This is the math of war. It has exponential power, for every fallen one affects tens, even hundreds, and ripples through time. One generation passes its tales and its prejudices on to the next. This was clear during the Victory Day parade in Slovyansk, when World War II veterans received a heroes’ welcome. Their legacy carries unprecedented weight in the Russian world. I met Romazan Mukhamad-Galiev there. At ninety, he still donned his navy uniform. Children gathered to take photos and hand him fists full of roses.

This year’s celebration meant more than ever he said. This year, “an enemy appeared outside again: the Banderas.”

No one figure is as fraught in Ukraine these days as Stepan Bandera. His portrait hung for months on the Maidan. Putin, meanwhile, has invoked the “ideological heirs of Bandera” to build his alternate reality, in which Kiev has been taken by neo-Nazis.

Born before the revolution in Ukraine’s west, Bandera became a fierce nationalist. He ran a group called the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, which declared war against all countries that controlled ethnic Ukrainian lands, putting him at odds with Poland, the USSR, and Germany. But he ultimately allied with the Nazis — most scholars say because it seemed the most expedient way to attain Ukrainian independence. The Nazis, though, eventually took Ukraine, and tossed Bandera into a concentration camp once he had ceased being useful to them. He died later, in Munich, poisoned at the hands of the KGB. Like Mazepa before him, he became a hero to Ukraine’s nationalist crowd, and a pariah to Russians.

At the Slavyansk Victory Day parade, Romazan repeated, with no hint of irony, “We have to fight the Banderas.” The children looked on, wide-eyed, like someone was telling a ghost story.

World War II veterans pass their tales to the children of Slovyansk during Victory Day celebrations (Noah Sneider)

Of course, not everyone believed that the fascists were on the march again. At one point I came upon a group of men cutting down a tree. The ringleader wore a red work suit, and looked like a figure torn from the pages of Soviet propaganda. I thought they wanted to build a barricade, but they explained otherwise: This tree, said one, has been ill for years, but the old city government was too incompetent to deal with it. Now, with the old authorities gone and the new ones preoccupied, they were taking the chance to handle it themselves. “Regular people don’t care who comes to power, we just want this all to end,” red-suited Denis said. His friend Aleksei chimed in: “I’ve seen Europe. I don’t want to go back to Russia.” The men gathered there spoke with disdain of their peers in the militia. “I see my classmates at the barricades sometimes,” said Denis. “To be honest, they’re the ones who haven’t achieved anything in life.”

The divisions did largely break down along socioeconomic (and educational) lines. Those with more to lose had less interest in playing war. For many in eastern Ukraine, the movement offered something they had long been missing: meaning. The Donbass is a place where people toil to no end. Being a rebel gave an underemployed factory worker a sense of purpose, all the more so when the cause was infused with history.

But behind the mask of patriotism and glory, the rebel regime operated with brutal impunity. A shadowy Muscovite named Igor Girkin took control of the movement’s military wing throughout eastern Ukraine. Girkin, who goes by the alias Strelkov, or ‘the shooter,’ served in Russia’s security services, and fought in nearly every post-Soviet conflict from Transnistria to Serbia to Chechnya. His revanchist views align with a certain strain of Russian nationalism that has become increasingly powerful throughout the Ukrainian crisis.

Under Strelkov and his successors, kidnappings, murder, and torture have become commonplace in the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The basement of the security services building in Slovyansk became a notorious dungeon, housing dozens of prisoners in squalid conditions. While the rebels demonstrated a formidable capacity for destruction, they did little to build the new life they so desired.

Building polling booths ahead of the rebel referendum in the Donbass (Noah Sneider)

They held a sham referendum in the Donbass, a vote at gunpoint, and declared their independence on May 11th. Together they called themselves Novorossiya, a revived name for lands conquered by Catherine the Great centuries ago.

The Ukrainians held an election too, though not in Novorossiya. They picked a chocolate baron, Petro Poroshenko, as president on May 25th. They cheered their independence. Little did they know, the struggle had just begun. Within days, a bloody battle for the Donetsk airport broke out.

The Russians began arriving in droves. How exactly they got there, no one really knows. Were they explicitly sent across the border? Or were they merely waved through? Were they volunteers or mercenaries? Chechens or “real” Russians? Most would call themselves “volunteers,” there to help their brothers. At the time, this rung true — it was a few months still before regular Russian troops began operating brazenly inside eastern Ukraine. Crimea wasn’t enough; Russia would do whatever it took to keep Ukraine from breaking off of the Slavic family tree.

