all he represented.
The other alternative for escape was 650 miles to the west, to the city of Lviv not far from the border with Poland—a NATO member and the first stop for millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing a brutal war, brought by invaders unable or hardly willing to distinguish warriors from innocents. This train ride itself was fraught with danger, with the tracks themselves targets for Russian missiles and rockets seeking to interdict shipments of western war materiel heading west on the same right-of-way as the refugee trains heading east. And then there were the hardships of packed trains and the heart condition of Larisa. Igor and his daughter feared she might not survive such a trip under the best of circumstances. Still, at least half of Kharkiv’s population—some 700,000—did flee to safety in Poland, Hungary, or Romania in the early days of the conflict. And more would continue to leave, though many like Igor and Larisa thought they had little choice but to stay.
The first trains were for refugees, packed to the doors. There were no tickets. The train would pull into the station in Kharkiv, and thousands simply rushed the entrances. Every seat was taken, aisles were packed. Hundreds stood for the 24 hours or more it took the train to make its way, haltingly across the entire breadth of Ukraine. But without the Papirovs.
While the Papirovs reflected, the war was closing in. At the beginning, it had been far away. The initial Russian push was from the north toward Kyiv. Putin expected that a blitzkrieg attack would reach the capital in days, toppling the pro-western government of Volodymyr Zelensky—a former comedian turned politician and target for the contempt of Putin as well as Donald Trump during the final months of his presidency. Clearly, neither paid very much attention to who Ukraine’s new president was and the hope for a new beginning that Zelensky represented for his nation.
To understand the man who would become his adversary, Putin needed to have done little more than watch a television sitcom—the political satire, Servant of the People, which ran for 51 half-hour episodes beginning in 2015, before being brought to the west by Netflix.
Zelensky played Vasily Petrovich Goloborodko, a modest, but utterly upright high school history teacher in the style of ‘Veep’ or ‘Parks & Recreation’ who’s elected president of Ukraine by a fluke of videography.
In his own way, Igor is not unlike an older generation’s version of Goloborodko, with a deeply ingrained ability to distinguish right from wrong, compassion and humanity from barbarism. But the world of Vladimir Putin, which did not do well by Zelensky did not do well by Igor and Larisa either.
The first rockets began landing in Kharkiv on February 28, just as Russian forces embarked on what would become a failed assault on Kyiv. Multiple rocket launchers, artillery and cruise missiles rained down death and destruction on both cities, but Kharkiv, closest to the Russian frontier, took the brunt of the assaults. Thousands raced for cellars and other bomb-proof shelters each time the air raid sirens sounded. For Igor and Larisa, it was into their bathtub in the smallest room in their apartment with no windows. They huddled, clinging to each other in fear. In the first series of strikes, dozens died. There were reports that cluster bombs—banned by some international conventions—had been used, leading UN officials to suggest that a war crimes probe would begin.
None of this did Igor or Larisa very much good, of course. Their situation quickly became dire. “Where we lived, our place, our home was literally on the front line,” Igor said. “We literally saw trenches and military vehicles and personnel right on our backyard, right in front of our building.” Their university, too, was pulverized by a succession of rockets and artillery barrages.
So they fled. Left behind were Igor’s beloved collection of books, copies of his most recently-published work—the 10-volume Wisdom of the Ages, each volume 1,000 pages. In their apartment, open to the elements or looters alike, every window had been shattered by rocket attacks. “Of course we could take nothing with us,” Igor recalled sadly. “All we took were our absolute necessities that fit into a small old-style suitcase.” Their destination, however, was still not to the West, not yet. To another “little place where it was safer.” He paused. “But still the Russians were shelling civilians.”
All this made daily life a dangerous, potentially deadly chore. Especially before their move to their new, temporary quarters. Bombs and missiles, some targeting Kharkiv’s nearby central market, would often go astray. Their whole building would shake. Since it was impossible for them to run quickly to seek shelter if they’d left to forage for food or Larisa’s medicines that were increasingly difficult to find, they needed to have everything delivered. For the most part, it was regular humanitarian food services brought by courageous volunteers. Larisa’s heart medication was different. Their local pharmacy closed, it was necessary to scour more widely. One Saturday, just as she was running out, a “Good Samaritan showed up with a partial refill,” Igor recalled. The rest, the woman said, she was keeping for her own mother with the same illness.
