“He was flanked by fields of dead sunflowers that could not be harvested because of the renewed Russian offensive.”
I remember an old man pushing a bicycle down a dirt road last fall. He had a plastic bag of what appeared to be potatoes hanging from his handlebar. We were about 120 kilometers east of Kharkiv. He was walking in the same direction we were driving, east, toward the invaders. As our battered pickup truck came up behind the man, our Ukrainian driver honked his horn, and the man turned. Recognition lit up his deeply lined face. He had to be well into his 70s. He waved.
The driver pulled up alongside him and stopped the truck. From our perch in the bed, the other foreign fighters and I could not understand a single syllable the old man unloaded into the cab. He spoke Surzhyk, a pidgin language used in the east of the country. It is part Russian, part Ukrainian, and part utter disdain for grammar, pronunciation, consistency…Disdain for rules of any kind, really. It is spoken mostly by older, more rustic people. It sounds ugly and unpleasant, especially in contrast to the rhythmical Ukrainian spoken by the well-educated young officer in the front passenger seat of the cab.
The old man looked as incomprehensible as he sounded. He wore work pants, a flannel shirt, a battered jacket, and tall rubber boots—a kind of uniform among the old men in the rural areas. You see them everywhere in the markets. But this man was far away from the nearest market, and he was walking his bicycle toward the front. Even seeing him was surprising to me, given that my colleagues and I had pulled over several kilometers ago to don our helmets and body armor. Most of us were already wearing our ear protection. Our rifles were loaded. This old man did not have protection from the rain, let alone the war.
After about a minute, two bottles of water were produced from within the cab. The Ukrainian officer handed them to the old man. They shook hands, and we drove away. I looked back at the old man. He was flanked by fields of dead sunflowers that could not be harvested because of the renewed Russian offensive. He waved. The other foreigners and I waved back. An artillery round landed somewhere in the distance. Our driver sped up. The old man carried on walking without noticing the boom. I envied him.
When we arrived at our drop-off point, we all got out of the truck. I asked the officer, “Who was that old man?”
“He is one of the ones we trained.”
“What do you mean?”
“He is a stay-behind.”
I understood the term intellectually, I guess. But the officer could see I was still confused.
“For better understanding, after the first invasion, we went to the towns that would be occupied in the future, and we trained volunteers to f— with the invaders when they came back. The stay-behinds kill the Russian administrators. He is one of the ones that stayed behind in Kupyansk when it was occupied in 2022.”.
Dave Smith is a retired Major in the Canadian Armed Forces. He is now fighting for Ukraine in the war there. He previously authored an op-ed in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail earlier this year outlining why he decided to serve in Ukraine.
