‘Please don’t use my name’ A report by journalist Shura Burtin on the growing war weariness among Ukrainians

Russia and Ukraine have been at full-scale war for more than three years. Throughout this time, the Ukrainians have mounted a fierce resistance to Russia’s aggression, but their strength appears to be waning. Shura Burtin, a journalist from the Swiss publication Reportagen, spent two months in Ukraine, traveling to Kyiv and throughout the Donbas region and speaking with people all along the way. He observed a national mood that has shifted noticeably over the past year and a half. Terrified by the prospect of being drafted, many Ukrainians have gone into hiding to elude military patrols. There is a shortage of soldiers at the front, and the troops there now have been unable to rotate out for several months. Desertion has become commonplace. Evacuating the wounded has become harder, too, with survival odds plummeting, largely due to drones, which kill infantry far more effectively than older weaponry.

Meduza has translated Burtin’s report, which includes dozens of testimonies describing the atmosphere at the front and behind Ukrainian lines. These are harrowing accounts filled with pain, helplessness, and despair. All persons’ names have been changed for security reasons. There’s also a lot of swearing in this story, so please read no further if that’s not for you.

Meduza condemns the invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s ongoing military aggression against the Ukrainian people.

The recruitment center

A year and a half ago, Kyiv felt frustratingly detached from the war in eastern Ukraine. Today, the invasion’s shadow has clearly moved closer. Walking from the train station at five in the morning, I immediately heard the sirens. It was chilly and gray, with a few scattered passersby hurrying along Yaroslaviv Val under the powdery snow. The shift in the city’s atmosphere over the past year was immediately palpable — it had become somehow more desolate and hopeless. Soon, a powerful explosion rang out — a missile slammed into the Holiday Inn. Later, the news reported that someone had died there.

However, more than missile strikes, it is the “TRC” that truly makes the capital feel like a city at war. Strictly speaking, the Territorial Recruitment Center refers to the army’s enlistment offices, but in everyday speech, the abbreviation has come to signify the military patrols that capture men in the streets to send them to the front. Today, “TRC” is maybe the most widely discussed word in Ukraine.

At the beginning of the war, Ukraine had no shortage of soldiers — a huge number of men went to the front voluntarily. But many have died, and far fewer are now willing to fight. At first, TRC patrols simply handed out draft notices on the streets while the state tightened penalties for draft evasion. When this proved insufficient, the authorities began using force. A patrol stops you, shoves you into a van, and takes you to a military enlistment office for a medical examination — where everyone is declared fit for service. This process has been dubbed “busification” — maybe the second most widely used word in Ukraine today. Later that evening or the next morning, you’re sent to boot camp: a site in the forest with army tents or dugouts, strict security lockdown, and basic military training.

A year and a half ago, people were already whispering about busification, but the threat had yet to arrive here. TRC patrols swept through villages and small towns while Kyiv still enjoyed the relaxed life of a capital city. Everything has changed since then. The Internet is now flooded with videos like this one showing TRC officers beating men when they try to escape, refuse medical exams, or resist being sent to boot camp.

A man sprints down the street, zigzagging like a rabbit, with soldiers in hot pursuit. Men with bloodied faces. Men jumping out of moving vans. On Ukrainian social media, these scenes are now commonplace. The government has promised to intervene but does nothing. Meanwhile, men have started dying at army enlistment offices. Several have been killed by the TRC. It may seem insignificant compared to the number of people dying at the front and under Russian bombardment, but these incidents have deeply demoralized the Ukrainian public.

A report from the Poltava TRC captures the atmosphere inside recruitment offices:

It is not actually possible in Ukraine to object to mobilization. By law, a person has the right to choose a prison sentence instead of military service — and many would take this option. In reality, even these men are sent to boot camp and then the front.

Many in Ukraine view TRC officers as enemies. There are popular Telegram channels in Kyiv and other cities where locals share constant updates on patrol sightings. Opposition bloggers abroad have heavily criticized the TRCs, but Ukraine’s mainstream media rarely covers the criminal cases against draft dodgers, killings at army enlistment offices, and desertions. It’s been considered indecent to admit that many men are unwilling to serve. Slogans fuel Ukraine’s prevailing rhetoric: victory is near, glory to the Armed Forces, the nation is united like a clenched fist, and so on.

When I arrived in Kyiv this year, I learned that my friends no longer use the subway because patrols are stationed there. They never travel to other cities and avoid going outside unless they have to. Despite these precautions, the TRC “busified” two of these people within a couple of weeks. After the officers caught them outside, they spent a night at an enlistment office and were in boot camp by the next day.

When they were allowed 30 minutes of phone access on Sunday, their scattered messages made it clear that it was like a prison: full of drunks (because more cautious men follow the right Telegram channels and know when to stay indoors) and without any chance of getting out. After a month of basic, you’re sent straight to the front. Men who volunteer are given some choices: branch of service, training, specialty. But if you’re grabbed off the street, you’re just deployed to the front lines as infantry, whatever your health, profession, or preferences.

Since one of my friends is an exceptionally talented programmer, I assumed he’d be assigned to some kind of radio intelligence unit.

Our mutual friend Valya put a different spin on this. He told me: “As if they’d let him go now — it’s a slave market,” referring to how brigades send so-called “buyers” to basic training camps to claim a set number of recruits.

A killer

There were several shocking stories in a single week in February. In Zaporizhzhia, a 24-year-old man was killed at a military enlistment office, but his mother turned out to be a lawyer and began investigating the case. A nuclear physicist from Lviv jumped out of a moving truck taking him to boot camp and fractured the base of his skull (he may also have been beaten before his attempted escape). In Khmelnytskyi, a man at a TRC slit his own throat and died. In the Poltava region, a man armed with a hunting rifle shot and killed a TRC officer escorting draftees to basic training. When this caused an outpouring of malicious delight online, patriotic circles demanded that Ukraine’s Security Service identify everyone posting such comments and send them to the front. There were also calls to lynch the officer’s killer.

I travel to Pyriatyn, the town where the TRC officer was killed, to attend the shooter’s arraignment. When the police bring in the suspect, I’m surprised to see a thin, sad-looking man in his fifties. His name is Vadym. Behind him, they bring in Zhenya, his wife’s brother, whom he had tried to free. In his mid-thirties, Zhenya is a bit younger than Vadym but just as skinny, shy, and bewildered. Both come across as thoughtful working-class men. Vadym’s mother sits beside me in the gallery and cries. When I ask her why her son was so worried about his brother-in-law, she answers, “Well, you see what’s happening in this country….”

Listening to the prosecutor, I piece together the details: As Zhenya was being “busified,” he called his brother-in-law, and they decided that Vadym would tail behind and help Zhenya escape when the van stopped for fuel. Whether out of rage or stupidity, Vadym took a hunting rifle with him. At the gas station, Vadym exited his car and saw Zhenya standing near a TRC escort officer named Sasha. Vadym raised his rifle and said, “Drop your weapon!” But Sasha didn’t flinch. Instead, the officer chambered a round and raised his assault rifle, at which point Vadym shot him in the stomach. Sasha fell to the ground, groaning: “Vanya, Vanya…” — apparently calling for his partner. Vadym grabbed the officer’s weapon, told Zhenya to get in the car, and they sped away.

