Explosions punctuate the night sky over Kyiv as Slava Medvedenko stares through a pair of high-powered binoculars. An AK-47 at his side, he studies the black, forested expanse that separates him from the frontlines of Russia’s war in his native Ukraine.
In the weeks following Vladimir Putin’s February order for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this is how Medvedenko spends many of his nights: Manning a guard station atop the tallest building in the Kyiv neighborhood he lives in with his wife and two of his children.
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For four hours every day he watches the road that stretches to the suburban battlefield and anticipates the moment the Russians will come. His efforts serve as a snapshot of the stiff civilian resistance experts have said Russian forces were not prepared to meet.
It has been two decades since Medvedenko emerged as an endearing figure on the championship Los Angeles Lakers teams of the early 2000s. Winning a pair of NBA titles backing up Shaquille O’Neal, he achieved a cult-like following among Lakers fans and was a favorite of Kobe Bryant. When Bryant threatened to abscond to the Clippers in 2004, it was Medvedenko he vowed to take with him.
Fifteen years since he last appeared in an NBA game, Medvedenko calls his playing days like a dream right now. “War,” he says, “is time to open something different in yourself.”
Since the Feb. 24 invasion, Medvedenko, who had no previous military training, has served in Ukraine’s territorial defense forces, the reserve unit of the country’s military. While Russian forces sat just 10 miles away in the occupied city of Brovary, he carried a rifle through the streets, on the lookout for looters and saboteurs. When a man caught taking photographs in Medvedenko’s neighborhood of Mykilska Slobidkja was found to have a Russian passport, the brigade’s rapid response group detained him, put him in handcuffs and turned him over to special forces. The brigade also made sure no one suspicious got close to the Kyiv Metro Bridge into the center of the city.
Medvedenko’s days atop the checkpoint were typically quiet. But during night shifts, he would watch as the Ukrainian air defense system shot Russian missiles out of the sky, sometimes directly over his head.
“Can you imagine?” he said. “You’re just sitting at a checkpoint and you see a big fucking rocket just fly over you?”
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On one of the first nights he sat watch, Russian forces fired more than 20 missiles trying to take out the Ukrainian radar system.
“We have almost first row in the cinema,” he said. “That was the first time I think Russians understand they cannot break our air defense system.”
In a country experiencing intense national pride in the face of war, with a significant civilian contribution to the effort, Medvedenko is not terribly unique. Except in one obvious way.
“Slava is a guy who is two meters and seven centimeters tall,” said his friend and fellow volunteer Mykola Vasylkov. “All other guys around is like microbes, ants and beetles compared to Slava (who is 6-10). And he is staying on his post not to allow Russians to come to Kyiv.”
Since Russian forces turned their attention to Ukraine’s east, things have calmed down in Kyiv. Medvedenko has focused on relief efforts, like delivering food to areas that were previously occupied by Russian forces, and is focused on building a charitable foundation aimed at helping Ukrainian children.
But for nearly two months, the former basketball star functioned as an around-the-clock member of a military police force. He participated in daily meetings at a café that had been converted into a self-defense office to strategize against possible attacks. He dug holes for anti-tank mines and trained to fire RPGs.
Vasylkov said that despite those dangerous tasks, “Slava was never scared.”
Medvedenko doesn’t necessarily agree, acknowledging that he experienced fear as those rockets flew overhead, but otherwise he was just focused on helping to defend his neighborhood.
“When you’re in this process,” he said, “you don’t have time to be scared.”
Mark Madsen arrived for his first NBA training camp in 2000, just months after the Lakers had won their first championship in 12 seasons, dispatching the Indiana Pacers in six games. Madsen was the team’s first-round draft pick, an All-American from Stanford who was suddenly surrounded by megastars in O’Neal and Bryant, and venerable role players like Brian Shaw, Horace Grant and Ron Harper.
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Despite a significant language barrier, Madsen felt an immediate kinship with Medvedenko, then 20, who had been signed from his club in Kyiv and was the team’s only other rookie. “We went to dinner together,” said Madsen. “We were on the second team together in practice.”
Madsen called Medvedenko “tough as nails” and a player who “doesn’t back down from anybody.” While Madsen performed rookie duties such as running errands for older teammates and fetching balls veteran players kicked gleefully into the stands, he said Medvedenko, who had already played three professional seasons in Europe, refused.
“Did it bother some veterans at the time? A little bit, but I think they respected Slava for that,” Madsen said. “Slava basically said, ‘I’m not putting up with that, I don’t care if that’s the tradition in the NBA.’ And that, to me, shows a strength of character.”
Lakers owner Jeanie Buss called Medvedenko, who never averaged more than 8.3 points in a season, “an ultimate role player.” That was something she thought of as she learned that he had not fled Kyiv, but instead took up arms to defend his country.
“You say, ‘OK, that matches the character of who that person is,’” she said. “And playing basketball isn’t life and death, but it is a reflection of who we are and what we bring.”
Madsen was watching the news this winter at his home in Provo, Utah, where he is the head coach at nearby Utah Valley University, as Russia began its assault on Ukraine.
“You saw the tanks and everything rolling towards Kyiv,” he said, “and I just reached out to him and let them know that I’m keeping him in my thoughts and prayers. It’s a sobering situation.”
On the other side of the world, Medvedenko was awakened in the early hours of Feb. 24 by the windows rattling on his third-floor apartment and Kyiv’s air raid siren blaring. He watched as cars filed out of nearby parking garages. Within days, all but three apartments in his 10-story, 20-unit building were abandoned.