One of the rebel leaders, a lanky dude with untrimmed stubble named Sergey, approached a few of us journalists on the terrace of our hotel a few days after the airport battle. “A convoy is leaving for the border tomorrow.” He looked harried. “With what?” His camouflage hung loose. “Bodies. Russian bodies.”

The next day, as they stacked coffins outside the morgue, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see “Medved,” the Bear, a rebel who must weigh more than 300 pounds. Tattoos spill out of his sleeves and down his arms. He wears dark circular sunglasses a la John Lennon. He keeps his shirt unbuttoned at the top. From a necklace hangs a giant bear tooth, still sharp at the edges. His eyes, though, are kind. “Once this is over, we’ll go for a beer,” he liked to say.

Look to your right, he told me. I saw Yuri, incognito in a black leather jacket and black aviators. We recognized each other with knowing nods, and walked away from the coffins, around a wall, into a clearing. He had disappeared for weeks, I was sure he had been killed. Where the hell have you been, what happened? He said something about being taken prisoner, four broken ribs, and not feeling pain. (I wanted to say it was only a matter of time, but there are things one does not say to a rebel commander on his territory.) Then, a smile. Something about trust. A scowl. Something about fascists and juntas, loyalty and Russianness. Something in the language of war. It is a reductive language, making phantoms of foes, and foes of phantoms.

Separatist fighters on the way to battle in Slovyansk, Ukraine (Noah Sneider)

On the other wide of the wall, two rows of empty coffins rested in a shady grove. A truck idled, and morticians loaded bodies, some of them draped in blue and yellow cloth. The side of the truck said, in French, “Fresh Products.” From the morgue, the convoy left for an ice cream factory on the outskirts of town — the public facilities couldn’t handle that many corpses, so the rest were stashed in a commercial refrigerator. Cookie dough, chocolate swirl, headless rebel.

A chubby woman in camouflage controlled the factory gates. She had peroxide blonde hair and a beady stare. When she finally let us through, we found nine coffins in the loading bay. They all bore gold crosses and the Donetsk People’s Republic flag. The bodies had been packed in black plastic trash bags. Shrapnel wounds laced legs and faces with deep gashes. A fighter from Russia’s North Ossetia region watched over the process. He carried an AK-74 and two pistols, just in case. “Our grandfathers and grandmothers fought fascism, and I wanted to fight fascists too,” he said by way of an explanation for how he found himself overseeing a covert repatriation mission in an eastern Ukrainian ice cream factory.

Next door, a family mourned in the “Penguin Café.” The wake was for Mark Zverev, a local who died alongside the Russians. Another big woman, Svetlana, with short dark hair, held court on the patio. Her voice was deep and gravely and as she spoke, her earrings of blue amethyst fluttered: “He died fighting for our bright future, for our faith.” Mark’s daughter was there too, staring at the ground: “He told us, ‘What, will I just sit and watch while they kill our people, our children? I will defend you’.” A family friend shook his head in disbelief: “We are brotherly peoples. My family came to Ukraine from Russia.”

In these comments lies the essence of entire war, a war that’s already taken some 3,700 lives. Future and faith, they and us, brothers fighting, Russia and Ukraine. A millennia-long struggle for identity has come to a head. Two nations riding fundamentally incompatible historical narratives have crashed. The stakes could not be higher, and not simply because Russia fears NATO expansion, but because Russia fears losing its brother, losing its family, and thus losing itself.

A truck full of the bodies of Russian fighters travels from Donetsk back to Russia (Noah Sneider)

In the loading bay, a man painted the side of the truck: two red crosses and “200" in big black brush strokes — Russian code for casualties. We set out for the border as dusk fell. The truck stopped near Lenin Square to pick up one last coffin, and with that, we were off.

Just outside the city, lush fields and dense woods obscured the black soil of the bloodlands. Our driver, a local doctor, Dima, remarked: “It’s so green, fresh, alive, and then… a truck full of dead bodies.” Flowers — small yellow buds — lined the road. We came upon a Ukrainian army checkpoint, the 25th Airborne Brigade. They had no protocol for a coffin rig. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” one soldier said, AK at the ready.

When we hit the border at Uspenka, the guards asked the truck driver — a Donetsk local — for his passport. In Russia and Ukraine, everyone has two passports, a domestic and an international. The driver hadn’t taken his international passport with him. In the past, he said, the crossing there had been treated as domestic.

So they checked more documents and made hurried phone calls, and eventually the border guards lit up the cargo bed with flashlights. They waved the bodies through as night fell. In the sky above, Ursa Major rose.