The Men in Woolly Hats

By Matthew Parish

Monday 5 October 2026

There comes a point in every evening in Kharkiv when a perfectly ordinary bar begins to acquire the atmosphere of a meeting whose purpose nobody has explained to you. This generally happens shortly before curfew. The music becomes quieter, although nobody appears to have asked for it to be turned down. The women remain dressed for a considerably warmer and less heavily bombarded city. The soldiers become louder. Then, one by one, men in woolly hats begin to arrive.

The woolly hats are important. They are not quite military hats, although some of them might be. They are not quite civilian hats either, because the men wearing them possess that peculiar Kharkiv habit of looking simultaneously unemployed, exhausted and as though they might know the coordinates of something extremely important. They enter individually, exchange brief acknowledgements with people whom one had previously assumed did not know one another, order drinks and sit in corners. Nobody introduces them.

This is how paranoia begins in wartime: not with secret documents or men whispering into radios, but with knitwear.

Outside, the air-raid sirens are sounding again. Earlier in the evening they competed unsuccessfully with rock music. Now the music has been turned down and the sirens have won. Their mechanical lament drifts through the windows and doors, accompanied periodically by the noises of a city that has spent nearly five years learning the distinction between sounds worth worrying about and sounds that can safely be ignored until morning. Nobody moves towards a shelter. Someone orders another beer.

Meanwhile the linguistic character of the bar is deteriorating magnificently. Ukrainian, Russian and English have ceased to function as separate languages and are merging into a single military dialect consisting principally of obscenities. A Ukrainian soldier shouts something in English that would cause difficulties for a BBC continuity announcer. An English-speaking soldier replies using a Russian profanity whose grammatical declension he has apparently mastered better than most foreign students ever master the genitive case. Someone else contributes an emphatic Ukrainian expression. Everybody understands everybody perfectly.

This may be the most successful experiment in multilingual education currently taking place in Europe.

Around them are women dressed as though Kharkiv were Ibiza and the Russian Federation an unfortunate rumour. This is another of the city’s more remarkable forms of psychological resistance. Outside there are sirens, drones, missiles, darkness and approaching curfew. Inside there are short dresses, improbable heels, carefully applied make-up and an absolute refusal to acknowledge that any of these external circumstances should interfere with Saturday night. Kharkiv women have developed the remarkable ability to dress simultaneously for a nightclub, an air raid and the possibility that the electricity may disappear halfway through applying mascara.

The contrast with the woolly-hat men could hardly be greater. They are wrapped in dark jackets and layers of clothing. Some have beards. Some stare into their telephones. Others stare at nothing. Their expressions suggest that they have either returned from somewhere unpleasant or are shortly going somewhere worse. One cannot help wondering who they are.

The obvious possibilities become increasingly elaborate after several beers. Military intelligence? Territorial Defence? Foreign volunteers? Policemen? Fixers? Smugglers? Railway engineers? Men who repair generators? Men who know men who repair generators? In Ukraine all these categories occasionally seem to overlap anyway. One of the great mistakes foreigners make is assuming that important people necessarily look important. In wartime Ukraine the reverse principle frequently applies. The man who looks as though he sleeps in a railway station may be responsible for a drone unit. The glamorous man in an expensive coat may actually be selling kitchen fittings.

It is therefore prudent not to inquire too aggressively about the woolly hats.

Sitting there, however, I find myself thinking about Kant. This is probably not what Kant intended. Königsberg’s famously methodical philosopher, whose daily routine became a legend of intellectual punctuality, seems an improbable companion for a Kharkiv bar approaching curfew. Yet Kant believed that reason imposes order upon experience and that moral freedom consists not in doing whatever happens to appeal to us but in submitting ourselves to principles that rational beings could recognise as universal. There is something wonderfully Kantian about the very idea of a curfew: at a stipulated hour everybody is supposed to go home, irrespective of beauty, drunkenness, nationality, rank, romantic opportunity or the quality of the beer.