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Almost immediately, a neighborhood chat group on a popular app began flashing messages from its 1,500 members. A friend who worked in special forces messaged Medvedenko to say that Ukraine’s air defense system was working. Plans were made for meetings.
Medvedenko was suddenly in the middle of a war zone.
On Feb. 25, one day after the first round of bombings, Medvedenko was among 30 volunteers who gathered for an emergency planning meeting. Within a week, the group numbered 100. Another week later, it had doubled.
“In three weeks, we actually were like a police organization,” he said.
Officially, they comprised Volunteer Formation No. 29 of the 128th Separate Battalion for Kyiv’s territorial defense.
Vasylkov opened up his cafe to be the group’s headquarters and prepared as many as 1,400 meals a day to be delivered to soldiers. Army representatives issued weapons to anyone who knew how to use them. Medvedenko already owned a registered Benelli rifle, but it was not considered suitable for war.
He was issued a Soviet-era AK-47.
“That probably was the best decision from our president (Volodymyr Zelenskyy),” Medvedenko said. “He let everybody get weapons.”
Medvedenko watched as his neighbors rallied to become a defense unit. His wife, Elena, manned a radio.
“The people of Ukraine, they surprised me,” said Medvedenko. “I saw how they united.”
Born in 1979 in his father’s native village of Karapyshi, south of Kyiv, Medvedenko was raised primarily in the capital city, where his mother, Olga, worked in a plant and his dad, Yurii, worked as a security officer.
Yurii died five years ago, but when the Russian forces moved toward Kyiv, Olga insisted on staying with Slava.
His kids had no choice. Two weeks after the invasion, Medvedenko sent his two youngest, 11-year-old Masha and 10-year-old Slava, to stay with his wife’s grandmother in western Ukraine, away from the fighting. An older daughter, Alona, lives in Texas.
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Medvedenko said he had opportunities to flee to the United States or elsewhere in Europe. While most men aged 18-60 were required to remain in Ukraine, those with three or more kids were allowed to leave.
“I feel like I have to stay in Ukraine and help our country, our nation, understand ourselves,” he said. “We have to be strong. It’s the opportunity to get stronger.”
When the Russian offensive around Kyiv let up, Medvedenko traveled outside of Kyiv to help deliver meals and water to survivors of the war.
In suburban Bucha, where some of the greatest atrocities of the war had been committed, he encountered bodies that had lain in the streets for weeks. According to news reports, civilians in Bucha were executed at random. Others were raped and tortured.
“I saw scattered body parts,” Medvedenko said grimly.
He described driving on a highway marked by explosions, and weaving around cars that had come to rest after their drivers were shot. There were signs of children in some of the cars.
Survivors who had hidden in basements for more than a month told Medvedenko stories about the horror they endured.
Medvedenko said he was usually able to block out the feelings of grief that accompany witnessing war up close. “I try to be brave,” he said.
But that trip to Bucha brought him to tears. It was, he said, the first time since the war began that he could recall crying.
Three weeks ago, Medvedenko’s children came home from the west. The family has resumed taking bike rides along the river and Medvedenko has picked up his efforts to start the FlyHigh Foundation, co-founded with Vasylkov.
Before the war, he had made plans for a sports academy in Kyiv with a hockey rink on one side and a basketball court on the other.
“The plans have gotten more basic,” he said. “Help schools have sports gear for when school starts back up in September.”
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Medvedenko is doing everything he can to support the Ukrainian army, which for a former NBA star has included auctioning off virtually all memorabilia from his playing days. He said he has already sold T-shirts, jerseys and sneakers. Next up: His championship rings, a process for which he has sought assistance from the Lakers.
The organization has offered to help however it can, including preparing a shipment of sports gear to send to Ukraine. In an email, Lakers executive Linda Rambis told Medvedenko that if he sold his rings, the team would replace them.
“I’m proud that we’re an organization that our former players know when they need help that somebody will answer their call,” Buss said.
Medvedenko said he wants to extend an invitation to O’Neal to visit him in Ukraine, noting the influx of other celebrities, like Angelina Jolie and U2 visiting Kyiv.
“There’s almost a line,” he joked.
The former Laker is planning basketball camps in June, hosting them in the Carpathian Mountains for children who he is certain have been psychologically traumatized by war. In Bucha, he was struck by the fact that adults who had survived the massacre were eager to talk about their experience.
The children, he said, were just quiet.
He felt fortunate his own children did not see all the horrors of war.
“If children are not scared by adults, they do not really understand what is happening,” he said.
No rockets were ever fired in the vicinity of their apartment within Kyiv’s Dniprovskyi district, which sits across the Dnipro River from many of Ukraine’s government buildings. But they heard the blasts from neighboring districts and hid in the parking garage of their apartment building during air raid warnings before they went to the West with Elena’s family.
On May 15, Medvedenko hosted a charity basketball tournament in Lviv, a city of more than 700,000 people about 350 miles west of Kyiv. It was a happy day for him and others. For months, sporting events and concerts were outlawed for fear that they could become targets of Russian airstrikes.
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But on this day, teams played three-on-three from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and then pick-up games continued for several more hours.
Medvedenko saw old friends and imagined more happy days like this one.
“It felt like there was no war,” Medvedenko said. “And it felt normal.”
It was a brief respite from an ongoing conflict with no real end in sight.
The morning after the tournament, Medvedenko drove home to Kyiv. That day Russia fired 10 more missiles at Lviv.
(Photo illustration: Wes McCabe / The Athletic; photos courtesy Slava Medvedenko)