Published in partnership with ISOLARII.

 

‘Wittgenstein once said, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” That really gets to the core of the issue you’re trying to address here. It’s a complex dilemma that can’t be resolved in a single article. If you write one, you risk either demoralising people or coming across as foolish. It’s probably best to leave it alone for now.’

– Andrei, a friend

 

I am on my way to Kyiv when Ukraine’s new conscription law takes effect: it requires men between eighteen and sixty to register to serve in the Ukrainian army, and introduces harsh new penalties for evading military service.

When I arrive, Kyiv is still and quiet, the streets empty. I hear from Andrei, who has lived in Ukraine for twenty years, but holds a Russian passport and so can no longer enter the country. He tries to dissuade me from writing about the new policy.

Many of the recent conversations I’ve had about the policy, whether by phone or in person, have ended with similar remarks. At first, I decide to write these remarks down so they bother me less:

‘Solidarity with Ukraine in this situation must be preserved by all means! And right now that means acknowledging as little as possible about such things.’
– University lecturer from Germany

‘If you write about the conscription, try to cover the situation from different sides. The easiest thing to do is to take one side, but then you won’t be able to tell the whole truth.’
– Ukrainian businesswoman

‘They will simply use the article to justify giving us even less aid – and so more people will die as a result.’
– Ukrainian volunteer in Poland

‘You can write whatever you want, but you need to know how to do it and acknowledge that there will be consequences.’
– Ukrainian journalist

Looking at them all together, however, I feel an impenetrable wall between myself and reality.

In each remark, I sense not so much wisdom or sympathy, but rather fear, hopelessness, and the faint hope that leaving things unspoken might make them disappear.

 

Grigory

On the train traveling through Poland towards Ukraine, a soldier sits across from me. We quickly become acquainted. His name is Grigory. Fifty-eight years old. He has been in Germany for rehabilitation and speaks enthusiastically about German medicine. He comes originally from the Vinnytsia Oblast, and was in agribusiness before the war. Now he is trying to rebuild and expand that enterprise.

He clearly has difficulty walking, moving slowly as if perpetually on the verge of falling, breathing heavily and gasping for air. Raising his arms is a struggle, with his left arm periodically freezing mid-motion. Everyone who sees him instinctively wants to help.

When Grigory speaks, you start to believe in his strength. His voice brims with joy and laughter, his jokes land effortlessly. There’s an unwavering optimism in his tone, as if he has convinced himself that no obstacle is too great.

‘Many people grease palms to get released, to pass the medical exams properly, but I greased palms to go back and serve again.’

‘What? You’re going back to serve?’ I find it hard to believe that a man who travels with only a small satchel because he cannot lift a suitcase, is returning to military service.

‘Yes, with my connections, everything will go smoothly! They’re waiting for me at the unit. Don’t worry, I’ll sit quietly in one place. They’ve found me the right job. They’re taking me to a unique place!’ He gave me his battalion number but asked me not to mention it.

‘And how was your rehab?’

‘They rebuilt me from nothing, made me human again. Now turn off your recorder. Or they won’t take me back. I have family, kids, so I must go,’ he says. ‘But I could tell you so much! I’ve had eight concussions! I’ve served everywhere – Kyiv, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson. Wounded in every place. Rehab and then back to the front. Eight concussions! And now, until the war ends, they cannot discharge me. I’m not the kind of guy who would let them! I will stay until the end.’

I turned off my recorder and, from there all the way to Kyiv, he told me war stories.

One day, after shelling, he got stuck in a trench, trapped by his body armour. He’s overweight, so it took several soldiers to haul him out. They drank to his health all evening, and only realised the next day that he was concussed. As his story continued, the scene of the men pulling him free grew more and more cartoonish until they resembled characters in a children’s fairy tale trying to extract a giant turnip from the ground.

Since then, he refuses to wear body armour under any circumstances. He believes he was able to predict who would live and who would die when his unit went on missions. He says he was never wrong, he knew everyone’s fate. Once, when wounded, he stitched up his own severed leg artery with iron wire, piercing the skin and tissue at the most sensitive spot of his inner thigh. Doctors at the hospital marvelled – his makeshift operation saved the leg from amputation.

Despite having a wife, three kids and a job to return to, he is unwilling to go back to civilian life. He says several times of his wife, ‘She’s a strong woman. I’m kind of afraid of her. And at the front, I found my peace.’

We talk for four hours. He shows me papers confirming his disability. The injuries paralysed his fingers and limited motion in his arms. The spinal trauma forced him to relearn how to speak, read and walk. Rehab took nearly a year, and his vision still hasn’t fully returned. Assessed at a level three disability rating, his pension is 2,500 hryvnia – 60 euros a month, an impossible amount to live on. He tells me he has a law degree and I ask him why he didn’t try to challenge this blatantly unfair decision in court.

