Some Ukrainians helped the Russians. Their neighbors sought revenge.

When I asked Bilozerkan about the types of collaborators they knew, I heard a taxonomy: there were the older Soviet nostalgists, mostly retirees, who missed what they remembered as the stability and pride of life in the USSR and believed that Putin could do this again to create; there were the ‘zombies’, the people who gobbled up Russian propaganda, even the most obvious lies, such as the claim that their country was a NATO puppet state led by a Jewish fascist; the ‘konservas’ or ‘tin cans’, the people who didn’t have much to do in life and just needed to be approached and broken open; and the ‘waiters’, the gatekeepers who waited to see how the war would go so they could join the winning side. Most fell into the latter category, I was told, including most of Kozlyonkova’s staff. The betrayal that hurt the most was that of Anatoli Korniev, the priest of St. John of Kronstadt, an Orthodox church in the city. Korniev distributed aid and sheltered people in the church at the beginning of the war, but the Russian Orthodox Church supported Putin, and soon Korniev told parishioners that Russia would stay here. They have to adapt to the new reality.

It seemed clear to me that some townspeople would have cooperated out of fear or out of necessity for survival. But when I made this point to loyalists in Bilozerka, it was mostly dismissed. The underlying motivation was simply selfishness, they said. They thought that the collaborators were not even pro-Russian, but only pro-themselves, with no more ideology than loyalty. The occupation was an opportunity to advance their careers, improve their position, collect an extra pension check or simply make some extra money. This statement applied to everyone from Kozlyonkova to the strawberry farmer Oleksandr Guz pointed out in his repair shop, barely making it around the corner in his sputtering sedan. If he had won anything from Russia, it apparently wouldn’t have been much. (I was unable to reach any of the accused Bilozerka or Volodymyr Saldo associates.)

One woman, Alyona Zelinska, had a different theory. Zelinska, an investigator at a nonprofit government watchdog group in Bilozerka, investigated Kozlyonkova for misuse of state funds before the war. To be fair, Kozlyonkova was part of an “amoral group of people,” she told me. But her betrayal wasn’t just a result of selfishness. Kozlyonkova had a cynical “philosophy of life” that was more complex and hereditary, Zelinska believed. She learned to be cynical in the dying days of the Soviet Union, a survival instinct of a people who grew up amid coercion and deception. “What did we learn in the Soviet Union?” said Zelinska, who was 12 years old when Ukraine became independent. “The children are marching in line. Don’t stand out and everything will be fine. That is what Sovietism is.” Kozlyonkova and other accused collaborators were “remnants of this herd mentality.” She had used the war for personal gain and given up on the idea that Ukraine could improve the hardened empire from which it broke away a generation ago. Forsaking the promise of a more decent life, that was their young republic: for Zelinska that was the real betrayal.

The apostasy that no one understood was that of Andriy Koshelev. Koshelev and his wife, a nurse in the hospital’s surgical department, were very popular in the city. They shared the building on Pushkin Street with his parents. His mother was a popular public school teacher, and she and his father owned the butcher shop where Koshelev worked. Koshelev was kind and modest, according to Oleksandr Shcherbyna, a friend of his. So humble in fact that he was ‘a completely unremarkable figure’. At the beginning of the occupation, he and Koshelev waited together on the food lines and talked about the war. “He emphasized that he was pro-Ukraine,” says Shcherbyna, “and that he was categorically against the Russians.” When the shelling was heavy, Koshelev’s wife would take people to the basement of the hospital for shelter. The coach Andriy Dibrova and his wife Alina lived nearby and Alina was friends with her. They saw each other during the occupation and felt sorry for the situation. Before the war, no one in the family had ever heard pro-Russian views expressed. As far as I could tell, none of the accused collaborators had done so.

Nevertheless, they were posted online shortly after taking up their posts. In addition to the mostly harmless local forums like the Telegram channel Bilozerka Chat, there were partisan forums dedicated to shaming Russian helpmeets. The administrators of Bilozerka Chat knew that the channel was being monitored by Russian intelligence and deleted messages that would arouse suspicion. The administrators of the partisan forums clearly wanted to arouse suspicion – to let accused collaborators know that they were also being watched. A photo of a smiling Koshelev was posted on the Telegram channel Database of Traitors of Kherson along with his home address.