The difficulty is that Kharkiv appears determined to provide a practical refutation. The categorical imperative has encountered a man in a woolly hat who has ordered another pint at eleven twenty. The universal moral law is being shouted over by a soldier using three languages to explain what he thinks of the Russian army. Pure reason has found itself sitting beside a woman in a backless dress while an air-raid siren sounds outside. Kant might insist that appearances must be organised by the categories of understanding, but tonight the categories seem badly in need of reinforcements.

Then I think of Hegel, who would surely have been more comfortable here. Hegel understood that history does not proceed tidily. Human societies develop through conflict, contradiction and transformations in consciousness that become intelligible only retrospectively. The comfortable world generates its opposite; established forms collide with forces they cannot contain; what once seemed permanent reveals itself as merely one stage in a continuing historical movement. Kharkiv at night sometimes feels like a Hegelian seminar from which the professor has fled.

Everything here contains its opposite. Fear produces recklessness. War produces an almost ferocious appetite for pleasure. Curfew creates the desire to stay out until the last possible minute. Russian attempts to destroy Ukrainian civic identity have strengthened it. The proximity of death intensifies the insistence upon living. Soldiers who have seen things they would rather forget laugh more loudly than anybody else in the room. Women surrounded by the paraphernalia of war dress with an extravagance that seems to belong to another universe. The mysterious men conceal themselves by gathering conspicuously in identical woolly hats.

Perhaps this is the dialectic, although Hegel scholars may wish to forgive me for discovering it after several beers.

The soldiers, meanwhile, have abandoned philosophy altogether. Their conversation has reached that volume at which operational security is protected primarily by the fact that nobody can understand a complete sentence. English begins in one corner, collides with Ukrainian somewhere near the bar and emerges as Russian profanity beside the toilets. Occasionally everybody laughs. Then somebody becomes serious for thirty seconds before the laughter begins again.

This oscillation between comedy and darkness is one of the defining rhythms of Kharkiv. War does not produce permanent solemnity. Human beings cannot sustain it. Instead the extraordinary becomes incorporated into the ordinary until an air-raid siren can become background accompaniment to an argument about whose turn it is to buy vodka. The absurdity is not evidence that people have forgotten the danger. It is evidence that they remember it constantly and have nevertheless decided to continue living.

Curfew approaches. In another city this would mean checking the time and ordering a taxi. In Kharkiv it produces something closer to the closing minutes of an unusually complicated military exercise. People begin calculating distances, checkpoints, transport, accommodation and precisely how much trouble they are prepared to have with the police. Telephones emerge. Messages are exchanged. Somebody announces that there are twelve minutes remaining, whereupon everybody behaves as though twelve minutes were an unexpectedly generous extension granted by the authorities.

The mysterious men in woolly hats do not appear concerned. This naturally makes them more mysterious.

One of them disappears. Another arrives. A third has apparently been sitting behind me for half an hour without my noticing him. There is no evidence whatsoever that these men are engaged in anything more sinister than drinking beer and keeping their heads warm, but evidence is an overrated commodity after eleven o’clock at night in Kharkiv. Imagination fills the evidential vacuum extremely efficiently.

Perhaps they are simply friends. Perhaps there is a convention of Ukrainian knitwear enthusiasts taking place tonight. Perhaps somewhere on Telegram there is a group entitled Men in Hats, Kharkiv, whose members gather every Saturday to discuss wool density and the relative merits of merino. This explanation is objectively more probable than several alternatives circulating in my mind, although it is considerably less entertaining.

Then there is another siren.

For a few seconds conversation pauses. Not completely, but enough to notice. Everyone listens. This is the instinct outsiders do not initially understand. Kharkiv residents may appear to ignore air-raid warnings, but they are always listening. Somewhere beneath the jokes, the alcohol, the flirting, the multilingual obscenities and the apparently suicidal indifference lies a highly developed sensory apparatus calibrated by years of war. People listen for direction, distance and type. They make calculations without visibly making them.

Then conversation resumes.

At this point Kant returns to my thoughts, because there is something deeper in his philosophy that survives the apparent chaos rather better than his reputation for orderliness might suggest. Kant’s great moral insight was that human beings possess dignity because they are ends in themselves rather than instruments for somebody else’s purposes. War represents perhaps the most systematic violation of that principle imaginable. Empires turn individuals into numbers, territories, strategic assets, mobilisation pools and acceptable losses. Missiles do not recognise autonomous moral subjects. Artillery does not distinguish between philosophical conceptions of human dignity.

Yet the people in this bar stubbornly insist upon being ends in themselves. They drink because they want to drink. They love whom they want to love. They speak the languages they want to speak, sometimes all three in the same sentence. They wear ridiculous dresses and ridiculous woolly hats. They refuse, insofar as circumstances permit, to become merely components in somebody else’s geopolitical calculation. Seen this way, the frivolity of the evening contains something profoundly serious.

Hegel supplies the other half of the picture. Freedom for him was not merely an inner possession but something realised through history, institutions and mutual recognition. That makes Ukraine’s war more than a contest over lines on a map. It is also a struggle over who gets to determine the institutions within which millions of people recognise one another as citizens and through which they construct their collective life. Moscow offers one historical answer. Ukraine, painfully and imperfectly, insists upon another.

These philosophical abstractions sound rather grand when contemplated beside half-finished pints and people wondering whether they can get home before curfew. Yet perhaps philosophy is most useful precisely when it illuminates scenes that initially appear ridiculous. Kant asks what principles ought to govern us. Hegel asks how freedom emerges from the collisions of history. Kharkiv replies by placing both questions in a bar, turning down the music, sounding an air-raid siren and adding several mysterious men in woolly hats.

This is why evenings such as this are difficult to describe to people who have never lived in a city under bombardment. They imagine either terror or heroism because these are the categories through which wars are conventionally narrated. The reality contains much more beer. It contains bored bartenders, flirtation, cigarettes, terrible jokes, people looking for phone chargers and mysterious men wearing woolly hats. War does not abolish ordinary life. It colonises it.

And ordinary life, stubborn creature that it is, colonises war in return.

That is perhaps why the barely dressed women matter as much as the soldiers. They are not merely decoration in an eccentric nocturnal tableau. Their determination to go out, dress extravagantly, flirt, dance and enjoy themselves is part of the same phenomenon as the soldier laughing at an obscenity in three languages. These are small declarations that Moscow does not determine every detail of existence here. A missile may determine whether the electricity works tomorrow morning. It does not necessarily determine what shoes someone wears tonight.

The men in woolly hats may represent something similar. Perhaps they have been somewhere difficult. Perhaps they are going somewhere difficult. Perhaps they are merely cold. Kharkiv does not volunteer explanations readily and after sufficient time here one learns not to demand them. The city contains thousands of private stories running alongside the public story of the war, many of which are better left unexplained until their owners decide otherwise.

By now the music is barely audible. The sirens are louder. A soldier is shouting something anatomically ambitious in Russian, another is answering in English and somebody has introduced a Ukrainian obscenity of such impressive complexity that translation would diminish it. The women continue drinking. The woolly hats continue gathering. Curfew is almost upon us.

And somehow, against every reasonable expectation, I find the whole spectacle reassuring.

Kharkiv at night is not normal. Pretending otherwise would be sentimental nonsense. It is a city within range of Russian weapons, inhabited by people carrying burdens that strangers cannot see and governed after midnight by rules that exist because the possibility of sudden violence is entirely real. Yet the city possesses an extraordinary appetite for life precisely because death has made itself so conspicuous.

Perhaps Kant and Hegel would disagree about what all this means. Kant might search for the universal principle beneath the disorder. Hegel might reply that the disorder is precisely where we should look for history doing its work. I suspect both would eventually become frustrated, because Kharkiv resists philosophical systems just as stubbornly as it resists almost everything else. There is always another contradiction, another exception, another man entering the room wearing a woolly hat.

So the bars remain open until they cannot. The women put on their dresses. The soldiers swear in whichever language comes most readily to hand. The bartenders turn the music down. The sirens take over the soundtrack. Mysterious men appear wearing woolly hats and nobody asks too many questions.

Then everyone looks at the clock.

Curfew.

Time to go home — unless, of course, you are one of the men in the woolly hats.

In which case Kant has failed, Hegel may have won and, apparently, you know something the rest of us do not.