Lang Holds the Line

Once an archaeologist, now a war-weary major, Lang buries friends instead of relics, fighting drones, grief, and silence to defend a country increasingly haunted by its own endurance.

KYIV, Ukraine — The rain was falling lightly on the worn pavements of Kyiv when I met Major Lang again, a soldier whose name had first entered my notebooks in 2022, during Ukraine’s early counter-offensives in Kharkiv. But it wasn’t until 2024, two years into a war that had already exhausted its combatants and disoriented the headlines, that I came to truly understand the measure of the man.

In October of that year, I published two detailed reportages¹ that traced his transformation from archaeologist to artillery commander. Lang was no career soldier. He had once sifted through the earth in search of ancient stories. Now he fights to protect the fragile future of the country he once studied through its past. It was in those two stories, one told on the banks of the Siverskyi Donets River, the other in a worn-down café near the threatened city of Sumy that I began to see how the war was changing not just Ukraine’s geography, but its soul.

Now, in June 2025, as Russian forces push again w…