Throughout, Marina kept in touch with her parents via Internet, Skype, or cell phone. It was the interruptions that were especially frightening. One predawn morning in mid-March, shortly after 4 o’clock, Marina e-mailed me: “Tonight was the first time since the beginning of the war that I was not able to reach my parents. Neither their landline phone nor cell phone is working. The Internet connection is lost as well. I contacted my friends in Kharkiv and they couldn’t reach them either. I have to admit, it is a very scary moment.” Three hours later, a reprieve. The Internet had returned. Igor and Larisa were able to reassure their daughter that all was well—for the moment.
“We understand now it was because this was literally the front line and perhaps they were not allowing any cellphone communication to work there,” Marina told me later. “So we knew they were alive only through the volunteer who delivered them food periodically. I had his number, and I actually communicated through Viper with him.” Eventually, Igor and Larisa were the only people left in their entire apartment building. To contact them, she would leave a voice message on the volunteer's cellphone when he was in a part of town that had service. He would keep the message on his phone and let Igor and Larisa listen to it. “We just begged my parents to leave,” Marina said.
When Igor and Larisa finally moved to their tiny, new apartment on the outskirts of Kharkiv, they felt a bit safer, for the moment. The neighborhood they’d left behind was a wasteland. Empty apartment buildings showed gaping holes where windows once looked out on childrens’ playgrounds, now littered with smoking debris mingled with shards of metal from the exploded munitions that had struck nearby. When the Washington Post’s Loveday Morris visited the nearby morgue in Kharkiv, she found it overflowing. “Scores of black and green body bags were stacked along two of its walls,” she reported. “On the other side, dozens more victims of Russia’s assault on this eastern city were exposed to the elements. Some wore slippers; one had on army boots and fatigues. Pale, bloodied bellies lay open to the skies. ‘We need body bags,’ morgue director Yuriy Nikolaevich explained. ‘There are no coffins left in the city.’”
But Marina recognized her parents’ move to a new flat would be little more than a temporary measure. The whole nature of the war had shifted. Now, having given up, at least for the moment, a full-scale assault on the entire country, Putin was concentrating the full force of his Russian military on eastern Ukraine—the Donbas, of which Kharkiv was the crown jewel. Clearly, this would be a war of grinding attrition and it was by no means clear when, or how Russian soldiers might suddenly appear on the doorstep of Igor and Larisa—when flight would become utterly impossible.
Throughout, however, Igor kept writing. His latest work was already at the printer when war broke out, typeset and ready to go: Jewish Civilization, Jewish Culture, and Jewish Wisdom. Igor was devastated when he learned that “the publishing house did not exist anymore.” It had been the target of a direct hit by Russian rockets. Now, he was determined to focus on one final work—a chronicle of the war around him.
“I am writing these lines to the sound of an incessant cannonade, from which the walls tremble,” Igor begins this new book with a working title, Crimes of Collective Putin. “My heart skips a beat, and the brain drills with the thought that behind every shot there are killed people, crippled destinies, destroyed kindergartens, schools, hospitals, monuments of the age-old culture of my people. And the painful blows to the heart of my beloved wife who suffers from arrhythmia. It is impossible to forgive. Right in my backyard, the most absurd war in the history of mankind is going on. The war of Russia against Ukraine.”
For weeks, Marina and her daughter Katie continued their drumbeat of insistence that it was time for Igor and Larisa to leave Kharkiv and seek refuge beyond Ukraine. “The last straw was the call from my granddaughter, Katie,” Igor told me. “She called us and cried and asked us to move. This was the last straw. We woke up and simultaneously made our decision to leave.”
Now, their adventure was only beginning.
Their new, temporary refuge was located little more than a mile from the railroad station of Kharkiv. An all-night curfew in the city was lifted at 6 o’clock each morning. So at 6 am, Igor took a taxi to the station. “This proximity also probably helped us make the decision to leave,” he smiled. “There was less exposure to Russian barrages. I bought two tickets for the same night.”
The timetable was different every day—wartime rules. The railroads were the only reliable transportation tying all regions of Ukraine together. Because these same rails were being used for refugees fleeing the battle zones, with humanitarian aid, soldiers, weapons, and ammunition arriving, the schedule was constantly in flux. At midnight, the ticket offices in Kharkiv and down the line would get the schedule for that day. When Igor purchased his two tickets and returned home to prepare for his departure with Larisa, they expected the train to arrive at 8 pm—14 hours to prepare.
