Pushkin is scared. Perhaps Pushkin is afraid. Three men stand in front of him. A tall narrow and two short spherical. They wear blue, are police officers. His guardians and protectors. Because you want your head here: attacks. Every day. With paint and with a hammer. The poet is not just a monument, not just a stone, he has become a symbol: no one in this city can be a Russian hero anymore.

Behind the statue of the poet stands a bulbous and sluggish snake. People waiting for humanitarian aid. Everyone gets two white plastic bags. Sometime. After hours in the cold. So this is what it looks like – the “hero city”. That’s what the President of Ukraine called Kharkiv – it was in the spring.

But who are these heroes today? In a café in the center sits a Bushido double: Vsevolod Kozhemyako. Former businessman, now commander of the Khartia Volunteer Battalion. He – 50 years old and one of the richest men in Ukraine – lived in Austria until Black Thursday in February. His old life before the new war is now running on Kozhemyako’s smartphone. Videos from the past: Alps and après-ski, white wine and good food. His wife laughs, his four children ask children’s questions. “That was on February 23,” says Kozhemyako. stops. Because now men in uniform and with machine guns come into the café. They wear them as proudly as women carry Hermès bags. But that is not proper; not in the cafe. The millionaire stares at them with something dark in his eyes that is far more frightening than the heavy guns.

He knows business

What is the smallest difference between his new life on the front lines and his old one as a businessman?

“What I’m doing now is also a kind of entrepreneurial work. It’s about planning budgets and logistics. Run like a small company. But with the difference that this company does not make a profit. And their goal is to kill the enemy,” says Kozhemyako and suddenly catches a waiter as if the waiter were a fly and orders tea.

He knows business, owns a large grain company in Ukraine. And now also a battalion – founded it with friends and in March. He gets his orders from the Ukrainian army.

Kharkiv in the now and in its destruction: the office of the security service in the center of the city.

“Where were we?” asks Kozhemyako and lets the waiter fly again.

When killing. How can he even do that?

He raises his eyebrows up and down and then up again. Don’t want to talk about killing. Tells that in the old war, in 2014, he started to support the armed forces, that he had “unofficial experience with trainers” in the east at the front: “Enough experience!”

A military training?

“Yes, sort of,” he says, then straightens his T-shirt, stroking the print of the Ukrainian trident like a mother caresses her child’s cheeks: not loving, just natural, like the mother, like the millionaire does that all the time made.

What will he do after the war?

“Playing golf!” he says.

But surely it won’t be easy to be a civilian again after all this?

“No, no, it will be very easy because I hate war very much.”

The millionaire will leave the hero city tomorrow, will go back to his battalion. As a fighter entrepreneur.