An autistic Ukrainian boy lived by routine. Then the Russians upended his world

By Wendell Steavenson with Marta Rodionova

When he was three Artem was diagnosed with severe autism. He grew up in a ninth-floor apartment in the seaside city of Mariupol in south-eastern Ukraine. His father, Anatoly, now 54, who worked as a theatre director, was big and jolly and fond of a glass of vodka. Artem’s mother, Anna, also 54 and petite with a pixie haircut, had given up her job as a seamstress in the theatre’s costume department to take care of him. She also looked after her mother, who lived with them and was so old that she could remember the second world war. She liked to tell the story of how she found a tank in their courtyard and a German soldier who cleaned his gun using her mother’s best shawl.

Artem could not speak and did not go to school like other children. His parents tried to build a bridge to his world. When he was a teenager, they managed to teach him a few syllables. “Ya-ha” for ya khochu, which means “I want”; “pi”, for pyit, “drink”; “pa” for pamagi, “help”, which Artem used when he had difficulty tying his shoelaces or dressing himself.

Artem loved to walk, often for hours at a time. But when the family had to queue at a bus stop or wait in a shop, he became agitated: he found the gap between doing things frustrating and incomprehensible. His parents would say, “Padazhdi, padazhdi”, which means “wait” and Artem learned to repeat this self-soothing mantra. “Zhdi, zhdi, zhdi”.

Artem could not speak and did not go to school like other children. His parents tried to build a bridge to his world
Artem would eat only a very limited number of foods: crispbread, bananas, apples and a cottage-cheese dessert called Marichka that had a picture of a girl on the tub. He loved listening to cheerful pop music and watching his collection of music DVDs. Somehow, despite not being able to read, he learned to navigate the internet on his tablet to find his favourite music videos. He was soothed by running water and would spend hours sitting under the shower.

Rote, routine, regimen, repetition: that is how the family lived for 20 years. Then on February 24th 2022 everything changed. The electricity was cut in the first days of the war: no radio, TV, internet or mobile-phone connection. Then no water, no gas, no heat. There was no way to escape: the family had no car, there were no buses, there was no information. Their apartment block had a basement, but you had to climb down a ladder to reach it. Artem could not be cajoled down there and his grandmother was 92 and could barely walk. Better they all stay in their apartment, said Anatoly; if they were killed, they would at least die together.

At first Anna carried on taking Artem out for his daily walk, but soon the fighting drew close. Anatoly fetched water from a nearby standpipe until it ran dry. He took food from shops that had been damaged in the shelling and hunted for wood for the stove. Then Ukrainian soldiers withdrew from the family’s district. One day Anna looked out of the window to see four Russian tanks parked in their courtyard.

There was no electricity for Artem’s tablet, no water for his showers, no more Marichka dessert. His parents wrapped him in blankets against the cold and he lay in bed clutching his music DVDs, shaking his head in a way that made his parents think he was playing the songs in his head.

A shell exploded near their block and killed two people. Anatoly found a couple of kilos of shrivelled apples in a smashed-up shop, which was helpful because Artem had almost stopped eating. While salvaging wood in a looted pharmacy, Anatoly came across a cache of pills; the packet said they were indicated for autism and since they had run out of Artem’s usual medication they started giving these to him.

Rote, routine, regime, repetition: that is how the family lived for 20 years. Then on February 24th 2022 everything changed
When the bombs crashed and the bullets cracked, his parents explained to Artem, “Streliayut”: they are shooting. “Strelyia-ut,” said Artem over and over and over and over. It was the only word he could pronounce in full. When the explosions were very loud Artem would bite his hands and scream. Once he howled for two days until he lost his voice.

On April 2nd Artem’s grandmother died, having fallen ill and stopped eating. They buried her in the courtyard.

The Russians encircled the city within days of the invasion; even those with cars barely had time to make it out. Some buses, laid on by the Russians, took people east into Donetsk, a part of the country that had been occupied since 2014. Those who stayed – sheltering in dank basements, foraging for food and fuel, risking their lives under shelling to collect water, seeing their loved ones killed and maimed, stepping over bodies – were entirely cut off from the outside world. No one knows how many tens of thousands of civilians were killed over two months of fighting.

In April the Russian administrators appeared in the city, even as they continued to bomb the last Ukrainian forces holed up in the Azovstal steel plant. They brought generators to power a few mobile-phone masts so that residents could catch an intermittent signal and send messages to loved ones who did not know if they were alive or dead. Water trucks were sent out and humanitarian-aid hubs erected to distribute food and clothing – people queued for hours to register, then waited two weeks for a bag of tinned food. Mobile screens mounted on lorries broadcasted Russian news. Soldiers went door to door, looking for people connected to the Ukrainian armed forces; they stopped people in the street and made them take off their clothes to check for patriotic tattoos.

