First Person: To Fight for Ukraine’s Freedom, He Went Back Into the Closet

Today, we're bringing you an episode from the recently launched New York Times Opinion podcast, “First Person,” hosted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro. In each episode, Lulu sits down with people living through the headlines for intimate and surprising conversations that help us make sense of our complicated world. This particular episode is about one gay Ukranian soldier’s experience fighting against Russia. Since the beginning of the war, Ukrainians of all backgrounds have come together to fight their common enemy, Russia. But for some Ukrainians, that enemy holds particular terror. In Russia, gay people are routinely targeted for their identity — arrested without cause and even tortured. That’s what motivated Oleksandr Zhuhan to join the volunteer Territorial Defense Forces, despite experiencing homophobia in Ukraine. In the months since, Zhuhan has been fighting two battles: one for his country and one for his identity. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more information for all episodes at nytimes.com/column/first-person. “First Person” is produced by Derek Arthur, Christina Djossa, Jason Pagano, Cristal Duhaime, Olivia Natt and Courtney Stein. The show is edited by Kaari Pitkin, Stephanie Joyce and Lisa Tobin. Scoring by Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta, with editorial support from Kristina Samulewski. The executive producer of Opinion audio is Irene Noguchi, and the director of New York Times audio is Paula Szuchman. Special thanks to Jeffrey Miranda, Kate Sinclair, Patrick Healy and Katie Kingsbury.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  We are sharing something different with you today, something fresh. An episode from the New York Times Opinion Podcast, the new opinion podcast, First Person, which is hosted by my great colleague, Lulu Garcia Navarro. First Person is a show exploring the stories behind the opinions that people hold, how they get to the views that drive them. Hope you enjoy it, and we will see you later this week with a new EK Show episode.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  From the earliest days of the war in Ukraine, we've seen the images of everyday Ukrainians signing up to defend their country against the Russian invasion, leaving behind the lives they'd been living just days before.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Wars can be uniting in that way, with citizens coming together against a shared enemy, putting their differences aside.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Oleksandr Zhuhan, Sashko for short, was one of those who joined Ukraine's volunteer forces. He's gay, and for him Putin's Russia held particular terror. Gay people are routinely targeted there, arrested without cause, even tortured.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  And among the reasons Putin gave for invading Ukraine, he said the country had embraced values, quote, "contrary to human nature."

• 1:45Speaker 01

  But Sashko had also experienced homophobia within Ukraine in the years leading up to the war.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  So when he started talking to my colleague Courtney Stein in the early days of the fighting, he was facing dual fears, a future under Russia, but also how he might be treated by the soldiers he was serving alongside. From New York Times Opinion, this is First Person. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. Today, Sashko and the fight for his future in Ukraine.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Hi Courtney. Today is Calmer than it was yesterday, but still, it's not safe here. Anyway.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  When we first started talking, Sashko was too busy to get on the phone.

• 2:42Speaker 02

  We hear bombing sounds like every fifteen minutes or every half an hour.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  He was just a couple of days into his enlistment, and these were the early days of the war, when Russia was shelling Kiev. His unit was stationed in what had been a mall there.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  And we're sleeping now next to the window shop. It looks somehow surrealistic because we see that beautiful clothes and we're wearing the same clothes that we came here in.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  So I asked him to send me voice memos whenever he had a free minute. And what most came through was just how disorienting this all was for him.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  I haven't... I hadn't held a gun in my life until the 24th of February. I skipped all the lessons of...

• 3:37Speaker 03

  In Ukraine, boys learn how to shoot guns in school, but Sashko never wanted any part of that sort of thing. He'd never imagined fighting in a war, even up to the moment he enlisted alongside the partner he calls his husband, though they can't be legally married.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  We didn't think that we would be given guns. We thought that we would do something like, I don't know, cooking or clinging or carrying heavy things, something like that. My husband is a director and I'm an actor and a director and a playwright. We are very stereotypically gay, if I can put it this way. Like, we are a gay couple who are vegans and we are very anti... anti, I don't know, war.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Or at least they had been. Then Russia invaded. Sascha and Antonina spent the night of the invasion hiding in their bathroom, weighing whether to enlist.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  For both of us, it was a very difficult decision because we used to avoid places where there are lots of manly men, like stereotypically heterosexual men, who want to fight. And we have met violence against gay people before, and it was difficult.

• 5:09Speaker 03

  But the day after Russia invaded, when it became clear just how serious the situation was, both Sascha and Antonina signed up. They weren't telling anyone they were together, though.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  There was a situation when a man from our unit came up to us and asked, "So are you brothers or friends?" And since he only gave us like two options, I said friends very quickly.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  But then I was sorry and I kept thinking to myself, "What would have happened if I had said,

• 5:43Speaker 02

  'We are husband and husband'? What would it have changed?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  I'm not sure."

