As the weeks progressed, the Horbonos family began to see that the Russian soldiers were beginning to understand how much unnecessary damage they had wrought.
The Horbonoses’ home, a house they had been building for 30 years, was completely destroyed; their library burned for two days before collapsing into rubble. When Irina couldn’t take it anymore, she would begin to cry and scream at the soldiers in the darkness of the cellar: “We had everything! What are you doing here?” The Russians would only sit in the dark, silent.
One morning, she took them with her to gather wild herbs for tea. As they walked through what little was left of the Horbonoses’ lives, the soldiers apologized for all the destruction they had brought. It would be so much better, one said, if they could someday visit as guests. Sergey was livid. “You’ve come here to kill me and destroy my home,” he said, “and we are meant to be friends? We can only be enemies.” The Russians again apologized, and soon all of them began to say that the war was senseless. They even began calling it a war.
The Horbonos family also got unusual insight into the Russians’ motivations. When I asked Sergey what he thought drove them, he was unequivocal. The soldiers, he said, were propelled not by national pride or expansionary zeal but by money.
The soldiers all said they had debt—mortgages, loans, medical bills—and needed their army salaries. Even those wages weren’t enough. Their job as mechanics was to repair tanks, but their skill set meant they were also proficient at taking them apart. During breaks in the shelling, they would find damaged or destroyed Russian vehicles and smelt down plates with gold wiring. One plate would get them 15,000 rubles, or about $200, back home.
Other Russian soldiers were less creative. On the day the Russian army left the village, many grabbed everything they could. Their tanks were piled high with mattresses and suitcases; their armored vehicles were stuffed full of bedsheets, toys, washing machines. (When the Tatar soldier came to say goodbye, he told Sergey that he would soon retire, and promised to send the Horbonoses part of his pension.)