Anatoly’s and Anna’s domain shrank to a few neighbours who shared their staircase and the stove at the entrance. For several weeks Anna had no news of her brother and his wife who lived on the next street. In May, when the fighting had abated, Anatoly and Anna decided to leave the city. Before they could do this they had to undergo “filtration”, a background check by the Russian authorities, and receive a stamped declaration of “clearance”. They went to one of the “filtration points” to present their documents and undergo questioning. Artem cried and bit his hand as they waited, but they managed to get their clearance papers. Anatoly found a driver willing to take them across the front line, though not for a few days – the driver had to find somewhere to buy petrol.

On May 20th Anna went to a small market that had sprung up nearby – she had heard that someone was selling Artem’s Marichka dessert. While she was gone Anatoly was arrested. Two men in military uniforms without insignia knocked on the door of their apartment. When Anatoly opened it one pointed a gun at his stomach. Artem was in bed, wrapped in blankets despite the warm weather – during the cold winter his parents had admonished him for letting the blankets slip and now he wouldn’t let go of them.

The military men searched the apartment, confiscating Anatoly’s phone and Artem’s tablet. One pushed open the door to Artem’s bedroom. “Are you stupid? Why are you lying in this heat with two blankets?” Artem was distressed by the aggressive tone and began to wail. Anatoly explained that his son was autistic and couldn’t be left alone. The men let him ask a neighbour to stay with Artem – then they took Anatoly away.

As spring turned to summer, things improved a little in Mariupol. The electricity was restored and Artem could watch music videos again. The water supply was reconnected, though there was no hot water, so Anna warmed pans on the stove for Artem’s bath. Food shops opened in the cavities of ruined buildings: Artem ate two loaves of bread a day, putting on weight. Anna tried to take him for walks but he didn’t want to go outside any more.

Mariupol was now under Russian control. The Russians installed a municipal government, made up of administrators from the Russian-backed separatist Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and local councillors from pro-Russian political parties. People needed to get clearance to work as doctors, nurses or sanitation engineers – any job where the salary was paid by the government. Others found work disinterring bodies from collapsed buildings and clearing rubble. Later, some helped in the rebuilding effort.

When the explosions were very loud Artem would bite his hands and scream. Once he howled for two days until he lost his voice
The big MARIUPOL sign at the entrance to the city was repainted in Russian red, blue and white. A screen was erected around the theatre where several hundred sheltering Ukrainians had been killed by a Russian artillery strike in March 2022. Billboards went up proclaiming Ukrainian-Russian brotherhood. The monument commemorating the Holodomor, the famine imposed on Ukraine by Stalin in the 1930s, was dismantled. A new statue was erected of Alexander Nevsky, a prince who defended Medieval Rus against “enemies who came from the same countries Russia is fighting today”, according to the inscription. The street where Anna and Artem lived was renamed in Russian.

The currency was now roubles. People resorted to black-market currency traders who used intermediaries in the unoccupied parts of the country to access hryvnia in their Ukrainian bank accounts. The traders changed these for roubles in cash – at a discounted rate. Schools taught in Russian, the curriculum excised Ukrainian history, teachers were sent for re-education, children were made to do military drills.

The Russians quickly rolled out an administrative framework. It was not obligatory to have Russian documents but it became increasingly useful. People queued to apply for Russian passports, to re-register their property (two neighbours had to testify to your ownership and residence), to sign up for pensions and benefits. The Ukrainian government continued to pay Mariupol residents for certain kinds of pensions; others were stopped. Just before the new year, Anna had a windfall when the Ukrainian authorities released several months of Artem’s disability benefit: a sum of about $1,000. In spring 2023 she paid a fee of about 2,000 roubles ($20) to register Artem as disabled with the Russian authorities so that he could receive a benefit of 7,000 roubles a month.

Anna’s older brother and his wife seemed impressed with the efficiency of the Russian bureaucracy. Before the war they had spent months gathering documents for the complicated process of applying for Ukrainian state pensions. By contrast, once they got Russian passports, they received Russian pension payments promptly. The couple, like many in Mariupol, watched Russian TV news. Anna’s brother began to repeat Russian disinformation: that Ukrainian forces had mined the theatre where so many had died, and that they had used civilians in Mariupol as human shields. Anna was baffled: when they were children her brother had encouraged her to learn Ukrainian at school. Now they had several big fights. She told him if he continued to spout nonsense, they would stop speaking.