“But when we arrived at the train station, then the difficulties started,” Igor recalled. “The entire train station was packed, people were laying on the floors, and then we learned that the train was behind schedule, several hours behind. My wife couldn't stay in conditions like this, she needed to lay down.” Igor found a sympathetic station manager who showed the couple to a room for people with disabilities. There was a couch for Larisa to rest while they waited. It was six more hours—at 2 am—before the train finally pulled into the station. It was dark, every light extinguished, “because of the military,” Igor observed. The real reason was so that it would not be an easy target for prowling Russian attack aircraft.
Everyone boarded the train in complete darkness. “Initially, when refugees started to evacuate, there was panic. They would take trains by storm and with no tickets,” Igor continued. “At the beginning, all the trains were free, but they were so packed people would need to stand for three days. It took three days to get from Kharkiv to Lviv. But in time, first of all the panic subsided plus there were trains [for which] you could actually buy tickets, and then your place was guaranteed. Some trains were still free for refugees, and these trains were difficult to get on, but there were also trains with paid tickets like we took. And these trains were not stormed. People at least could sit so they were not as packed.”
Still, that did not make the trip a whole lot less difficult. Instead of the anticipated 16 hours, it took 24 hours to cover the 650 miles from Kharkiv in the east to Lviv, the westernmost large city in Ukraine before the Polish border. Whenever there was an air raid siren, the train would stop. No lights, no sound, no movement to attract the attention of Russian aircraft. “Also, in my mind it was very difficult because I worried that the railway in front of us would be bombed and then our train would be stranded in the middle of nowhere,” Igor recalled. It was a single-line track. “So there was that worry.”
And though Igor and Larisa had bought first-class tickets, “there was pretty much nothing,” Igor recalled. “It used to be in first class they provided sheets for the beds and food. But this time there was literally nothing. Only one time during this 24 hours did a server arrived with hot tea. We had some food we’d brought with us so we didn't starve, but it was pretty basic. We didn't even have blankets. It was not freezing cold, but not warm either.” They huddled together in their compartment and watched as the countryside rolled past their window.
Halfway around the world, in Denver there was also panic—delighted, controlled, frantic, but still panic. Igor and Larisa had made the decision their daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter had for so long been hoping they would take. “We did not expect them to make their decision so fast,” Marina smiled. “For Mikhail and me, it was April, so we had to wrap up our affairs, our taxes needed to be filed. I was also closing my office, I had to move literally at the very time they decided to leave. And then my father called and said, ‘We got tickets to Lviv and we are leaving today.’ For us we were so happy they made this deciison, but shocked because we had to leave fast. We booked a hotel for them in the very center of Lviv which is supposedly the safest place.” The Papirovs in Denver began booking their trip to Lviv as well. And then the bombs came.
“It actually happened the day we went to leave,” Marina explained. “It was a big worry for my daughter, Katie. But I never experienced it because it was on the outskirts. In central Lviv it was pretty safe.” Still, the scattered Russian air attacks on Lviv only hastened the panic of arriving refuges to move in and through the city as quickly as possible.
The immediate problem, though, was how to get Larisa, who could not walk very far, off the train, through the station and to the hotel their daughter had booked for them. To set the scene, Lviv, a city of 600,000 people, had swollen to 900,000 almost overnight. It had been weeks since the first refugees had begun fleeing as the Russians were closing in on Kyiv. Even when the Kyiv offensive was halted, the stream was unending. And though refugees were moving to the border as fast as possible, each was replaced by others right behind them. “Because the hotel was in the very center of Lviv, during the day crowds of people were wandering, walking down the streets as if it were a big holiday,” said Marina. “It was never as packed as it was then.” And then came the air raid sirens and the bombing began.
“We have friends here in Denver whose cousin lives in Lviv,” Marina explained.
“So we contacted them and asked her cousin to meet my parents actually on the train and take them to the hotel. This was a very important move because without these people who literally took them from their train compartment and brought them to the hotel, they wouldn't have been able to make it because of the crowds everywhere.”