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Eventually, Sascha was able to find some time to talk to me on the phone. And he explained to me that part of the reason it felt difficult to go back into the closet was because it hadn't been easy for him to come out of it. Growing up gay in Ukraine was really complicated for him.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  So I grew up in a small town in the center of Ukraine. When I was born, it was still the Soviet Union.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  As a kid, Sashko spoke Russian in school. Then, in 1991, when he was seven, Ukraine declared its independence. But it wasn't a big patriotic moment in Sashko's memory. What he remembers is the economic collapse that followed.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  People had to survive and they did different things, like some people stole, some people... I don't know the word for that. They did very bad things to survive and to get some food for their children.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Sashko and his parents lived in an apartment block with a shared courtyard.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  All the kids knew one another from the moment they were born. And I knew that there were some boys that my mom said, "You mustn't be friends with those boys because they smoke and their parents are not a very good family." Some of them smoked cigarettes beginning at the age of five, I suppose.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  What?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, true.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Sashko wasn't that kind of kid, though. He was a rule follower.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  I was really very out of touch with the reality, I think. I mean, I didn't know much about sexuality, about homosexuality or anything like this. I really liked to draw and I drew things. Like every day I had albums. Do you say albums or notebooks?

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Hmm, notebooks.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Filled with sketches, yeah. And I had a secret notebook where I drew naked people, naked men. And I was about, I don't know, 10 or 11 years old. And my mom found it and she said, "Oh, my God, what was that?" I was so ashamed and she said that it was a really bad thing.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  That was the message Sashko got from basically everyone growing up.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Homosexuality was something that you should be ashamed of. And it was something that people in prison, you know, prisoners used to punish other prisoners. Does it make sense what I'm saying?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. So it wasn't like that people were actually gay, it was just a punishment?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Whenever you heard the word homosexuality, it was considered some of the world's biggest threats. You know, like homosexuality, atomic war.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  And given that, when he left his hometown and went to Kyiv for college, he stayed in the closet. But in his second year, he fell in love with his roommate, who was straight.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  One day, I just, I decided that, oh, my God, if he doesn't love me, then I have no more reason to live. I know now that it was very stupid, but I was 16. So I got all the, all the drugs that I had. I mixed them with alcohol and I drank them all. And at first I fainted, but then my friends found me and they called the ambulance.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  He ended up in the hospital. They called his mom to take him home.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  And of course, she started asking questions and I had to tell her.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  How did she respond?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  She said, it's OK, I love you. Maybe one day you'll meet a woman and you'll have children and I'll pray for you. Let's pray together. And I said, oh, my God, Mom, don't please. And there was like second coming out, I said, I don't believe in God. I'm an atheist. Yeah. And then some years later, I'm a vegan. And she, you know, like it was a bingo, gay vegan atheist. No more hope for mom.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Which one was hardest for her? The atheism, the veganism, or being gay?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  I don't think that she, that she accepted anything, any of these.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  When he finished college, Sashko stayed in Kyiv. He met some other gay people, but he said it was still too early to call it a community. He started dating, but it didn't always go well.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  One of them was a criminal, so that was dead bad. Yeah. And so I embraced that some people find their partners in life and some people don't. Some people die lonely. And it stopped scaring me because before that, I thought that it was one of my biggest priorities, you know, to find a partner, to make family and so on.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Then in 2014, Sashko got a message on a dating site.