In court, Vadym says he never meant to kill the soldier, only to scare him. Clearly, bringing a hunting rifle was a dumb move: the moment he raised it, he found himself at war, where it was kill or be killed. He’d hoped the TRC officer was only wounded, but he was afraid to stay at the gas station, fearing he and Zhenya would be shot. When an ambulance arrived 40 minutes later, Sasha was already dead. Zhenya and Vadym returned home and waited for their arrest. When the authorities came for them, they immediately confessed.

The reality doesn’t reflect the heated online debates. Vadym didn’t kill Sasha out of revenge against Ukraine’s hated recruitment center officers. It was an absurd tragedy driven by fear, not a cold-blooded murder.

On the cab ride back from the courthouse, I ask the driver what he thinks about the case. “Well, it’s a complicated situation,” he answers evasively. “It’s really complicated. Honestly, I’m afraid this will set a precedent that allows TRC officers to start shooting at people. And they will…”

Draft dodgers

Fleeing the country is a widespread phenomenon and a booming criminal industry. Ukraine’s television networks show officials dragging men out of vans headed for the border, throwing them to the ground and kicking them. The commentary from news anchors implies that this is what draft dodgers deserve.

For another perspective, I contacted two men, Serhiy and Sasha, who illegally crossed Ukraine’s border and now live in Berlin. 

Serhiy’s story

— I’d already seen guys with folders packing people up. I’d go to the corner store near my house, and the cashier would warn me, “Be careful around here. They’re on patrol…” The trigger for me was when a manager I worked with just didn’t come to work one day — he got “busified.” And he had a presentation for a client, but he just never showed up. It felt like the noose was tightening. From then on, I tried not to leave the house. When I did go out, I kept my phone in my pocket and focused on my surroundings, scanning for danger, just in case. I was lucky — one of my coworkers lived nearby, and he had a car. We used backroads to get to work.

At the office, we had a group chat, and if there was a TRC raid, the security guards were supposed to send a code word, and all the men would hurry downstairs. We had a special basement for hiding.

I heard about guys faking disabilities, but it takes forever and costs a fortune. Everyone was scared — guys everywhere and their wives. But one day, I just stopped being afraid. All I had left was desperation and even some defiance. I started carrying a little hatchet to work. I figured, if they come for me, at least I’ll have the last word. My girlfriend found out and said, “Maybe you should just leave?” She told me a friend of hers had just gotten out, and [for now] it was still possible. She even lent me money for it because I didn’t have any.

I went to work and spent the whole day thinking about it. In the evening, I went to the corner store and saw an old man buying a bit of buckwheat or something and some cooking oil. He seemed very poor. And then it hit me. I thought, my God, I don’t want to grow old in this country. I went home, opened a bottle of wine, and made the call: I was ready to leave. Those last days were a mix of despair and euphoria.

I studied all the checkpoints where the TRC stops people. They usually start working around eight or nine, so we left Kyiv at 5:00 a.m. [My friend] Sasha’s coworker drove us. She’s a tough, no-nonsense lady, and we felt safer with her. She also has this bright red, very girly car, which was oddly reassuring. The scariest stretch of highway was near Bila Tserkva, where there are tons of checkpoints, but the roads were empty at that hour. Nobody was stopping cars so early. By then, it all felt like a game to me — no hope or illusions left. Later on, they’d sometimes stop the car ahead of us, but we passed through, threading the needle.

We reached Uman [130 miles south of Kyiv], checked into a hotel, and waited three days for instructions. Our handler paired us up with two other guys — we’d all be crossing together. They charged us each 8,000 euros [$8,680]; for them, it was 12,000 [$13,020] per person because they had more middlemen taking a cut. Somebody from work later asked me for the handlers’ contact info, but he ended up using a different group. He said, “I’d rather shell out 20,000 euros since their route is only two kilometers [1.2 miles] instead of 20 [12.5 miles].” After that two-kilometer trek, they picked him up and packed him off straight to the front.

In Uman, I get a call from a Moldovan number with a destination and a message to leave in a taxi immediately. We drove 200 kilometers [almost 125 miles] in two cars, got out in some empty lot, and waited until this garbage truck pulled up. There were 20 guys packed inside, everyone drenched. The air was suffocating, like being in a sauna. We had to strip down, there and then, to avoid overheating. It turned out that they were guys from Odesa and had been in there for two hours already. A thick metal chain was hanging inside, naked men lay on the floor, condensation covered the truck’s walls, and runoff water pooled with rust at the bottom.

I’d brought a bottle of whiskey and said, “Guys, who wants a drink?” They shot back, “A drink? Are you kidding? This guy’s about to pass out.” Every time we stopped, we heard voices outside, and I kept telling people, “Quiet, quiet, shut up!” so the cops wouldn’t open the hopper.

We rode for three hours, deep into the wilderness. By the time we stopped, it was nearly night. I twisted my ankle when jumping out of the garbage truck, and it immediately started swelling and hurting. They gave us another geolocation, and we set off on foot, heading into a forest that was more like a dense jungle. We were lucky that one of the guys — a big, tall, rugged type — knew how to use a compass and had downloaded an offline map. He led the way. They had warned us: the most important thing was not to stray from the route. Branches kept hitting me in the face. I was covered in scratches — all over my face, legs, and arms. But it was kind of fun, and we stuck together. We were also really thirsty; we hadn’t brought much water. Every now and then, we came to an open field, and we’d been warned to sprint across them.

After about five hours, we reached the border. There was a small patch of woods, and then the last field we had to cross. We ran and ran and ran, for as long as we could, because the drones could have spotted us. We saw lights in the distance. At the actual border, there were big concrete “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank barriers. Ukraine had put them there because Transnistria is a Russian proxy. As soon as we crossed those barriers, sensors went off and floodlights lit up. Suddenly, there were dogs, and someone with a flashlight was running toward us.

We started booking it. I was the second one out, and the guy ahead of me was sprinting when suddenly, I heard him fall and yell, “Watch out! A pit!” But it was too late, and I was already falling in after him. I went flying, but somehow, I landed okay. Then, everyone started falling on top of me. The trench was wide and deep, about two and a half meters [eight feet]. Everyone climbed down and helped each other get out on the other side. We boosted up the first guy and then started pulling each other out, moving as fast as we could because they were closing in from both sides. We got out and took off running. We pulled it off perfectly, really.

After that, there was more forest, but things calmed down — just the sound of dogs barking in the distance. There was one guy with us who kept falling behind. It seemed like he was genuinely sick and had been from the start. Honestly, the moment I saw him, I thought he was in bad shape. This was the same guy who was so messed up in the back of the garbage truck. I kept helping him up, but he fell too far behind after we crossed the border. I told the others, “Let’s wait for him.” They said, “We’re not stopping for anyone. It’s every man for himself out here.”

We left him behind somewhere in the forest. I could hear him shouting for us, but we were already too far away. I don’t know what happened to him.

We made it through the forest, and there were no border checkpoints — nothing. It was unexpectedly peaceful. We stepped out into a Transnistrian village. The whole place was quiet and isolated, just a few little houses and a river. The lights were off almost everywhere.

The smugglers running the operation started picking us up in groups, giving us water right away. One of the drivers said, “You guys were lucky. The Ukrainian border guards caught the group before you. Some of them spent three days lying low in the wetlands, waiting. And a week ago, a father and son tried crossing and the Transnistrian border guards shot them both.” Later, we heard many horror stories about people being locked up and tortured by the Transnistrian KGB.

