Credit...Elinor Carucci for The New York Times

An Escape from the Front Line in Ukraine

An excerpt from one of the most ambitious stories in The Times Magazine’s history.

by · NY Times

Today, The New York Times Magazine published one of the most ambitious stories in its long history — an account of a Russian military officer’s desertion and escape. Sarah Topol spent over a year and a half investigating the Russian military and reporting in eight countries across four continents.

In the story, the officer — identified by a pseudonym, Ivan — feigns a serious back injury to escape the front in Ukraine and eventually defect. He uses a cane to make that story convincing. Now, he must retrieve his passport, which is locked with other officers’ passports in the H.R. office of his base in Russia. Each passport has a paper slip in it, logging various personal details. He buys a fake version of the passport online: good enough to fool the military, but not to fool anyone at the borders he needs to cross.

So Ivan devises a plan to get his hands on the real one — and swap it with the fake. Here’s how he does it.

By Sarah A. Topol

I’m a contributing writer for The Times Magazine.

Ivan knew the office from years of worthless paperwork and reports. The H.R. manager sat at a desk on the right side of the room. Next to him was a six-foot-high metal safe with three drawers. They were unlocked with a key. The passports were kept in folders inside the drawers.

To complicate matters, Ivan could use only one arm — the other would be holding the cane as part of his act. So he had to walk in, with his cane in his left hand, take the passport out of his pocket and somehow swap it for the fake. He would also need to remove the paper slip from the original and place it into the duplicate before returning it. How could he do all that with just one hand?

The H.R. manager’s desk faced the room. Ivan would have to find a way to reach into his pocket while holding both the cane and the passport. No, that wouldn’t work. He would need to find a way to sit down, put down his cane so he could have two free hands and then reach into his pocket — but that motion could be seen from the side or the back.

Ivan thought maybe he could hide the passport up his sleeve. At home, he put on his uniform and practiced — the passport was bulky, bigger than his wrist. Someone could notice.

Ivan sat down at his kitchen table to think. He attended meetings with a Moleskine-type notebook; maybe he could take the notebook, as if he were coming from some mindless meeting. He carried it in his right hand. What if I take it, open it and slip the passport inside? When he tried it, he realized that the notebook bulged a bit — you could see something smaller sandwiched inside the larger book easily. Just imagine if it slipped out and there were two identical passports on the ground?

He sat down again to think. What if I cut a hole in the notebook and put it in there?

Ivan took out a knife and carved a hole in the center of the notebook’s pages. He left blank pages at the back, so if anyone asked him to write something down, it would still be usable.

He practiced how he would do it. He would walk into the office; to his right, the H.R. manager would be seated facing the room. “Privyet! Can I have my passport please? I need to write something down for my wife,” Ivan rehearsed. The guy would turn, open the safe and hand Ivan the passport.

Ivan would take the passport with his right hand — the same one holding the notebook — and walk over to a table he knew was on the other side of the room. He would sit down and lean his cane against the table. Keeping his original passport in his right hand, he would open the notebook with his left, his fingers flipping the cover to reveal the duplicate passport in the hole. Ivan would pull out the duplicate with his left hand and insert the original passport with his right.

When he was done, Ivan would close the notebook from the back and pick it up tightly by the binding in one hand with the duplicate passport on top. He would return it to the duty officer the same way he had taken it and walk out, leaning on his cane.

He spent a night and a day at home practicing the movements. He timed it, until he could do it fast, almost with his eyes closed. He wanted it to be quick, muscle memory, so if he were nervous, he wouldn’t stumble or shake. The trick wasn’t just in the double-handed swap, but in moving the pages and cover backward and forward with his fingers simultaneously, like a difficult piano piece.

Once he mastered the movements, Ivan spent a week casing the H.R. office, determining when it was the least busy. He learned that the usual senior human-resources officer had left for the front — and that in his place was a green young lieutenant whom Ivan outranked.

Perfect, Ivan thought.

Find out what happens next by reading the whole story. You can also listen to the audio version (read by the actor Liev Schreiber).

Read this week’s Magazine here.

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THE SUNDAY DEBATE

How much will the interest rate cuts affect the economy?

Significantly. Lowered interest rates will improve the job market and continue to lower inflation and mortgage rates. “The soft landing that we all hoped for — where inflation falls back to 2 percent without triggering a recession — is on the horizon,” Jason Furman writes for U.S. News and World Report.