Anatoly’s and Anna’s domain shrank to a few neighbours who shared their staircase and the stove at the entrance
People in Mariupol complained, but a mood of resignation hung over the city. They said that the Ukrainians had abandoned them. They were in Russia now and Russia would take care of them. Exhausted and traumatised by months of war and privation, citizens seemed easily to absorb the carefully calibrated Russian propaganda. Maybe, Anna thought, this kind of acquiescent denial made living with the new reality easier. Mariupol’s citizens were living in a parallel Russian world, as strange and as familiar to her as her son’s.

When I was in Kyiv in July, I talked to many people who had fled from Mariupol. Some, like Vadym Boychenko, who had been mayor of the city, had managed to get out in the early days of the war; others had left only recently. They described two Mariupols – one in exile and one under occupation. Before the invasion, Mariupol had a population of around half a million. Boychenko estimates there are now 150,000 people living in Mariupol. One-third of them are people who have moved there from Russia and Central Asia since the occupation began, incentivised by the Russian government, which offers them healthy wages and accommodation in apartments abandoned by refugees. Around 150,000 residents of the city are displaced within Ukraine, 120,000 are in Europe and 50,000 in Russia.

All the Mariupolans I met in Kyiv spoke with great anguish at the divide between them and family members who are still in the city. Some said that, after all the trauma of war, their relatives no longer wanted to talk about Russia or Ukraine – they just wanted to get on with their lives. Diana, who worked in the culture department of the local council and escaped with her 12-year-old son, told me she has a completely different relationship now with her mother and brother who remain in Mariupol. Her mother, nostalgic for the days of the Soviet Union, says things like, “Russia is much larger and more powerful, they will win, just as they beat the Nazis. Russia will always win.” Her brother has a job in construction and tells her Ukraine is being colonised by Poland.

Denis, a nightclub manager in his 30s, said he can’t understand why his younger brother in Mariupol, “an intelligent person with critical faculties”, believes what he sees on Russian TV. “He tells me: ‘I don’t want to live in a country that cannot protect me. Ukraine has nothing, no weapons, no big army.’ He has become brainwashed.” Denis has tried to reason with him many times, but his brother counters: “You weren’t here. You didn’t see your neighbours’ bodies lying in the street. Why didn’t you come? Why didn’t you help us? Neither you nor your country came to help us.”’ Denis spoke with great pain, tears in his eyes. “I really have no answer to this,” he told me. The brothers have not spoken since April.

Petro Andryushchenko is a pollster and political adviser to Mayor Boychenko. He remains in contact with friends in different municipal departments inside Mariupol and gleans information from Telegram channels. He has managed algorithmically to track public opinion in Mariupol over the past months.

Andryushchenko said that even before the occupation, the city was roughly 20% pro-Russian and 20% pro-Ukrainian. The remaining 60% did not much care either way. “We call them the fridges,” he said. “For these people, what matters is not which flag is flying over the council building, it’s what’s in their fridge.” A year ago, he calculated that the majority of these people had been persuaded by the Russian narrative. Services were being reconnected by the occupiers and there was a sense that things were getting better. Now, he said, pro-Russian opinion was being eroded by people’s experience of corruption and repression. Mariupolans are complaining about low salaries, preferential treatment being given to incomers, haphazard internet connection, poor-quality produce in the markets, kiosks selling vodka on every corner and the sour taste of DNR-manufactured cigarettes.

For Andryushchenko, those who stayed in Mariupol had made a choice. “We understand and they understand that they are paying taxes to Russia which buys the weapons that kill us.” It was as if Mariupol had been unplugged from Ukraine and plugged into Russia. He didn’t think that the relationship between people who stayed and people who left could be repaired. “I think it’s for ever for all of us.”

Anatoly was charged with incitement of hatred and enmity for a series of Facebook posts he had made during the first days of the invasion, before the internet was cut. One was a picture of a cartoon couple holding hands in front of a burning Kremlin.

The investigating officer was a young woman from the prosecution department of the DNR. When she first questioned him, in May 2022, she filled out her protocol form in Russian, but switched easily to Ukrainian to read out the offending Facebook posts. Anatoly complimented her on her accent. Without thinking, Anatoly recalled, she replied in Ukrainian, “Oh thank you, I used to get top marks for Ukrainian at school,” and then realised that she had admitted her pride in her prowess at a language she ought to treat with disdain. She swore. Anatoly’s case was complicated when Russia officially annexed the DNR on October 4th 2022 because the offences he had been charged with were not subject to custodial sentences under Russian law. Still it took six months before he was released on parole.

When Anatoly finally arrived home in March, Artem looked at him in the doorway, turned away and went into his room. Anna hugged her husband tightly and asked him: “When are we leaving?”