• 11:56Speaker 02

  And at that stage, I met Antonina. I looked through his profile and I found out that he was into theater and that he was refugee from Crimea. And that looked interesting.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Antonina recently began identifying as non-binary and using she in her pronouns, but Sashko still goes back and forth.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  He, she, yeah, I'm still confusing these things. We arranged a meeting. It wasn't a date, it was a meeting.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  They connected at a big moment in Ukraine. The moment a lot of Ukrainians say was the actual beginning of this war. The Ukrainian president at the time, who Putin supported, had just fled to Russia after months of protests forced him from office. Within days, Russian troops moved in to occupy Crimea. And like a lot of LGBTQ people there, Antonina fled and ended up in Kyiv.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  We met on the bridge, which is non-existent now. And we spent the night like talking, drinking coffee, talking about children, about theater and all kinds of things. And it was like, I don't know how many hours.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  And that's how we met.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  I think that talking to him and spending evenings and nights talking about what's right and what's wrong made me the person I am today.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Not long after they met, Sashko says he and Antonina decided to stop speaking Russian. And they helped create a theater group that performed pieces calling out Russian aggression in Crimea and homophobia within Russian culture. Outside the theater, they were also calling on Ukraine to recognize LGBTQ rights and taking part in some of the earliest Pride celebrations.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  I think it was 2015. The biggest slogan of this Pride was that "We exist." And there were like less than 50 people and lots and lots and lots of the police.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  Since then, Pride in Kyiv has grown. In recent years, the parade has attracted thousands of people, part of a broader liberalization, especially among young people in the cities. But with that liberalization, there's also been a backlash. Sashko told me about a night last November when he and Antonina were approached by two men in the street.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  First, they came up to us. And Antonina was wearing a tiny, what's that? What was this thing called? It's not a stripe, but ribbon? Oh, I forgot the word.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Like rainbow?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Rainbow, yes, rainbow ribbon things. And I felt this danger right away, the way they looked at us. And they were like about 50 meters away, and the street was empty. And one of them started following us. And they started talking to us in a very rude manner, like, "Hey, are you fags? What are you wearing? Do you believe in God? Are you patriots?" And they started pushing us and so on. And that was the first time when, well, I'm like anti-violent person. If there is a chance for the words to work it out, I usually use the words.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  But then, one of the guys pushed Antonina to the ground.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  And I was like, uh, of, um, I want bananas. And I was, I was so mad that I felt I could like tear those men with my bare hands. Because I was like, I don't know where I, about the strength. But it was like the first, maybe the second time in my life when I got to hit a person right in the face and I felt so, I don't know, empowered, that was the word. Like, I hit back. And they, they didn't expect it. Like, they thought that they were like, no, attacking two fags who couldn't hit back.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  The attack was still fresh in Sashko's mind when Russian forces invaded Ukraine just a few months later. It was all part of what was weighing on him and Antonina. That night, they spent huddled in their bathroom, considering their options.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  I definitely had doubts, like, um, I was not afraid to like go and fight, but I was really, I felt a great anxiety if I would fit in. And being gay was part of, of things that gave me that anxiety.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  But on the second day, when Russia went full scale and when we understood that it was, like, it's not a joke, it's going to be for a long time. We couldn't make any other choice, really. What mattered was to protect our country.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  So that's how Sashko and Antonina came to enlist in this war. Fighting to protect a country that hadn't always protected them. Alongside soldiers who in peacetime might have been their enemies.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm not considering the option of losing my freedom because for an LGBTQ person to lose freedom, to get captured by the Russians is worse than death. So I'll be fighting until I win or I die.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Hi Courtney, it's the 8th of March, Tuesday. So I'm going to go on describing what life has become for me since the war started.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Not long after he enlisted, Sashko sent me this voice memo.

• 18:42Speaker 04

  It's been 13 days since Russia attacked Ukraine for no reason. I'm sick now and almost everyone in our unit is either sick or getting better.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  And it's because it's always cold in here. Um, we're sleeping on the floor now in sleeping bags. Uh, but I'm not complaining. It's just that she asked me to describe what it is like here. I go patrolling, uh, three times a day.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  On these patrols, Sashko and Antonina were often together, but still keeping their relationship a secret.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  The commander is very loyal. Uh, well, he doesn't know or he doesn't want to know that we are gay couple.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  We don't touch or we don't hold hands, we don't hug each other. And the riskiest thing that my husband has done, since the first day, he kissed me on the forehead. When I said that I probably had temperature, and he pressed his lips against my forehead, like, just to check if I had temperature. But it was a kiss, I knew it.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  She's the one person who can,

• 20:16Speaker 04

  I don't know, who can calm me down and ask if I'm okay.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  Hello, Sascha?

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, Courtney, can you hear me now?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  I can hear you, can you hear me?

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Oh, that's perfect, yeah.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  As winter turned into spring, Russia continued to focus a lot of its air power on Kyiv. At this point, the volunteer forces were largely playing a support role, away from the fighting. So Sascha and Antonina weren't seeing active combat, but the war was all around them. How are you?

