As the last curtain fell in Mariupol, as the dying screamed among the rubble of the theater and the survivors crawled out, a young man in a dust-covered Spiderman costume stumbled through the rubble. The acting student Dmytro Muranzew hadn’t taken off his disguise for almost three weeks. It was quite simply the warmest thing he’d found in the closet of his dorm room when the heaters went out shortly after the siege of the Black Sea port city began – a chance find from a second-hand shop, bought in pre-war times for 30 hryvnia.

Access to all STERN PLUS content and articles from the print magazine

ad-free

Already registered?