“You said you didn’t want to leave your home,” he reminded her.

“This is not my home any more,” said Anna.

Artem was upset his father had been away for so long, but a few days after Anatoly’s return he tugged his hand to show he was ready to resume their bedtime routine, when Anatoly would lie down with his son before he went to sleep. Some weeks later though, Anna found Artem ripping up old family photographs.

Anatoly was struck by how much Mariupol had changed since he’d been in prison. There was now electricity, gas and cold running water. Buildings had been razed, and whole blocks reduced to vacant patches of land. There were long waiting lists for compensation and for new apartments. The sounds of construction was everywhere – people complained that the repairs to damaged buildings were shoddy. But elsewhere housing developments with sea views were going up to accommodate new arrivals: Russians, Chechens, Kazakhs. The family’s apartment block was still mostly empty, but two Uzbek families had moved onto the floor below, and half-a-dozen rowdy Chechen men were living in a flat on the ground floor.

People in Mariupol complained, but a mood of resignation hung over the city. They said that the Ukrainians had abandoned Mariupol. They were in Russia now and Russia would take care of them
Russian news carried no mention of the explosions that people could hear, as Ukrainians shelled military targets on the outskirts of the city. Anna and her brother avoided talking about politics, but he continued in his pro-Russian stance.

There was a sense of mistrust, between the occupying authorities and Mariupolans, and between the residents themselves. From time to time someone spray-painted a Ukrainian flag on a wall or graffitied praise to Ukrainian defenders. But no one dared talk openly. Informers were everywhere. Every week people disappeared. No one knew where they were taken.

In spring this year, the family began to make plans to leave. Anatoly, Anna and Artem needed Russian passports so they could travel easily through Russia back to Ukraine. The passport application office in Mariupol was inundated. But Anatoly had a friend who knew a policeman in another town where there were fewer applicants. “Thank God you can bribe them [policemen],” he told Anna when he gave her the news they could jump the queue.

There were, however, several Artem-shaped obstacles. First they needed a passport photo, but the face had to have a neutral expression and Artem always grinned when he saw a camera. They had obtained special dispensation for Artem’s Ukrainian passport picture; now when Anatoly explained the problem, the photographer winked and (against all regulations) Photoshopped a closed top lip. It tickled Anatoly that his son was smiling in his Ukrainian passport and frowning in his Russian passport.

Artem screamed when the technician yanked his wrist over the electronic fingerprint reader. Then they were told Artem would have to declare, out loud, an oath to uphold the laws and constitution of the Russian Federation. Anatoly spent some time persuading officials that the oath could just be read and signed – and that Anna could act on behalf of Artem.

With all the waiting and the strange people with barking voices, Artem became agitated and started to scream. His hysteria, his parents saw, was a kind of “superpower”: the officials soon got out their stamps to clear the family as soon as possible. Oddly, their passports bore the words, “Issued by the Crimean passport authority”. In this topsy-turvy world, time and place were in flux. One friend of theirs had received a passport in Mariupol that was issued “in Zhdanov”, the Soviet name for Mariupol.

Anatoly and Anna packed in secret so that Artem would not become anxious. They booked a taxi and set off at 7pm, hoping that Artem would sleep on the way. (He did not.) At the checkpoint outside Mariupol the soldiers looked at their documents and waved them through. The family in the car in front of them was turned away because they had Ukrainian passports.

Denis said he can’t understand why his younger brother in Mariupol, “an intelligent person with critical faculties”, believes what he sees on Russian TV. “He has become brainwashed.”
They drove through southern Russia and the next morning they arrived at an informal crossing-point on the Russian-Ukrainian border. Artillery thundered in the distance. Anatoly mustered all the calm he could and told Artem it was only fireworks.

Anatoly was worried a hard drive he had brought with him would arouse suspicion at the Russian checkpoint. Once again Artem saved them, howling and biting his hands in frustration at the hold-up. The guards threw their bags back at them and waved them through.

They had to walk almost two kilometres along a track, hauling their bags in the boiling heat. When they finally saw a Ukrainian border guard sitting beside a small hut, Anatoly stopped and took out his phone to film the moment of deliverance. Artem made a lowing sound and uttered syllables he had never said before: “Jo-jo!” His parents did not know what it meant, but they understood that he was happy. ■

Wendell Steavenson has reported on post-Soviet Georgia, the Iraq war and the Egyptian revolution. You can read her previous dispatches from the war in Ukraine for 1843 magazine, and the rest of our coverage, here.

Marta Rodionova has worked as a television journalist and creative producer.

PHOTOGRAPHS OKSANA PARAFENIUK