The question stings him. He replies, shouting, ‘Ask things like that and I’ll stop talking to you! Everyone gets level three. There was nothing I could do! I don’t want to talk to someone who asks such questions!’ He shoots me an injured look, and only speaks again after some time has passed.

He felt powerless to advocate for a higher pension. Yet, throughout his service and rehabilitation, he aided fellow soldiers in drafting reports to challenge their commanding officers and contest the newly instituted law that introduced harsher punishments for disobedience – a law he believes contravenes military regulations. Enacted in 2023, it swiftly became the most criticised statute among service members.

During our train ride, he takes it upon himself to help all the passengers around us. He assists a woman with her ticket for the next train, befriends two Poles planning a business meeting, and finds space for an elderly woman’s suitcase. He turns to me and says, ‘The others, the selfish ones, die fast. A week and they’re gone. You must say goodbye to selfishness right away; it’s the only way to survive. Soon after, no one remembers them, because there’s no chance to get to know them.’

I try to picture these unnamed selfish people, perishing so rapidly and anonymously.

Grigory mentions volunteering to fight for Chechen independence in 2000. ‘What can I say about it? There’s nothing to say. I don’t remember what happened. I chose to forget, so I forgot. Like in our country, you walk among corpses, eat among corpses. There are dead people everywhere, and you get used to it because the main thing is love and family.’

But he could no longer live with his family. He was unwilling to return to his former peaceful existence as long as the war dragged on. His wife and children would not be meeting him at the train station: ‘I didn’t call anyone. I don’t need anyone now. My guys know I’m coming. I just need to get to my unit. They’ll usher me through the checkpoints, and then I’ll back to the front.’

It is one of many contradictions. When I ask his opinion on the new conscription law, the random detentions of men on the street, who are then forcibly sent to training or military postings, he flashes with anger. ‘My boys and I hate this law. It’s useless. No one has any motivation left! My son is thirty. I want him to be careful, to stay away. There’s nothing for him out there. I’ve made arrangements such that he can leave Ukraine anytime and not return, once he’s ready. Getting his documents in order lifted a weight off my shoulders. Now I’ll fight to the very end of this damned war.’

Several times he shows me a rectangular piece of metal that hangs around his neck on a chain. It’s a funeral plate, as we call it, a ‘dog tag’, listing his identifying information. He has never removed it, he says, even during his convalescence in Germany.

 

In a Kyiv Grocery Store

The shopkeeper is standing at the shop counter. She looks happy and tells me about some new Ukrainian cleaning products they have in stock. ‘We support homegrown production as much as we can,’ she says. Then she asks, ‘What’s on your mind? What are you writing about?’

After I explain, she says, ‘My husband has been in the army since day one. He felt he had no choice, and I felt the same. I worry about him constantly, but at least he’s in Kyiv Oblast now. Will you write about men like that? The ones who’ve been at the front from the very start, and who aren’t even considering demobilisation. The ones who have families, shops, their own small businesses? Who have things to get back to?’

‘I’d also like to write about the people who don’t want to go to the front,’ I say, keen to clarify. She smiles broadly, and points at the two young men behind the counter. ‘You can see them right here. There’s no way they could go to the front. They’re scared, and they’d be of little use there anyway. You realize not all women can bear and raise children, right? Well, not all men can go to war either. These ones can’t. And I’ll do whatever it takes to keep them from being sent.’

The sales assistants hear all of this. They stand next to us and don’t say a word. She turns to them, her voice pointed, ‘You couldn’t go there either, could you?’. They remain silent and she shifts her gaze back to me. I begin to object to the comparison with women who can’t have children. Everything in me disagrees with this comparison, but I can’t find the right words. Sensing my discomfort, she adopts a conciliatory tone, ‘You have to explain it to yourself somehow, that some people can’t go.’

Why doesn’t it occur to her that it could also be different? That women could be expected to go to the front, and that it could also be enough for men to be good fathers for their children? In both versions, an impenetrable wall between ‘men’ and ‘women’ is erected, if you imagine for a moment that these two groups are clearly separated from each other.

 

Semyon

I meet Semyon, an acquaintance from Zaporizhzhia Oblast, while he is passing through Kyiv. He is about forty years old and looks tired. He works as a rehabilitation doctor with civilians and former soldiers. He wanted to see me, he said, to get something off his chest.

To understand the mood in Zaporizhzhia you have to talk to the locals; the news reveals almost nothing. Like so many Ukrainian towns, it was practically invisible before the war, and just starting to take shape in the public imagination before the war eclipsed everything.

