In War-Torn Ukraine, Mahjong Offers Peace for Soldiers and Survivors

When I met Rostyslav Fedorko in Kyiv, he was wearing military fatigues and a soft smile. Fatigues, because after three years on the front lines defending Ukraine from Russian attacks, he said he doesn’t have many civilian clothes left.

The smile because he was playing mahjong. Fedorko, 28, is one of a group of some 25 Ukrainian game enthusiasts who gather at a cozy club called Japan Dojo to play Riichi mahjong, a Japanese variant of the tile-based game.

The scene at the club was lighthearted on a Saturday in late April, during a friendly tournament. Little bursts of laughter rose above clacking tiles in a soothing rhythmic polyphony. Everyone had traded their shoes for slippers. Someone had brought a cake.

It was just days after an April 24 Russian missile attack leveled an apartment building in central Kyiv, killing 13 civilians and injuring almost 90 more. But no one was talking about that.

I was in Kyiv thanks to a reporting fellowship with the International Women’s Media Foundation. Over the years, I’d produced many Forum segments on the war in Ukraine, and I jumped at the chance to report from the ground to better understand what daily life is like in a country under siege.

I also wanted to know how people find laughter and distraction amid war, which is how I ended up at Japan Dojo.

Fedorko wasn’t having his best game, but that wasn’t the point. He said he plays mahjong to relax, “but in a meaningful way.”

He serves under near-constant Russian bombardment in the eastern province of Donetsk with Ukraine’s International Defense Legion. He had lost many friends in combat. At the time, he was on a two-month break from active duty at a base near Lviv, about 350 miles from Kyiv. Every Friday, he told me, he takes the overnight train from Lviv to play at the club.

“I’m here from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., like all day,” he said. “I’m here playing mahjong and just talking with people.”

I understand the impulse to de-stress and connect through mahjong. For years, I’ve played the American version of the game with the same group of San Francisco friends. Mahjong is a great social game — challenging enough to keep us off our phones, but not so challenging that we can’t dish about the world while we play.

As we slap down tiles, my friends and I talk about movies, books, our kids, our jobs, our problems. We tackle national politics — or avoid it entirely. And the collective physical rituals involved — the mixing, stacking and laying down of tiles — unite our table of four in common purpose, at least for a couple of hours.

At Japan Dojo, Polina Suprunenko, 17, had thought a lot about the sense of peace games could bring. Her eyes twinkled as she sat wrapped in a bright pink fuzzy blanket. She had come to the club with her older brother.

“But even if I come up here alone,” she said, “I always have something to do, and I don’t just end up sitting in the corner and crying and stuff like that. There’s always someone who can play with me, who can help me, who can talk to me. It’s a very open space, and that’s wonderful.”

Polina hadn’t seen her father in a year. A doctor, he chose to stay in their hometown of Kherson to treat soldiers on the front lines. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022 and occupied Kherson, Polina, her mom and her brother fled to Kyiv. They are among the nearly 4 million Ukrainians that the United Nations estimates have been internally displaced by war. She said that although Kherson is under constant missile attack, her father is OK.

“He understands that he’s helping more people and he’s dedicated to it,” Polina said. “His life has meaning for him.”

I wondered if any of the players felt conflicted about detaching from the war when they immersed themselves in a game. A player named Rina Honcharova, who is also a co-founder of Japan Dojo, said Ukrainians were divided on the subject.

Some people, she said, “don’t feel like they can just relax and forget that the war is going on, and they feel guilty when they’re just taking some breaks and just trying to relax on weekends.” Others, she added, criticized those who sought out distraction. But to her, “most people, they don’t understand that you really need some breaks.”

Polina may have understood the importance of finding room for breaks better than most. She does not strive to be a doctor like others in her family. Instead, she wants to pursue art and open a cafe where you could relax, sip a coffee and play a game.

For a while, she felt unsure about her ambition because it didn’t involve saving lives. But then she realized that creating such a space “is what actually saves people,” because it could help reduce the need for mental health care later.

Like all types of mahjong, Riichi is part skill and part luck. To win a hand, players assemble 14 tiles into four groups of straights or triplets, plus a pair.

You also need a yaku, a special pattern that determines how high you’ll score. Some yaku are more valuable than others; the rarest are called yakuman. A regular player could go for a year or more without getting one.

A Japan Dojo member named Yevhen Kolodko, whose fingernails were exquisitely painted to look like Riichi tiles, said he got a yakuman a few months earlier: “It was hilarious.” I think he meant it was both thrilling and wildly lucky.

We started talking about luck.

Kolodko told me his family has been fortunate. His brother was drafted but works in tech on a base. His family had to leave their life in Luhansk after Russia seized the Donbas region in 2014, but now they’re OK. Kolodko, a data scientist, thinks about statistics a lot — in mahjong and in war. He reminded me that the chances of being killed in a missile attack in Kyiv, like the one a few days before, remained low in a city with a population of nearly 3 million.

But in Ukraine, he added, “We play the lottery every day.”

While I was at Japan Dojo, a few players taught me the basics of Riichi. Later, I showed a group how to play American mahjong with a set I’d brought from California. They were quick studies and peppered me with questions.

I’d like to say I had profound thoughts about the irony of our easy collaboration while the U.S. government’s support for Ukraine wavered. But we were all too caught up in the game.

The reporting for this essay was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation.