KYIV

“SHOULD HAVE ALL of it by Christmas. That’s Christmas 2350 at the current rate of advance.”

Ivan Demisovych spent his youth fighting in Stalingrad and his middle age in a Gulag. He knows Russia, he knows Russians. He lives in a small cabin in the Siberian forests that dominate Asiatic Russia. He has no electricity, no phone, nothing like that. He reads by candle light and hunts his own food.

“If the Ukrainians come here, I will fight,” he insists. “I am in my nineties. I don’t care for Putin. He’s KGB. They locked me up for 20 years. I love Russia, though. Don’t ask why. This war needs to end.”