Where Russia Once Triumphed, Ukrainians Prepare to Resist Putin

Mr. Khanko is a veteran of the war that Russia whipped up in Ukraine’s east in 2014 to hinder its neighbor from integrating with the West. While the U.S. and its allies have been fretting that Mr. Putin will order a forceful military thrust to rein in Ukraine again, Mr. Khanko has been laying plans to send his wife and small child westward so he can wage a partisan war from the woods around Poltava.

“Even if they get to Poltava, they won’t be here for long,” said Mr. Khanko, who sports a buzzcut and long black beard.

Mr. Putin has described Ukraine as an artificial country glued together by Soviet leaders and named Poltava, some 100 miles from the modern border, among historical Russian lands that he says were wrongly cleaved from Moscow’s control. The city lies on the main highway westward from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, to Kyiv, the capital.

But there are thousands of veterans in this region alone, and while the powerful Russian army would likely overrun Ukrainian forces, holding the territory would come at a huge cost, Mr. Khanko said. A recent national survey by a Kyiv pollster showed that one-third of Ukrainians are willing to take up arms if Russia launches an all-out war.

“I know what I am fighting for, but how will Putin sell it to Russians when tens of thousands of graves appear across the country?” Mr. Khanko said. “For what?”

Western and Ukrainian officials say there is little clarity whether Mr. Putin is planning a major military offensive to secure Ukraine in his sphere of influence or seeking to use the threat of war to pry concessions from the West.

Russia has denied it has any plans to invade, but it wants the U.S. and its allies to abandon its support for Ukraine’s military and withdraw a pledge to make Ukraine a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. On Thursday, in his annual end-of-year media session, Mr. Putin said Russia wanted to avoid conflict but it required immediate security guarantees from the U.S. and its allies.

One thing Mr. Putin has been clear about is his broad ambitions for Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that declared independence in 1991. Ukrainians and Russians, he has said repeatedly, are one people torn apart by the Soviet collapse.

In a recent 7,000-word essay on Ukrainian history, Mr. Putin wrote about the Battle of Poltava in 1709, saying that most locals sided with Moscow against Swedish forces and Cossacks under a Ukrainian leader named Ivan Mazepa.

Yevheniya Shcherbyna, a 33-year-old tour guide at the museum of the battle, sees things differently.

“The information war started 300 years ago,” she said, citing the production of paintings, engravings and statues glorifying the Russian victory.

The battle was a defeat for Ukraine, she said, but later generations continued the fight to this today.

The museum last year opened an exhibit detailing what it calls Russian myths about the battle.

“For Putin, the mythology of the Battle of Poltava is the foundation of the idea that we are one nation,” said Oleh Pustovgar, a Poltava historian. “It is important for Russia not to let Poltava out of the brotherly embrace.”

After Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist last month said his country could send troops on a training mission to Ukraine, Russia’s embassy recalled the battle.

“We would like to remind Mr. Hultqvist that he is not the first military leader in Sweden who is trying to intimidate Russia with the power of his heroic army by planning to send his military to Ukraine,” the embassy wrote on Facebook.

Poltava, a quiet provincial capital of around 280,000 inhabitants, saw a surge of patriotic activism after 2014 that was sparked by a revolution that toppled a pro-Russian president and the subsequent war.

Mr. Khanko led a unit of protesters from this town during the revolution in Kyiv that ended in dozens of deaths, including one from his group.

Protesters took to the streets here as well, using a crane to pull down the city’s statue of Lenin.

Russia fomented separatist protests in cities across Ukraine’s south and east in 2014, but patriotic groups here quickly quashed efforts of instigators they said weren’t locals.

As supplies of fighters, commanders and weapons from Russia transformed demonstrations in the east into an armed conflict, Poltava residents sent aid to Ukraine’s threadbare army. Food and clothes piled up in an Orthodox cathedral here, soon filling an office, spilling down a staircase and taking up around one-third of the building, recalls Archbishop Fedir, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine’s leader in the region.

“Ukraine has weak state institutions, but we can organize ourselves quickly,” he said.

Others like Mr. Khanko, the archaeologist, went to fight, many as part of volunteer units.

“I used to know how to dig up,” he said. “But I learned how to dig in.”

Activists raised Ukrainian and nationalist flags atop a monument to the Russian victory in the center of town. A statue to Mr. Mazepa, the defeated Cossack leader, was erected after years of delays. At the aviation museum, new displays were added to commemorate locals killed in the current war alongside exhibits to Soviet heroes.

There is some support here for ties with Russia, mainly among older residents with ties to the ex-Soviet air force base.

The city’s mayor, Oleksandr Mamai, who draws support mainly from elderly voters, caused a storm when he echoed the Kremlin’s narrative in a recent television interview, saying the U.S. was fighting Russia in Ukraine, setting “brother against brother.” Political opponents want him removed.

Oleksandr Koba, who helped topple the Lenin statue, said elderly ladies cursed him in the days afterward. “You pulled down our Lenin,” he recalls them saying. Mr. Koba has organized pop-up street museums and performances to showcase Ukraine’s history and Soviet villainy, including the Holodomor, a forced famine that killed millions in the 1930s.

The conflict has brought some economic pain. Exports to Russia collapsed, a process that began even before the war when Moscow banned milk imports from the region.

At the souvenir shop near the museum, a seller complained that some of the craftspeople who make trinkets and traditional embroidered shirts have left to look for work in European Union countries.

Russia has justified its interventions in Ukraine by claiming, with scant evidence, that Russian speakers face repression there.

Ihor Petrichenko, a deputy of Mr. Mamai’s from an opposition party, said many in the town switched from speaking Russian to Ukrainian after 2014, but he largely stuck with Russian to make a point.

“I don’t need Putin to protect me,” he said.

After returning from the front, Mr. Khanko and other veterans launched camps to teach teenagers basic military tactics and survival skills, as well as patriotic history.

He acknowledges the West wouldn’t send troops to help if Russia invades, but hopes for weapons deliveries.

Ivan Petrenko, who helped set up a motorized infantry battalion from scratch in 2014, said Mr. Putin had underestimated Ukrainians then. A retired colonel who served in the Soviet army in Afghanistan, he said Russia has been buoyed by the U.S.’s recent flight from Kabul—but that Ukrainians would stand firm.

“We won’t be a second Afghanistan,” said Mr. Petrenko. “This is our land, and we’ll fight for it.”

—Natalie Gryvnyak in Kyiv contributed to this article.

Write to James Marson at [email protected]