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Um, well, it's been a tough time. Tonight, there were like three regions where the bombs fell, and one of them was right next to us, next to our base. But it's okay, we're alive and more or less healthy. In like fifteen minutes, I'll have to go to, unpack the big cars with provision and ammunition. So that's our job, that's the riskiest thing I've done so far.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  We're just defending the base.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  And how are you feeling about that being your role right now?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Um, I'm okay. Well, uh, on the first day when we came here, lots of, lots of guys, uh, they were like, "Wow, I wanna go and fight," and so on. And I was like, uh, "I'm pretty much okay with the things as they are now." And the terrible thing is that we are getting used to this state of things. And I, I, I don't want this to be my, like, usual state.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  The day before yesterday, we went to the place where we learned to shoot guns. We, we have Kalashnikovs. And I was thinking about my old sewing machine, because, you know, I work in the theater, so I can sew costumes for theater plays. And I was thinking about, "Wow, I used to hate to oil my sewing machine, but I would love to do it now instead of oiling my gun." So it was like, uh, you know, those flashbacks about what life used to be.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Hi Courtney, it's been a month and two days since the beginning of the war.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  And, um, I've been thinking a lot about it, uh, when I had the time, which happened not so often, because we are either too busy or too exhausted to think.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Um, there are things that depress me, but there are good things though. Um, for example, some people from our unit, they added us as friends on Facebook. And, uh, one of them came up to me, uh, the other day, and he said, "I read your post on Facebook." And he said, "I didn't put a like below this post, but I really want to say that I think it's, it's a great post." And I liked it.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  In The Post, Sashko talked about the similarities between the fight for LGBTQ rights and Ukrainian independence. He said that where Russia was driven by fear and hate, he hoped Ukraine would follow a different path after the war, a path of tolerance and acceptance.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  So it was a good thing, and that really made my day.

• 24:09Speaker 03

  For the next few weeks, Sashko's unit stayed in the same warehouse in Kyiv, protecting ammunition and resupplies for the regular army troops that were pushing the Russians back in other parts of the city. Then in April, Ukrainian forces retook the suburbs, places like Bucha, where hundreds of civilians were tortured and killed. Sashko messaged that he and Antonina had been moved and were now doing a different job, but still mainly on guard duty. A few days later, we got on the phone.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Hi Courtney.

• 24:44Ezra Klein?

  Hello Courtney.

• 24:46Speaker 03

  And I got to hear Antonina for the first time.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, Courtney, the thing is Antonina speaks very little English.

• 24:53Ezra Klein?

  My English is not very good.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  So Antonina just listened while Sashko and I talked. Sashko said that now he assumed people in their unit understood that he and Antonina were a couple, but they still weren't publicly acknowledging their relationship.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  But sometimes we like, I don't know, touch fingers. Or, well, that's mostly it. We touch fingers, that's it.

• 25:23Speaker 03

  I saw on your Facebook pages that you have decorated your guns with stickers.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  It feels like a small act of resistance.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and our guns really stand out from the other guns.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Can you describe them?

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Yes, so like there's a rainbow and a unicorn and pineapple.

• 25:50Speaker 03

  Do other people decorate their guns, or is it just you guys?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Uh, no, not really. We are the only ones with the stickers. Now, I saw one more person with a sticker, but it was like a sticker of a skull, and we have those optimistic, cute stickers.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  And has your commander or anyone ever mentioned it? Like as a security concern or questioned you about it?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. One, one person came up to me like two days ago and said, you know, that sticker has lots of white and it's going to be a problem if we fight in, in the darkness, like it could be seen from afar. And I said, okay, so when we fight in the darkness, I'll take it off.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  At the end of April, Putin declared victory in Mariupol, and Russian troops continued to push into eastern and southern Ukraine, where hundreds of Ukrainian troops were dying every day. Sashko sent me a text message. Their unit had been given a choice. They could pack up and go volunteer in Kyiv as civilians, or they could help bolster the military's ranks and join another battalion and be sent to the front lines in the south. This time, the decision wasn't so clear. Sashko thought that he could be more useful as a volunteer, but for Antonina, returning to Kyiv was out of the question. Sashko wrote me that Antonina was intent on going with or without him,