We drove for hours and got there just as the sun was coming up. I’d completely lost all sense of time. Everything around us looked rundown. The driver was super pro-Russian, yelling about how Ukraine was shelling them and all that. I gave the guys a look: stay quiet, don’t say a word. He dropped us at the next checkpoint, where we had to cross another field to get from Transnistria into Moldova. Another guy met us there, and we followed him into somebody’s yard. When he started his car, I noticed the Moldovan plates. After another long drive, he finally dropped us off at a hotel in Chisinau. All these drivers got $100 each.

At the hotel, another Moldovan guy calls and says, “I’m headed to the location now. I need to take your passports and get them stamped.” Then he adds, “You need to find another place to stay. It’s not safe for you at that hotel. I’ll be honest with you: The group right behind you got caught, and the whole operation has gone dark for now. I can’t reach them. Lay low somewhere for like 10 days.”

It was terrifying because we were in another country, now without passports, without anything. Sasha and I found a house, but it ended up taking almost three weeks before that guy called again and said everything was ready. He told us where to go, handed back the stamped passports, and said congratulations.

That night, we went for a walk. It was such a strange feeling — music was playing, people were having fun. I’d never been outside Ukraine before; this was my first time abroad. Now I’m in Berlin, and it’s incredible. One of my friends [back in Ukraine] saw on Instagram that I’m in Berlin and messaged me: “Serhiyko, did you bail?” I wrote back: “Yeah, I just couldn’t take it anymore.” And he replied, “Go fuck yourself. I never want to speak to you again.”

Okay, I’m not a brave person. I don’t fall in line, I don’t follow orders, and I’m not about to sacrifice anything. 

* * * *

I ask Serhiy what he plans to do now that he lives in Berlin. “Pick berries in the summer and enjoy the jam in the winter,” he tells me.

Nobody likes cowards

“Those who left, they’ve vanished from our lives," says my friend Valya. “They’re gone. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve lost all relevance.”

At the start of the war, Valya, an electronic musician, saw some combat outside Kyiv, but in the chaos, he managed to slip back into civilian life. Today, like many others, he tries to avoid the subway. Explaining why he doesn’t write to our mutual friend now stationed at the front, Valya sighs: “I just don’t know what to say. They’ve been at war for three years, and we’re here just hanging out….” 

Valya seems to worry that he, too, has lost all relevance, and he’s not alone — everyone in Ukraine has faded into irrelevance for each other, and a sense of dissonance has replaced the feeling of unity. 

Another friend, Borya, has had similar experiences.

Borya’s story

— At the start of the war, it seemed like it brought out the good in people. But then it turned out that all the worst in people comes out. A prolonged war wreaks havoc on society. I was telling my brother about how these guys bailed, and his wife got really worked up. People like her lose it instantly. I said how guys mentioned that some Moldovans over there were really nasty to them, and she goes: “Yeah, nobody anywhere likes cowards!” She went straight to screaming, hissing: “What, should we just surrender to Putin?!” I got worked up, too, telling her: “And what makes you think you have the right to decide other people’s lives? Just because you don’t want to surrender to Putin?”

I tell her: “Do you even understand what people are running from? Have you even seen these videos?” I wanted to show her — there’s a whole series from the Third Assault Brigade, where FPV drones are hunting infantry. Set to upbeat music, the footage shows a drone pursuing [Russian] soldiers. One drone crashes into a man, while another films from above as he dies. And these soldiers try to find ways to survive, even playing dead. Or a soldier takes cover behind some puny tree, crouches down, and the drone flies right up his ass, blowing it off. And he’s left writhing in agony and gasping for air, heaving in a pool of blood.

“Oh please, I don’t watch things like that!” Of course, people like her don’t want to see that stuff — they swat it away without blinking. Because if they ever stopped to reflect and think things through, it would shatter their whole worldview, where there’s noble struggle and heroic beauty. But open your eyes and it’s spilled guts, snapped spines, and dismembered jaws. 

This woman isn’t heartless — she’s a genuine animal lover with five rescue dogs. Naturally, if she lets herself think about these things, she’ll lose the ability to stay on the “right” side of things. She knows it but won’t allow herself to face that choice. Otherwise, she’d turn out just as messed up as me. 

Why did so many volunteer when Kyiv was surrounded? There was no faith in victory back then, but a lot of people just didn’t want to be helpless victims, like sheep led to the slaughter. Later on, it started to feel like there were guys who had your back. 

War turns ordinary people into helpless children, but you know the grown-ups are out there, somewhere, sorting it out somehow. There was a year when everyone made donations, greeted soldiers in the street, shook their hands, and thanked them. These days, wherever you turn, you feel like sheep. Any TRC officer can beat the crap out of you. And if you’re not on the front lines, the TV does nothing but shit on you — you’re garbage, it’s all your fault. People push back: “It’s not me. It’s the thieves and corrupt officials.” It’s enough to make you fucking snap.

Remember when the counteroffensive stalled? That fall, The Economist published an article by [then Armed Forces Comannder-in-Chief Valerii] Zaluzhnyi, where he declared a strategic deadlock. After that, Zelensky came out and said he doesn’t need generals who talk about stalemates. Then there was a campaign against Zaluzhnyi, and they fired him. And after that, the entire media, all the patriots, started saying that the war would drag on. No one even mentioned peace as a possibility. They just kept drilling into people’s heads: “A long war is inevitable. You can’t talk to Putin. We have to fight for as long as we can.” And now it turns out they were lying for two years? How many people died in that time? What was it all for?

* * * *

For the last two months, I’ve been going back and forth with Borya, who never stops ripping into Zelensky and Ukraine’s patriots. Then, one day, I walk in on him, and he’s completely wasted. He’d just watched an interview with some general who wanted to ramp up mobilization. Labeled fit for limited service, Borya was supposed to report to an enlistment office before February for a second medical exam. “They’re gonna get everyone killed, those fuckers, every last one…,” he mutters grimly. “I’ve made up my mind: I’m not going to the draft office. Let them come and dig me out.”

A rude question

Borya sends me videos of TRC officers every day, asking why journalists don’t write about it. The footage doesn’t really shock me: the country is at war, after all, and the state is doing what it can. But I still want to know how people went from trusting the army to fearing it like the plague.

I head to Donbas to talk to friends who volunteered to fight. These men didn’t enlist at the start of the war; they thought about it before signing up. One of them is Taras, whose very first deployment was as a combat medic in Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive in the Zaporizhzhia region.

“Every inch of the ground was covered in bodies. It was just the smell of gunpowder, your own adrenaline-charged, piss-soaked sweat, and rotting flesh everywhere you turned. Then we moved to Robotyne [a small town in the Zaporizhzhia region] — the highest elevation in the area. If we’d taken it, we could’ve pushed downhill toward Tokmak. We literally had to step over dead bodies out there. It was late November, early December, and insanely cold. The trenches were full of our dead. We tried pulling a few out, but it was pointless — we couldn’t even make a dent.

Taras used to work in labor rights and served as the chairman of a workers’ union. I visit him in a small town near Pokrovsk and ask what compelled him to enlist. He says solidarity still drives him:

Of course, Taras isn’t your average person. But it seems deciding whether or not to go to war is connected to a broader sense of fairness, even for regular people. And now, that sense feels like it’s fading.