Minimally. Though these cuts are a step in the right direction, small businesses and home buyers are unlikely to see much of a difference. “The Fed would need to reduce its federal funds rate by at least a full percentage point to help accomplish this. So we’ve got a long ways to go,” Gene Marks writes for The Hill.

FROM OPINION

Padma Lakshmi says Kamala Harris’s qualities as a cook — patience, attention to detail, and the impulse to bring people together — would make her a great president.

Conservative college students face discrimination on campus, but they shouldn’t allow that to alter their beliefs or give them a victim mentality, Robert George writes.

Here are columns from Nicholas Kristof on rape in Sudan’s civil war and David French on Mark Robinson’s scandals.

MORNING READS

Old school: Across New York City, millennial chefs are saving decades-old diners, gently tweaking menus and interiors.

Car parts and a dream: A teacher from Alberta, Canada, spent nearly 2,000 hours building a hovercraft without a blueprint.

Routine: How the “Suits” actress Gina Torres spends her Sundays.

Vows: A Hollywood actress finds a farm, and her leading man, in the Midwest.

Lives Lived: Robert Lansdorp was a tennis coach whose focus on developing ground strokes through ceaseless repetition helped turn four of his students — Tracy Austin, Pete Sampras, Lindsay Davenport and Maria Sharapova — into world No. 1s. He died at 85.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

By Elisabeth Egan

“Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI,” by Yuval Noah Harari. No need to be intimidated by this 492-page doorstop; it’s easy to dip in and out of, and its analog heft makes for a satisfying counterweight to the algorithmic vapor it tries to contain. Welcome to Artificial Intelligence 101, taught by the historian behind the mega-best-seller “Sapiens.” Here, Harari takes a long, hard, philosophical look at the way decision making, idea-creating technology can and will reshape the future — including jobs, governments, health care and relationships. Do we want our universe to be overtaken by a Strega Nona-style supercomputer hellbent on producing paper clips? Probably not. But Harari also offers thoughtful ideas for how to rethink technology without going full Luddite, and he asks a poignant question that, for now (I think/hope?!), can only be addressed by humans: “Why are we so good at accumulating more information and power, but far less successful at acquiring wisdom?” Read our review of the book here.

More on books

THE INTERVIEW

By David Marchese

This week’s subject for The Interview is the best-selling novelist Sally Rooney. Her new book, “Intermezzo,” will be published on Sept. 24.

There are stylistic aspects to “Intermezzo” that make it different from your past books. But it’s not that different. Do you ever wonder if your books are too similar, and about how your writing might change in the future?

That’s a really good question. I would have to answer it by saying I don’t care about my career. I think about, How do I make this book the perfect version of what it can be? I never think about it in relation to my other work, and I never think about what people will say about how close or distant it is from my oeuvre. I don’t feel myself thinking about my growth as an artist, if you will.

You’re not being a little disingenuous? I’m skeptical.

It’s fair to be skeptical. There is a huge cultural fixation with novelty and growth. Get bigger, sell more and be different. I don’t find that very interesting.

This question relates to a recurring theme in your work: how one might live a meaningful life in a time of historical crisis. How do you think about the value of your work in that regard?

That’s a really good question and a difficult question and one that I constantly return to in my own life and work. I feel convinced that our present world system is not fit for purpose. That’s a crisis that is extremely pressing, and I’m aware that I’ve spent three years of my life working on a novel that does not really directly contribute anything to the struggle against these forces. I absolutely question why I’ve done that. A lot of this would be more easy to justify if I could say, “Thankfully, all my novels are works of genius.” But what I will say is they’re completely sincere. I genuinely put my heart and soul into them.

Read more of the interview here.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Relax at an adults-only hotel.

Ace an online job interview.

Outsource vacuuming to a (self-emptying) robot.

Choose the best running shoes.

MEAL PLAN

New York Times Cooking, in celebration of its 10th birthday, released a list of 50 of its greatest hits for inclusion in your recipe box. (You can find them here.) In this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter, Emily Weinstein offers five extra five-star recipes to add to your list including kimchi fried rice, garlicky chicken with lemon-anchovy sauce and hot honey shrimp.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangram was jawbone.

Can you put eight historical events — including the Berlin Airlift, the founding of Venice, and the creation of “Happy Birthday to You” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku, Connections and Strands.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

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