• 27:34Speaker 03

  so he decided he was going to. But they weren't sent right away.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Um, we're waiting here for the transfer.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Weeks passed. Then, at the end of May, Sashko got back in touch.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Hi, Courtney. Sorry for not responding to you right away.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  Things had been busy, he said.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  And on Wednesday, that's tomorrow, we are going to Mykolaiv. Mykolaiv is a city in the south of Ukraine. It's close to Odessa.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Mykolaiv, Sashko explained, was part of the new frontline in the war. Like in Mariupol to the east, the Russians had managed to cut off water to Mykolaiv, forcing many of the city's half a million residents to flee.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Before leaving for the South, Sashko and Antonina were sent home to Kyiv for a few days. Their apartment hadn't been damaged in the shelling, and for the first time in the three months since they signed up for the territorial defense, they were able to sleep in their own bed. And with the Russians no longer anywhere near the city, cafes and shops were open again.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  We were walking around the city and I felt like I was walking next to a fish tank, looking at people who were having their lattes. And the war seemed very real, but this life in Kyiv, the peaceful life, seemed like something impossible. And I could physically feel it. I felt weak at my knees and I had a strange feeling in my stomach and everything seemed so unstable.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  And I just can't pull myself together. Everything feels like a very bad, meaningless movie without the end. And the worst thing, the thing that I'm afraid most is that the war is going to be for like two, three, five, eight years more.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Sashko and Antonina met up with a friend from the theater world while in Kyiv, but Sashko could only think about war. He no longer related to his past life and he was distracted by his upcoming deployment.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  And the thing that I'm worried about is that in the new battalion, maybe there will be like real army people with strong hierarchy. I have an idea that in Mikhail Ivan, that new battalion we are going to, I'm going to be more open about my sexuality. Like, I'm not going to wait if anyone asks or I'm not going to let them be guessing.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  A few days later, I heard from Sashko again. They had made it to Mykolaiv.

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Hey there, corps team. Hope you're hearing me okay.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  They'd begun digging trenches in anticipation of a new Russian offensive.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  And today, when we met our commander, and he was like getting acquainted, speaking to us, giving his like speech, he said, "I've had gay guys in my unit before, and it was no problem with them. So if I see or hear any cases of homophobia, this unit is not a place for homophobia. Is that clear? And we are not going to talk about that again." He said, "I don't care who you are or what you do, until you break the rules.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  So if you're a good fighter, then I'm okay with you."

• 32:04Speaker 03

  Russian troops were sending a near-constant stream of bombs and missiles toward Mykolaiv. Huge swathes of the city had been burned to the ground or completely destroyed. But on one quiet evening, I was able to talk to Sashko by phone, and I asked him to tell me more about what happened with his commander.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  He said, "I know that there are guys in our unit who are gay." Like, he just looked at me, and I raised my hand. Like, "Here I am, hello."

• 32:37Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  He made the things clear, you see?

• 32:40Speaker 03

  And how did the other people in the unit respond?

• 32:44Speaker 02

  They were like, "Okay." Yeah, they didn't say much. I mean, the way they talked, they are not like some narrow-minded, homophobic savages, what I expected. Because, you know, I expected the worst. Army is still a world of men, le man. But...

• 33:17Speaker 02

  We're not. I mean, I don't feel uh threatened physically. And I feel much more um confident now. I really feel like here, I just have to be like

• 33:43Speaker 02

  a good soldier.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  And that's like some guarantee that at least the uh commanders will protect me if anything happens. But I'm sure, I'm I'm sure that nothing bad will happen.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  A few weeks later, I got this message from Sascha.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Hi Courtney, sorry for taking so long to respond to your message. Here's just another piece of information which I think is important to see a bigger picture of what's happening here in Ukraine. So yesterday, I think, that was yesterday. Um LGBTQ person was uh bitten. And that happened when the guy was going to give an interview about his boyfriend. Uh who had died uh in this Russian Ukrainian war. And uh at that time, a group of young men came up to him.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  And they attacked him and they started shouting homophobic things. And they uh beat him.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Um.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  I don't know what to add.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Over our many months of conversations, Sashko and I had talked a lot about his hopes for the future and for the future of Ukraine. So many of them revolved around his uncertainty of what version of the country would greet him and Antonina if and when the war finally ended. But one time, I'd gotten a different answer. Do you think about the future?

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I sometimes stop and think about the future. And I'm trying not to make some great plans like, oh, I'm going to write a play about this war, or I'm going to, I don't know, to write a song.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Just very, very small things, down-to-earth things. Like, my mom, she lives in the center of Ukraine, and they bought a house in a village. And they went there yesterday for the first time. And she sent me a video and she said, "We're waiting for you and Antonina to come and live there and like repair it because the house is very old. And there's a garden with fruit trees." And I was, "Oh, my God, yeah. I'd really love to do that, Mom."

• 37:14Speaker 01

  First Person is a production of New York Times Opinion. We'll be back next Thursday with a new episode. Today's episode was produced by Courtney Stein. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Lisa Tobin with help from Kari Pitkin. Engineering by Isaac Jones. Original music by Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker, and Carol Sabar.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Fact Checking by Mary Marge Locker. The rest of the first-person team includes Crystal Duhaime, Christina Josa, Olivia Knatt, Derek Arthur, and Jason Pagano. Special thanks to Christina Samulski, Shannon Busta, Kate Sinclair, Jeffrey Miranda, Paula Schuman, Irene Noguchi, Patrick Healy, and Katie Kingsbury.