I decide to visit Kostya, an old colleague who enlisted about a year ago, after seeing him on Facebook mocking some friends now living in Berlin who act like they’re emotionally traumatized over arguments online about the purity of the Ukrainian language. He basically told them: Quit whining over there and come stand with us instead.

Kostya meets me in a mining town outside Pokrovsk. We’re nowhere near the front. There are lots of people out, the stores are open, and even some mines are still running. Kostya says his day off just got canceled — he’s now heading out to drop some guys at their positions. He’s the driver for a drone crew. They launch long-range drones, something like small “Shaheds,” flying tens of miles beyond the front line.

We stop by his place and unload cardboard boxes from the van. One of them opens, and I see a drone’s wings folded neatly, like a Soviet-era model airplane, just bigger. Both the box and the foam wings look kind of flimsy. Then we pick up two guys with rifles and drive out into the fields.

“This is Shura. He’s a journalist — you can trust him. Anything you want to say?”

Vitalik, a young guy, about 23, with curly hair, suddenly starts speaking with intense emotion:

Kostya throws a look at Vitalik over his shoulder, signaling that he’s gone a bit too far. We pass through small towns that were full of life just a year ago. Now, they’re gray and bleak. At every gate, there’s a military jeep packed with electronic warfare systems. The roads have been reduced to mush. But you still see old ladies sitting on benches with soldiers — like someone glued together pieces of photographs from very different eras.

When I was here last year, on the road between these small towns, there was still a stone statue of an old Scythian woman. I remember we stopped, and I went up to run my hand over its rough surface. The carving was crude, but it still felt like a window into my distant past — something nearly forgotten, yet still mine. I felt that ancient impulse to carve the human form, to try and grasp its mystery. For thousands of years, the stone mother has watched with dead eyes as people killed each other in these fields. Now she’s gone. A few months ago, afraid that the front was closing in, volunteers dug her up and hauled her away.

“She’s probably planted at someone’s summer home now,” jokes Kostya.

Finally, we pull up to a dugout by the road — a scrap of plywood above the entrance reads: “IN USE.” There’s heavy artillery trading shots somewhere nearby, but it’s not our problem, and drones don’t make it out this far — they call it a yellow zone. The guys hop out of the vehicle, two others emerge from the dugout and get in with us, and we head back. I ask what they were doing there.

“Defending the homeland,” they tell me.

The soldiers explain that they’ve been rotating shifts in the dugout to make sure another unit doesn’t come along and claim it. It’s supposed to be a drone launch base, but their unit’s a mess right now, and they’re just guarding it, not launching anything.

After dropping off the guys, Kostya and I duck into a café. The prices are outrageous — worse than downtown Kyiv. The locals now just want to squeeze whatever they can out of the soldiers. Kostya tells me how he ended up in the army. He joined up even though he had a medical exemption thanks to a brain surgery that put a metal plate in his skull:

Kostya took off in the morning to bring the guys some pizza — it was an hour there and an hour back. After he got back, we grabbed a coffee in the center of town. That evening, he zipped back to the guys with a bottle of cognac to help them stay warm through the night. We could have brought it all with us when we dropped them off earlier, but I can see it’s Kostya’s way of keeping busy.

“You know I’m not actually doing anything — none of us are,” Kostya says when he gets back. “What we’re launching — it’s a children’s toy. Half the drones just crash in some field, and the rest fly past the front. In three months, we’ve hit something maybe twice, tops. But we were out there every day — how’s that for stats? They’re so hard to control that hitting anything is a miracle. They promised us better drones, but hey, it’s the army. Promises don’t mean shit. Bragging about how many combat flights you’ve flown is like bragging about how many times you jerked off.”

“I feel like I’m in prison,” Kostya continues. “All my ambition’s dried up. I realized I can’t keep grinding through all of this. Now I just do the minimum — I mind the car and try not to screw anything up. I try to keep the guys from tearing out each other’s throats (they never stop fighting), and I handle stuff like helping to find housing. I guess I’m useful in little ways with personal stuff, but honestly, as a unit, we’re not doing anything that matters. Oh well, at least I’m making some money for now.”

I’m half asleep in the morning when I hear a machine gun rattling. It has a strangely comforting quality, like it’s watching over me. It makes me want to roll over and go back to bed.

“What’s that sound?” I ask.

“They’re shooting down Shaheds,” says Kostya.

“Are they hitting any?”

“Bit of a rude question,” Kostya grins.

Finally, I grill him about something that’s been gnawing at me. If the work is such bullshit and everything’s so miserable, why does Kostya keep posting on Facebook that others should join the army?

“Ha, yeah…,” he smiles again. “That’s just how it works — everyone’s supposed to sacrifice something.”

I ask him if a manpower shortage might be what finally forces the army to change.

“I doubt it,” he says. “More likely, it’ll collapse.”

It seems to me that a lot of people in Ukraine now are acting like Kostya — they’ve stopped believing, but they’re still out there waving the flag.

That night, I change trains in the small town of Smila in the Cherkasy region. It’s freezing outside, and an air-raid siren is howling. There were no direct tickets to Kyiv, so now I have to wait three hours for the next train. A Shahed drone rattles overhead along the railway line. And it’s weird — you can tell from the sound alone that there’s no one in it. Anything with a pilot inside just feels different, while this thing makes a harsh, lifeless noise. 

When I approach the station, people are being kicked out. This started three years ago after a missile strike on the Kramatorsk train station. On the locked doors, there’s an ad for a “Point of Invincibility” — the specially equipped warming tents that are supposed to operate at every station. The poster promises “hot tea and coffee 24/7.” In the photo, people in scarves smile and sip tea. We just stare at them. It’s freezing outside.

After about an hour, people start banging on the train station’s doors. The staff shout back through the doors that it’s not their fault, that we need to find a damned shelter. So, I do — it’s a cramped basement around the corner that’s just as freezing and reeks so bad that it’s hard to breathe. There’s no way anyone has washed the bench mats once in the last three years.

Two hours in, I see an old lady sitting on the ledge by the station entrance start to slump over. I catch her and start pounding on the door. “We’ve got cameras! Don’t you get it?” a woman inside yells — but she finally agrees to let the old lady into the little entry space between the doors. The whole thing is absurd, but we grew up in the Soviet Union, so we know the drill. It feels like the country’s just burned out. Nothing makes sense anymore.

Kostya’s voicemail

Later, Kostya left me this voicemail:

The deserter

A year and a half ago, I met an assault soldier named Danylo, who became the central figure in one of my reports. I couldn’t even imagine what he’d been through, but he had such incredible humility and quiet strength. Back then, he was all in. He talked about “driving out those fuckers” and said everyone needed to get ready to fight — no exceptions. Six months ago, I wrote and asked how he was doing.

“Hey, I’m in the shit right now, heading to Chasiv Yar tomorrow,” he answered.

“Try not to be a hero, okay?” I told him

“I already did the hero thing — now I just want to make it out alive.”

The tone was new. When I got back to Kyiv, I called Danylo again.

“I went AWOL,” he said. “Didn’t see it coming — but then again, maybe I did.”

According to different estimates, as of fall 2024, Ukraine had anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 deserters. Soldiers said roughly a third of new draftees flee the front — either immediately after arriving or after their first battle. There’s simply no way to keep that many people from leaving. Many commanders don’t even bother filing a report — they just don’t have time. Officials have opened more than 60,000 criminal cases for desertion, but they’re not being investigated — the state doesn’t have even a tenth of the investigators needed. When someone deserts the front, they’re technically outside the law, but there’s no real punishment. And commanders know there’s no point in holding onto guys like that. They’re dead weight. So, about a third of what recruitment centers and training camps do just goes straight down the drain.

The soldiers who’ve actually started going out on combat missions are less likely to desert: they get used to the danger, and more than that, they build real connections. That makes it harder to turn your back on the men around you. Still, even seasoned front-line guys are bailing now — they just can’t take it anymore. The government said a year and a half ago they’d settle when people could rotate out, but it was a lie. Eventually, you realize the army’s just going to keep using you until you’re dead. That’s all there is to it.

Danylo said he got sick of being treated like shit. What really got to him was when his commanding officer told his unit to go into a Russian-occupied town and hold a defensive ring inside a school. Danylo thought it was basically suicide and refused the order. At first, the battalion commander threatened him with criminal charges. Then he waited until Danylo was asleep and got a few guys from his squad to go in instead. The guys died, and Danylo couldn’t forgive the officer for getting them killed just to tick a box for the higher-ups.

He explained: “Then they pull you off rotation, bring you back to base, line you up, and go, ‘In a month, new troops will arrive — we need to get things ready.’ So we’re stuck replacing windows, painting walls, and installing showers. And we’re all looking at each other like — wait, seriously? We just did four and a half months out on the front line, and now we’re painting walls? After two years, I accepted that I’m disposable. But it’s hard to keep wrecking yourself when you see they don’t give a shit about you. Everyone’s completely drained. The guys are just burned out.”

When I ask Danylo what finally made him leave, this is what he tells me:

When I ask Danylo if he’s afraid of being prosecuted for desertion, he says, “Fuck it. I’d rather do time than get killed because some idiot gave a bullshit order.” Evidently, after experiencing combat, the threat of a criminal charge seems laughable.

I ask about his family’s reaction:

The image stays with me: a mom who worries about her son while building the tanks that will hunt him.

Later on, Danylo asked to borrow 200 bucks. He said he was headed back to the front and would repay me with his first combat paycheck. He planned to learn how to fly a DJI MAVIC 3 quadrocopter and link up with a different unit. Life back home wasn’t panning out:

I ask if he remembers when he used to say that everyone should go fight. He says he understands now why people don’t.

I ask Danylo if he’s tired of all this, and he says, “Well, who else is gonna do it, right?”

If he’d said this 18 months earlier, Danylo would’ve meant it. But now, when he speaks, we both feel it — the words fall flat to the ground the moment they leave his mouth.

Public desertion

For the longest time, trash-talking Ukraine’s Armed Forces was off-limits. But people got fed up with the army, and it all started spilling out into the open in the last few months. The first major scandal was the case of the 155th Brigade, where a third of the troops deserted before firing a single shot. The public figured out that officials are using “busification” to pump out phony brigades — one after another, no gear, no officers, no training — and send them straight to Pokrovsk. Put simply, the generals are sending thousands of men to their graves just so they can tick some box. 

A widely circulated photograph showing a soldier from Ukraine’s 211th Brigade tied to a wooden cross triggered an intense public backlash. Reports later confirmed that the platoon commander was issuing 5,000-hryvnia [$120] penalties for getting caught drinking — and those who didn’t pay were physically tied to a cross as punishment. Meanwhile, documents listed the soldiers as deployed on the front lines — but in reality, they were off building a house for the brigade commander’s father.

People have grown sick of these stories, and public opinion has shifted sharply in recent months. A new trend has emerged — public desertion — where volunteers who enlisted early in the war say openly that they’re walking away from their units.

For example, when a volunteer soldier named Mykyta Zoryanyi declared his desertion, the announcement got 10,000 reposts in a single day. Here’s what he wrote:

Drones

I step onto the medevac bus in some town outside Pokrovsk, and the first thing I register is their swollen faces and blank stares. The wounded are doped up on painkillers, but you can see in their eyes that they’re still hurting. The more important thing is that they’re somewhere else in their heads now, miles away. I sit down next to a few of the soldiers and ask how they were wounded. One after another, they tell the same story, each man pulling back the curtain on a living nightmare.

An older guy, pushing 60, says he works construction in the Rivne region. He holds out his frostbitten hands and says, almost like he still can’t believe it, “They just won’t bend anymore.” He tells me what he’s been through, and I begin to understand why wounded soldiers have that thousand-yard stare:

The man shows clear signs of a serious concussion. Most of the soldiers sitting around him on the bus say they’re having memory problems, too.

Nine times out of ten, the wounded owe their injuries to a drone attack — whether an FPV kamikaze drone, an aerial “drop” (a grenade, mine, or incendiary device), or a drone used to guide mortar fire, among others. Drones are everywhere now, far outnumbering men at the front. It’s no longer safe to step out into the open — not in daylight, not even after dark. Soldiers have to stay hidden at all times in dugouts or camouflaged foxholes covered with branches.

My bus companion describes the situation:

Put simply, FPVs sweep areas of the front, rotating in and out like a carousel, remaining airborne until dying batteries force them back to base. Kamikaze drones dive at soldiers who peek out from their dugouts, sometimes weaving in through the portholes. Each day, there are only 20-minute periods of “gray time” at dusk and dawn when the drones’ cameras are briefly confused. This is when wounded men are evacuated and the infantry tries to move.

For nearly two centuries, trenches were the infantry’s main defense. Artillery and mortar shells are rarely precise, and flying shrapnel caused most casualties. But drones now drop grenades with pinpoint accuracy, making the old trench system largely obsolete.

“A trench definitely won’t save you,” says my friend, Taras the combat medic. “A dugout might — unless they start targeting it directly. You can’t really move through the trenches anymore — people just live underground. They’ve gotten used to it, basically turning into mice. The mice are actually biting you all the time, and you’re like the mouse king, living down there with them.”

Back on the bus, one of the wounded soldiers says he spent 12 days in a dugout without going outside for more than 30 minutes the whole time:

An FPV drone is a robot lightning strike — it appears out of nowhere at extreme speed and explodes when it hits you. Drones have fundamentally altered the nature of warfare, stripping away what little luck the individual soldier once had. War has always been about killing, but soldiers could at least hope to survive by luck. Today, a drone will find you, track you down, and end you.

“You step outside the dugout to take a piss — and there’s already a drone hovering overhead, and then a second one swoops in and drops on you,” says a man on the medevac bus. “Those assholes have two drones for each of our guys — one just hovers and observes, and the other’s loaded with “eggs” [explosives]. If we have four guys moving through the woods, they’ve got eight drones tailing them, just waiting for somebody to stop. The moment they do, the drones dive in. And those things see even better at night. They don’t fly only when it’s foggy. They’ve got thermal cams, which is why nobody heats anything in dugouts, even at night. Once, when the guys were bandaging me up around midnight, somebody put the kettle on to boil some tea, and they spotted us instantly and hit our dugout with an FPV.”

Recon drones, “drop” drones, and FPVs all work together. The scout finds the target and then guides in the drop — an FPV or some other weapon. Drones have significantly increased the accuracy of mortar fire. Reconnaissance drones now track soldiers anytime they’re moving in or out of positions. Anyone who stops for so much as a minute becomes a target for a drone drop, and FPVs are fast and nimble enough to catch you even on the move. On social media, both Russian and Ukrainian channels are full of videos laughing at enemy soldiers freaking out as an FPV chases them down.

“We used to cover 11 fuckin’ klicks to get to our position, but you can’t go even one now. Step outside, and there’s already a drone on you,” says my bus companion. “As soon as you hear that FPV coming, you run — straight into whatever brush or forest you can. You start looking for something it might hit — maybe some branches — but there’s nothing left. The treelines are already shredded. It either loses track of you, you get off a few shots, or it slams right into you. But hey — when you’re fighting for your life, fear gives you wings.”

In winter, the treelines near the front are basically just thin rows of blackened trunks, branchless and burned — or, more often, just mangled stumps. And yet, in spring, it’s striking to see them bloom again in wild, defiant green.

“You see a drone — you hide. But the thing is, you don’t know what kind of drone it is. It could be packing an RPG; it could have a thermobaric charge,” another soldier tells me, referring to a vacuum bomb that kills by creating a massive pressure wave. He describes the grim survival odds at the front:

Taras told me that pressure from above often makes a bad situation worse:

Every soldier says the same thing: There’s a catastrophic shortage of men at the front. Most units are operating at just 20 percent strength, which means soldiers sit in trenches for weeks or even months with no one to relieve them. A man on the bus tells me how the manpower crisis got him:

“Or you go AWOL,” says the guy sitting next to him. “They’re just feeding us to the meat grinder while those fuckers keep advancing, taking five new towns a day.”

Ukrainian soldiers now radiate pessimism. Exhausted troops once condemned those who refused to join them on the frontlines, but a sense of resignation has replaced that fury and contempt. After all, who would volunteer for this? Even going AWOL now gets a nod of understanding.

One of the worst tragedies at this stage of the war is how difficult it’s become to evacuate the wounded. Drones now target every medevac, meaning the only safe times to move are at twilight or in dense fog. The wounded are often left on the front lines for three to five days, suffering and dying. Survival depends almost entirely on how fast you can get them to a hospital. Targeting medevac vehicles is a war crime — but drone operators seem to do little else.

“He was lying there in agony for five days, poor guy. We couldn’t get out,” the wounded man says about a comrade. “In the end, I pulled him out myself. Had to force him to eat. He’d been hit in the gut, too — stomach all swollen and 20 pieces of shrapnel in him. Later, he somehow limped all 700 meters to the evac on his own. He had to get out because his blood was already going septic.”

“There’s maybe 20 of us left from the whole battalion,” says another soldier. “Most of the guys who died were just wounded and didn’t get pulled out in time. Armor can only come in during twilight when the drones are switching over their cameras. But there are some crazy guys who will roll in and do extractions in the middle of the day.”

“Our brigade had this driver,” a medic tells me. “He was headed through the woods to a position when shelling started. So, he stops the car and crawls under it. Wouldn’t answer the radio. Our guys are waiting for him, so they send out a search party and find him under the vehicle. They try pulling him out, but he won’t go. He’s curled up like a scared cat, pushing them away, totally out of it, has no idea what’s happening.”

“They managed to evacuate me on the third try,” the medic continues. “We’d barely started moving when they started shelling us. [The Russians] are listening to our comms — they’ve got every grid locked in. We got lucky there were three of us wounded — [the medevac team] wouldn’t have come for just one or two.”

I start talking to a paramedic, and she tells me why many wounded soldiers are so emaciated:

Drones are methodically annihilating people, and the infantry is being ground down, like a pencil held too long in a sharpener. The full picture is starting to take shape in my head. Now I understand what those army enlistment patrols really mean and why people are so freaked out about getting “busified.” What soldiers told me doesn’t make it on TV, but somehow, people know.

Hunting the bastards

“Hell yeah, Kostya!” a young drone operator named Vitalik nearly shouts as Kostya and I drive him to guard some empty dugout. “In the army, people fall into three groups. First, there are the ones who came here to kill — ’cause here, you won’t get in trouble for it. The second group is in it for the money. The third is chasing rank. And the ones who actually came to defend the country? After a month, they’d go home in a heartbeat — if they could. Let ’em scream about how they’re still ‘true believers’ and knock my teeth in for saying it, but I don’t buy that crap anymore. It’s either survival — for the guys stuck at the front who’ve stopped believing this will ever end — or it’s a needle they just can’t pull out. There are highly motivated FPV crews who work non-stop. But when you really talk to them, you realize they just get off on killing. We used to like it, too. But then you start to rethink all the shit you’re doing — and realize there are real people on the other side, too. All kinds.”

“My guy,” Kostya tells Vitalik, his voice soft, like a patient teacher, “I completely disagree. You can’t say the guys on the other side are people. ’Cause if they are — how do you keep doing this? I mean, sure, yeah, technically they are… but still.”

“I saw one of those bastards giving first aid to one of our wounded,” Vitalik fires back. “You’d hit him with an FPV? Go ahead — press the button. He’s not a fucking human, right?”

“What are you yelling at me for!” says Kostya.

Vitalik tells him why:

“You saw one of those bastards giving first aid to our guy?” Kostya asks.

“Yeah,” Vitalik explains. “When new units rotate in, the fresh ones on both sides don’t dive right into fighting. They watch each other for a bit. Then the real shitshow begins. I remember us hitting this house — it was one of their command posts — and they had some of our wounded in there, captured. But they went ahead and hit it with artillery anyway. We’ve got no clue how the brass sees it. But out here, you kind of get used to it — you stop overthinking it.”

Listening to Vitalik, I want to talk to another drone operator — someone else who’s spent time behind the controls of these killing machines. At the hospital, I sit down with an older soldier who suffered a concussion during an attack on his dugout:

Listening to the soldier, I start to grasp why drone crews often end up hitting civilian cars, houses, or even people — it’s those last few minutes of flight, and the crew doesn’t want to waste the drone. I ask the man if his team also hunts infantry.

“Of course,” he says. “Yesterday, I was chasing two guys — dropped a three-kilo bomb right on one of them. Ripped him to shreds, no surprise there. And when they send our infantry to the meat grinder, their drones do the same damn thing to us.”

I ask if he watches the whole thing up close. “You watch it all the way up to the last second,” he tells me. “Right before you slam into him.” When I ask how he lives with it, he’s suddenly guarded and looks me in the eyes. I’ve crossed a line. “Feels great,” he answers. “Just one drone, and you know the meat’s already down — he ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

When I tell my friend Borya about all this, he says, “It’s like chemical weapons. These things [drones] should be banned.”

Welcome to ‘Milan’

I’m scared to go. On the train, I dream there’s a drone in my apartment. It’s sitting in the kitchen like a spider, ready to strike. I run out to the stairwell and slam the door, but I’m terrified because my dog and — for some reason — a lizard are still inside. I worry they’ll trigger the drone, but there’s no explosion.

Kramatorsk makes an unusually bleak impression. A year and a half ago, it was a battered but functioning industrial city where disoriented seniors still walked the streets. Borya had even taught me to see a certain beauty in its weathered modernist architecture. Today, the city feels dead. There’s hardly anyone left. At night, maybe four windows are lit up in an entire apartment building — and three of them belong to soldiers.

The city isn’t being shelled heavily, but three years of almost daily strikes have taken their toll: the number of damaged buildings is so overwhelming that the city feels diseased — like it’s infected with something slow and incurable. Every car is painted khaki. Most of the people you see are in uniform — and something about them feels off now, even dangerous. The mood is grim and detached.

I meet another friend, Hrysha. He enlisted six months ago, reasoning that it was better than waiting to get dragged in by the TRC. He got a job as a press officer with a battalion he knew and now spends his days editing drone and bodycam footage for the brigade’s social media. We sit down in a café, and he says he’s doing well. His girlfriend recently visited him.

Hrysha scrolls through videos on his phone — clip after clip of so-called “drops.” A grenade falls from above on some “fuckers” moving through the treeline. There’s a small blast; a soldier collapses, curls up on the ground, and dies. Hrysha scrolls to another clip — a dog gnawing on a skeleton. The arms are gone. The skull just dangles.

“I’m used to it now,” he says flatly. “Doesn’t faze me anymore.”

I can tell he’s totally checked out — like he’s running on power-save mode now.

While in Kramatorsk, I ask another friend about a guy named Max — he’d introduced us on my last trip. Max used to be a combat medic, but for some reason, he decided to switch jobs and join an assault unit. At the time, Max said he just wanted things to be fair. But the truth is, what combat medics do is already a nightmare. Almost half the evacs get hit by drones. I’ve been told that, in terms of risk, infantry and assault units rank at the highest level — ten. Combat medics are slightly lower, around eight. Mortar units, engineers, drone operators, and artillery — closer to three. But Max still decided to join the assault troops.

“People get that idea all the time,” says a mutual friend. “‘I want things to be fair, so I’m gonna head straight into the worst of it.’ That’s the worst time to go. I told him to drop that bullshit, just for a while. Gotta step off the ride and catch your breath. But he was like, ‘No, no, I want this, that’s final.’ And I could see his mind was made up.” 

“And so what happened with him?” I ask.

“Died right away. Two weeks later.” 

In the morning, I head to the hospital to speak with more wounded soldiers. Just an hour earlier, an Iskander missile slammed dead center into the round flowerbed in the city’s main square — a perfect bullseye. Locals from the nearby Stalin-era buildings are sweeping up shards of glass. I approach a neatly dressed elderly woman in a down shawl and ask for directions. She’s sitting alone on a bench, her eyes fixed on something far away — like she’s seeing a different city, the one where she used to live.

The hospital is a grim old building from before the revolution, tucked behind a cast-iron fence. The windows are boarded up with plywood, and the whole place reeks of death. A wave of nausea hits me, along with a visceral sense of horror, and suddenly, with total clarity, I understand what war really is. It’s about torturing and killing people. War is something fundamentally rotten.

We drive into Lyman with a team from a volunteer medical battalion. The city is half-destroyed and totally deserted, like a Hollywood movie set. There’s not a soul in sight. In Kramatorsk, you’re haunted by the feeling that the city around you is dying. But here, that feeling is gone — this place is already dead. Just bones left. Then suddenly, in the gap between two dark apartment blocks, I see a man walking his dog. It’s a surreal image.

“Welcome to our little Milan,” says the unit commander. The Italian nickname helps take the edge off what we’re seeing. Lyman has changed hands twice during the war — and it shows. Two years ago, when the Ukrainian army drove out the Russians, there were still a lot of people living here. At the time, a local man summed up the city’s mood in a conversation with my friend: “We’d prefer it if nobody ‘liberates’ us again.” But now the front line is back, just 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away.

I talk to two women — a doctor and a nurse — who just returned from a field medical post.

“I used to think, what can I even do?” the nurse says. “But at the front, you see how many true miracles a single person can pull off. And you start to believe in yourself again. Today, we had this patient — he came in with high amputations of all four limbs. He’d lost so much blood. His heart had already stopped. We walk in, and they’re resuscitating him — his face is completely gray. I’m thinking, okay, maybe they’ll get his heart going again, but there’s no way we’ll get him to the hospital in time. But he made it — in stable condition. He actually has a shot now….”

Dear God, I think, what miracles you force us to witness out here. Twice, while I’m talking to the women, the area comes under Grad rocket fire, and we run for the dugout, laughing nervously.

Because “Milan” is again within range of artillery fire, the medics spend the night in a small town outside the city. On the drive out, the doctor behind the wheel opens every window to listen for drones — and floors it the whole way. When we get there, the nurses are already making pancakes, frying something up for us. The quiet domesticity of it — in the middle of a war — is strangely hypnotic.

“Wanna go get some vodka?” asks the driver, Hennadiy.

I’m confused. Liquor is banned here. But Hennadiy shakes his head and says, “Come on, it’ll be a good lesson in field reporting.” At the store, he tells me to go up and ask the clerk for a “black bag.” I do — whispering it — and the clerk says, “Well, you do know, prices these days….” “He knows,” Hennadiy cuts in. Then, turning to me: “Come on, Shura — what’s with the secret agent face? Just say it normal: ‘black bag.’ Be cool.” 

The clerk brings out a bag. When I grab it, I accidentally knock it on the counter, all the bottles clink, and everybody in line turns to look. “Shura, man… in front of the whole line?” Hennadiy says. “You gotta be smooth. You’re at the front, remember?”

On the ride back, he complains about how the army has absorbed all the volunteer battalions and reduced them to standard Armed Forces units: “What we’ve got now is just a cheap imitation — we used to be five times bigger. It would be like putting you on staff at one of those old Soviet newspapers — your work would lose its edge, the spark would go out. The army’s the same way. But whatever, it doesn’t matter anymore. We’re like boxers in the 12th round — bam… bam….” Hennadiy sways, shadowboxing the air with weak punches. Then he stops. “We’re just waiting for someone to call the fight.”

At the dinner table that evening, I ask Kyrylo, a young paramedic from Poltava, how he’s handling the war. He tells me that volunteering is harder now: “Times have changed. Work almost didn’t let me come — I had to go on unpaid leave. They said, ‘If something happens to you, we’re on the hook.’”

“Just small talk,” Kyrylo says when I ask if he speaks much to wounded soldiers. “You know: Who are you? What do you do? It helps the patient relax. If he’s a fisherman, great, let’s talk fishing gear. Ketamine induces hallucinations, and whether they’re good or bad depends on me to a certain degree. Before I administer it, I always try to get him talking: ‘How are things back home?’ And if that only makes him sad, I switch it up and start talking about the sea or the mountains. That one always seemed to work.”

But Kyrylo immediately corrects himself, remembering that it doesn’t always work out: “One time, we had to pick up this guy with a bad concussion. There was also a dead body — his brother, it turned out. He broke down completely — this massive guy, built like a tank. We pumped him full of meds, but he just kept sobbing. And you realize there’s truly nothing you can do to help.”

I ask Kyrylo if he’s ever scared in the field. He’s certainly not afraid to get philosophical when he answers:

Then Kyrylo catches the look on my face and laughs: “It’s not like I’m out here waving a flashlight at the sky!” A beacon like that would be easy work for the drones.

The train

As of December 2024, saying publicly that the war should end was still considered a kind of treason. But in private, a lot of people were already saying, “They can choke on their damn Donbas — just make this stop.” Of course, few could say that out loud. But by February, I witness this: in a third-class sleeper car, a young, broad-shouldered assault trooper and an older soldier who works with mines and bombs sit on the lower bunk. Across from them, a woman.

“Enough of this already!” the woman says, raising her voice. “You guys have it easy — you’re getting paid to fight.”

“Easy?” Sasha, the older man, repeats in disbelief. “My kid has grown up without me!”

I sit down with them, surprised, and they pour me some vodka. Though officially banned, drinking and smoking on trains has basically become legalized. Every train car is packed with soldiers coming back from the front, and the conductors have stopped trying to crack down on these small comforts. You can buy horilka or beer on pretty much any train now.

“This is my first time heading home in nine months,” says Vladyslav, the young assault trooper. “I’ve got a wife and a kid, too. You think this is the life I dreamed of? Yeah, right — we’re all millionaires, just raking it in out there….”

“Oh right — you just do what you’re told, that’s all,” the woman sneers.

“We’re doing our job! We didn’t bail, didn’t desert — we’re out there defending the country! Maybe think about something other than money for once…”

“And what exactly are you fighting for?” she asks.

“We fight for our parents, for my daughter.”

“And are they actually in danger right now? You only see what’s right in front of your nose. Try stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. You should be asking — why won’t they let you out?” The woman wants to say something more, but the words catch in her throat.

“What’s there to look at? You realize, if we’d bailed, you wouldn’t even be on this train right now! We’re fighting for Ukraine.”

“And what does that even mean to you — ‘Ukraine’?”

“I can see you’re no patriot; you’re not even a Ukrainian. Who are your parents? Where are you from?”

“I’m from Shepetivka [a city in Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi region]. You made me the enemy right away — didn’t hear a word I said.”

“If it weren’t for us, they [the Russians] would already be in Shepetivka.”

Oddly enough, even with how heated the conversation has become, everyone remains friendly.

“Tell me, do you have a neighbor back home?” the woman asks.

“I do — so what? He’s a drunk. He came home drunk one night and started in on his wife, so I went over and clocked him.”

“We’ll always have neighbors,” she explains. “The trick is figuring out how to live with them in peace.”

“We’ll never live side by side with the damn Russians. They’re scum. They’re animals. You’ve seen what they do, right? The videos — our guys on their knees in the snow, stripped to their underwear in the freezing cold — and they shoot them in the back of the head. You’ve seen it, right? Let them all fucking die — young and old, every single one. Pour concrete over that whole shithole and let ’em rot.”

“That’s your anger talking. If I’m a human being, I have to treat all people equally.”

“The Russkies aren’t people! The Russkies and those damn Buryats.”

“And what about in Donetsk — do they count as people?”

“Who gives a fuck?” A thin, tall, visibly drunk infantryman suddenly leans over from the top bunk. “My friend died out there! You’re in our country! Leave us the fuck alone! This is ours — stay the fuck out! I hate all of you!”

“Who is ‘us’?” the woman asks, a bit startled.

“The Russkies, for fuck’s sake…” the soldier answers incoherently. 

“You’re in a public place — knock it off!” snaps another woman from a side bunk.

“Vadyk, you’re getting on my fucking nerves,” the assault trooper says, calm but firm. “I asked you nicely — lie down. I can’t stand drunk soldiers.”

“He probably carries a wound in his soul,” the first woman says gently. “We’re all a little broken. But we’re not living out our own lives — we’re stuck cleaning up someone else’s mess. And the worst part is that soldiers keep dying.”

“The worst part will be when we give up those territories and our guys died for nothing,” mutters the woman from the side bunk.

“You really think our army’s going to win them back?” snaps the first woman. “We need to stop. What’s the point of dragging it out?”

“It’ll only get worse,” the assault trooper suddenly agrees. “Because now everyone they try to draft just runs and says, ‘What am I, an idiot? Let the politicians’ sons fight instead!’”

“And you judge them?”

“Of course! I’m no politician’s son.”

“Then why keep fighting?”

“What — we should just surrender?”

“This has to end.”

“Well, that’s not up to us.”

“Then who is it up to?”

“Alright, just say what you really mean.”

“What I mean, Vladyslav, is that you’re tough as they come,” she says with a smile. The assault trooper blinks, unsure whether it’s a compliment or an insult. 

Just a couple of months earlier, no one would’ve dared utter such things out loud. But now, people who believe the war should end immediately are starting to say it openly. As I walk through the train car, I hear that in another compartment, they’re also talking about how peace might be near.

Back where I started, Vadyk climbs down from his top bunk and sits across from me.

“What’s your ethnicity?” he asks me.

“Jewish,” I tell him.

“No kidding? Then take a look at what your people did to this country — sold off everything.”

He leans in, drunk, pressing his forehead against mine.

“My wife left me. Three months in — can you believe that?”

“Why?” I ask.

“She just gave it up to somebody who was closer.”

I remember what the woman said earlier in the ride: “He probably carries a wound in his soul.” She wasn’t wrong.

The electrician

I decide to visit one of the wounded soldiers I met earlier on the medevac bus. The moment I step into the room, he lights up — like he’d been waiting for me.

“I need to find some kind of help! I can’t take it anymore!” he says, visibly distressed. “I’ve had constant high blood pressure since the concussions. I told him [he nods at a soldier in the next bed]: ‘Just leave me on the road — the end. I can’t do this anymore!’ There’s so much injustice in this army — they treat you like a piece of meat. We got hit hard, one strike after another, and ran for our lives — and they’re screaming on the radio, ‘Get back to your position!’ But it was gone. Completely leveled. Where the hell were we supposed to go back to?!”

He’s trembling now.

“They don’t treat you like a soldier… These ‘buyers’ come and say, ‘Boys, you’re headed to the front — but chances are, you won’t be coming back.’ Why the hell start with that? My dad was there, too — we were drafted together. And there was a young guy from my town. We got there, did some live fire for a couple of days, and then they sent us straight into combat. And bam — a bullet to the head, right in front of me.”

He continues: “When you go to ask for help, telling them you’re not okay and asking for some real medicine, they say they’ll do it later, and later they say, ‘What do you need that for? You’re alive. You’ve still got your arms and legs.’ I spent my entire leave in the hospital — hernias, bulging discs, two kinds of tumors. No one even looked at my chart. Back when I was healthy, I went willingly. I’m not saying I won’t serve. I’ll help however I can. I used to be an electrician, and I loved it. I’ve always been happy to pitch in. But I’m not cut out for the infantry anymore. I’m all shaky now, see?”

“I’ve got two kids — a twelve-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter.” His hands tremble as he produces a wallet from his pocket and shows me their photos. “I keep these with me all the time — it’s like my good luck charm. I just want to see them again. If they told us how long — even if they said, okay, 18 more months on your contract — I’d keep serving, even sick like this. I get it — it’s war. But how come nobody drafts all these guys still partying in nightclubs? We’ve lost so many men — so damn many. I just want to go home, that’s all,” the soldier breaks down, crying on the edge of his bed.

“Please don’t use my name, okay? I don’t want any trouble. Otherwise, they’ll stick me in an even worse shithole.”