Andriy Koshelev steered his car into the driveway of his home on Pushkin Street in Bilozerka, a lakeside town in Ukraine’s Kherson region. Leaving the car on, Koshelev got out and walked to the entrance gate. He reached down to loosen the latch. When he pulled it, the gate exploded. Koshelev’s parents, who lived on the same property, rushed outside as acrid smoke filled their driveway and the street. The explosion resounded across town.

Bilozerka was near the front line in occupied territory, and the townspeople knew a shelling when they heard one. This was not that. The explosion came suddenly, without the air-tearing screech that precedes an incoming shell. Stepping out of the ambulance, the medics sensed this, too — they could smell the remnants of a bomb. “The scent of the explosive was so strong that I started sneezing,” one medic told me. They found Koshelev’s car, its engine running and its headlights on. Then they found Koshelev. The blast had hurled him through the gate. He lay beneath its bent bars, shrieking. Among the wreckage were bits of metal shrapnel; he had apparently tripped an explosive wired to the gate.

The medics knew who Andriy Koshelev was. By that night — Oct. 7 of last year — he was infamous in Bilozerka. Before the Russian invasion, Koshelev worked in his parents’ butcher shop. After it, his neighbors say, he became an official in the new government. It was commonly believed that he’d won this sudden career advancement by collaborating, a belief that became even more common when, a week before the explosion, Koshelev appeared in a video celebrating Russia’s announcement that it had annexed Kherson. “We extend enormous gratitude,” he said, “to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, the president of the Russian Federation.” The video quickly circulated on social media; the medics had seen it. As they bandaged Koshelev’s legs, loaded him onto a spine board and took him to a hospital, they surmised what had most likely happened: The Ukrainian resistance had gotten to him.

When I arrived in Ukraine, in June of this year, Bilozerka had been liberated by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and the Kherson region was now split in two, with its right bank, north of the Dnipro River, once again Ukrainian, and its left bank, south of the river, still occupied. I met Vlada Bahinska and Hryhorii Pelykh, two of the medics who treated Koshelev, at the town’s hospital. The medics reconstructed for me what they believed had happened when Koshelev returned home that day, and they described his condition.