Meanwhile, Marina and Mikhail were en route—Denver to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to Krakow, the largest Polish city closest to the Ukraine frontier. In Krakow, they rented a car and drove four and a half hours to the border, where they found a small hotel 15 minutes from the crossing point. Mikhail delivered Marina to the frontier but did not enter Ukraine with their car. “The line of cars to cross the border from the Ukraine side was probably 24 hours,” Marina explained. Mikhail returned to the hotel. Marina crossed the border on foot. Five minutes. Then on the other side, “I met Americans there. They were volunteers. They were crossing the border with me and how much camaraderie there was. ‘Oh you're from the United States.’ And people hugged each other, people sang songs together. It was very touching.”
Marina had booked a car and driver to meet her on the Ukrainian side. “I waited for him. It took two and a half more hours to travel from the border to Lviv,” she continued. “My plan was to spend the night in Lviv, and then in the morning we would cross the border into Poland. But that very day they started bombing Lviv. And my daughter called me pleading, ‘Mom please do everything within your power that you don't stay overnight.’”
But first, there was the reunion. Marina, Igor, and Larisa together once again. “I hadn't seen them in three years,” Marina said, her voice breaking up. “They lost each probably 20 pounds. They were so thin. They did look like refugees. For me, after that moment when we met, everything was getting into the world of fantasy.”
Outside the hotel, the car Marina had taken to Lviv was waiting for her. Igor and Larisa packed quickly and the three headed back to the border. The line to cross was still very long—at least three to four hours. “It was pretty cold and there were children there and older people,” Marina continued. “Not as elderly as my parents, still people in their 70s, and they were standing for hours. The crossing point worked really well and efficiently. It was just the number of people who wanted to cross the border was enormous.”
Igor had purchased a wheelchair for Larisa, which allowed them to avoid the worst of the border queues. Passports were no problem. Polish officials were allowing through Ukrainians even with local identity cards, the equivalent of an American driver’s license, no passport, no visas. Not so the United States. Igor and Larisa would need not only an international passport issue by Ukraine but an American visa.
“Four years ago, their older passports with visas to the United States expired,” Marina recalled. “I begged my father, please renew them. And he said, 'oh we are old, we are not going to go there any more, to America.' And I begged them, ‘Please, provide me with peace of mind. Get visas to the United States.' So reluctantly, three years ago, my father did it. They had traveling passports and visas valid until 2029.”
Mikhail was waiting for them on the other side—with the car. “Without it, it would have been problematic,” Marina smiled. “While he was waiting for us, several people approached him and asked him to give them a ride.” It was 8 pm, 11 hours after Marina had left the little hotel to fetch her parents. All four of them collapsed on their beds. The next day, it was back to Krakow. Then, Krakow-Munich, Munich-Chicago, Chicago-Denver.
“It was a hard flight, a long flight,” Igor, forever stoic, admitted. “But what inspired us on this difficult journey is we are flyng to freedom where there is no shellling and no bombing.”
So what’s next for the Papirovs?
“I am 85,” he smiled on our zoom call. “I recall the words of a famous physicist who said, ‘After 70, don’t make plans and don’t give advice.’ Still, I’ve read thousands of books, so sometimes it's very difficult to keep myself from giving advice. I still would like to try not to give advice because I believe each next generation is better than the previous one and knows more. So, while it's sometimes hard not to give it, I stick to my view.”
What has left him most devastated, however, is the reality that “the publishing house that has published all my writing is completely destroyed in Ukraine. I hope so much to find a place here to publish what I write.”
He lives with one hope. “At 85, I know that the collapse of an empire is a long process. But I still hope that I will live to witness that. And since I was 17 years old, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the Russian empire will collapse because an empire like this with no moral foundation cannot stand for long.”
So what will winning look like for Igor, for Ukraine?
“From my perspective, this is a war of the Middle Ages in the 21st century. It's hard to imagine that a country that lives in the Middle Ages can win with an entire world that stands behind Ukraine right now—a world with all its technology, with all its modern military armament. I just cannot imagine it's possible at all. I have a theory that every country lives in its own age. And even though I'm aware that the Middle Ages also delivered some great examples of architecture and literature and cultural masterpieces, still technologically and with its mentality Russia lives in the Middle Ages. It has nothing to offer to our world today. This will be the collapse of Russia. I believe in that absolutely.”
NOTE: Elements of this story first appeared in Air Mail, Graydon Carter and Alessandra Stanley’s webzine on March 22, 2022.