Just before 2 P.M., at a gas station near the city of Panevėžys, in northern Lithuania, officers raided the bus. The young man appeared to be dozing in his seat; they shook him awake and told him that he was under arrest. Later, during an interrogation, he admitted everything. His name was Daniil Bardadim, a seventeen-year-old from southern Ukraine. He had committed one act of arson, he said, and he had been on his way to Riga to carry out another.
Two months earlier, Bardadim had crossed the border from Ukraine into Poland. He had previously lived with his parents and a brother in Kherson, a port city known for its fields of sunflowers and watermelons, which, in the early days of the war, was occupied by Russian forces. A former K.G.B. officer was installed as mayor; the schools and other public services remained closed for months. Bardadim, who was then fifteen, briefly worked at a gas station. In September, 2022, occupation authorities held a supposed referendum that led to Russia’s annexation of the city and its surrounding region, but the Kremlin’s rule over Kherson proved short-lived: in mid-November, after a sustained counter-offensive, the Ukrainian Army retook the city.
The first days of liberation were joyous, with crowds flooding the central square. But Russian forces, which remained just across the Dnipro River, routinely fired rockets and artillery into the city, killing people at bus stops, outside the grocery store, in their homes. Then came the drones, hunting anything that moved. The city began to empty out. In November, 2023, Bardadim moved with his family to Haivoron, a small town near the border with Moldova.
Haivoron was relatively quiet: Russian missiles and drones occasionally streaked across the sky, but the town itself was never targeted. Bardadim finished eleventh grade; by the following spring he was feeling restless. “During the war, wages were poor, and I had little money,” he later told investigators. In a few months, he would turn eighteen and have to register with his local draft office. At that point, he would be prohibited from leaving the country. He gathered his savings—three thousand hryvnia, around seventy-five dollars—and formed a plan with a friend from Kherson, who is identified in Polish case files as Oleksandr, to flee Ukraine. “So as to not have to fight,” Bardadim said.
The pair crossed the border into Poland in March, 2024; it was Bardadim’s first time outside Ukraine. A Ukrainian friend who worked at a furniture factory in Kluczbork, a small town in southern Poland, had arranged jobs for them loading sofas into trucks, which paid around fifty dollars a day in cash. After a month, another acquaintance from Kherson, a man named Serhiy Chaliy, invited them to Warsaw.
“Any dietary restrictions the kitchen should know about?”
Cartoon by Ellie Black
Chaliy, who, at thirty-one, was more than a decade older than Bardadim and Oleksandr, came from the same neighborhood in Kherson; he’d owned the gas station where Bardadim had worked at the start of the invasion. (Oleksandr had worked there, too.) Bardadim later described him as having a “short beard,” an “athletic build,” and “pockmarks on his face.” He always wore a “blue baseball cap,” “black clothes,” and a “thick gold chain” around his neck. During the occupation, Chaliy had been involved in a series of side hustles, including trading fuel on the black market, an enterprise that was possible only with the approval, tacit or otherwise, of the Russian forces stationed in the city. He sped around town in a BMW. “Like a gangster,” Oleksandr said. “I was afraid of him.”
Bardadim had heard that Chaliy was also involved in the stolen-car trade, running vehicles into Russia and either selling them there or moving them on to Europe. When Ukrainian forces liberated Kherson, Chaliy, fearing arrest, had fled to Crimea, which had been annexed by Russia in 2014. “The police are fighting over his head,” Bardadim had told Oleksandr at the time. By then, the pair may have already been associated with Chaliy’s criminal circle. A source in Ukrainian law enforcement told me, “Chaliy, along with his neighbors in Kherson, dismantled cars and transported them to Crimea.”
