Bakhmut, called Artemivsk by the Russians, has become part of the grim roll call of the Ukraine war, one of the eastern cities blasted into a jagged hellscape of shattered buildings and rubbled roadways by the back-and-forth struggle between the two sides. Bakhmut even has the dubious distinction of being the place where the mercenary army of the infamous restaurateur turned condottiere Yevgeny Prigozhin battled for months to provide Vladimir Putin with a pyrrhic and temporary victory. It was also the city to which a 25-year-old Chris Miller, fresh from a stint as a local journalist in Oregon, was posted on joining the Peace Corps. This was 2009, before the 2013-14 Revolution of Dignity, before the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the start of an undeclared conflict in the south-eastern Donbas region, and a world away, it seemed, from the 2022 invasion.
Nonetheless, some of the early seeds of trouble were already growing. The young American – there to teach English and work in the local library – encountered people convinced he was a spy (he smiled too much) who fulminated against the politicians in Kyiv (not that they were any more keen on Moscow). In 2014, this sentiment would transform among a small but sadly armed minority into a conviction that they had to rebel, and the rest is bloody history.