He has raised money several times to help refugees, many of whom are in Zaporizhzhia, having fled there from the occupied territories of Melitopol and Berdyansk. The city’s proximity to the front – the constant shelling and the destruction – has meant that the prices of rental apartments have fallen sharply. Even the poorest among the new arrivals can afford to rent a room in the city. Some days the shelling is so intense that the alarm sounds every hour.

My close friend’s brother is an artist who left Berdyansk. He found a remote job and now lives in Zaporizhzhia. He has hardly left his house in the past year, terrified of being conscripted on the street, at the entrance to a store, or at a bus stop. He is unwell, and his hands have a constant tremor, but he believes that no one will pay attention to his chronic illness.

I quote Semyon:

‘Can you imagine, they’ve closed the hospitals? Public hospitals! One day they just announced they were closing the oncology unit, the cardiology centre and the reproductive health clinic. People came for treatment from all over the region, many from occupied territories. Where will they go now?

A friend of mine was at the heart centre. He was being prepared for an operation. The evening before, his doctor said, “Pack your things. We’re closing, nothing works here anymore.” When he called me, I couldn’t believe it. I checked the news – sure enough, they were closing it. Some staff might move on to the regional hospital, but who knows. I can’t believe it – this can’t be happening! People could get free care at those hospitals, that’s what mattered most.

The regional hospital charges for everything and doesn’t have proper medication. There is not even a basic service for the military. Volunteers who have been supporting the army since 2014 must buy almost everything themselves.

Those three centres were the only places that looked after those unable to pay for operations. And who around here has that kind of money, for surgery? A handful! The doctors protested but no one listens.

The news confirms it. They say the closed centres will merge with the regional one. Clearly, the free programs will disappear. Doctors and staff have been laid off, many with nowhere to go, their patients left waiting for chemo, for operations, all cancelled in a day. Our people are stepped on like dust; their lives count for nothing.

Let it be known, let the world hear of this.’

I scribble furiously, trying to get down his every word and intonation. And I realise: against the backdrop of the Russian onslaught, all everyday concerns, the facts and things that make everyday life, literally life, seem like luxuries. The war, through nearly every perspective, forces a radical existential choice. Life in a battle-scarred country becomes a grand state of exception, an emergency of the highest order, the highest expression of pathos: heroism. Within this heroic narrative, all sympathy for ordinary human needs dissolves, as if in sulfuric acid.

Residents of other European countries, who follow the news from Ukraine, may experience a sense of weary resignation rather than genuine shock in response to the escalation of Russian military aggression and its blatant human rights violations. And so – amid the destruction of infrastructure and the displacement of millions of people – it might seem strange that someone in a city under bombardment would still hope for access to medical care or the restoration of hot water. However, it is precisely this perception that has led to a form of censorship that renders conversations about human rights provision in Ukraine taboo. Asking such questions, we have been made to feel, is tantamount to ‘playing along with’ Russian propaganda.

Shortly after my conversation with Semyon, I learn that the doctors at the oncology clinic signed a petition against the closure of their facility and its proposed merger with the regional hospital. The petition gained attention in Ukrainian media and, soon after, each of the doctors received a conscription order.

 

Again, I quote Semyon:

‘We listened to the radio, watched TV. People celebrated the death of every enemy. My neighbours were like junkies riding high: “another Moskal bites the dust on foreign soil!” Then they woke up to find the most essential services had been ripped away. Who cares about those services now? It is as if they don’t even exist anymore. Hospitals locked, the ill – out with your things! A man can’t even go out for bread. My friends sit at home, trembling, having lost their human form.

You don’t see men outside at all these days, only women, and those with ironclad exemptions from service.

One man stepped out and never came back. His family rang the conscription offices but no one would pick up. It took days to find out where they’d hauled him off to. These men are just unfit for battle. So women started hiding them.

My cousin has a chronic condition, on permanent medication. He stopped sleeping, started losing weight. He decided to consult a lawyer about his rights, whether he could be called up despite his health.

I said to him, “Don’t go! It’s pointless, you’re gambling with your life. You won’t make it home from the lawyer’s office, they’ll grab you and we won’t find you.” But he didn’t hear me, his voice was shaking, his hands were shaking. He went anyway. He came back, and I asked what he learned, and he still didn’t know anything about his rights, obligations, what to say if stopped. He wasted his money. He was too rattled by fear of being outside to understand the lawyer.

Recruitment centres in our oblast are taking anyone without an exemption now – HIV, cancer, doesn’t matter.

It chills me to the bone, the need to accept that most of the men drafted now won’t come home. Those who went at the start, they know their way around. They’ve got the will to fight. The ones being drafted now, they’re the ones who fail to evade the mobilisation units. If they can’t run or hide from the police, how can we expect them to survive the Russians?

I asked a commander I know, “How can you do this? Why take the ill, the frail, the chronically sick?” He said, “Orders from above. We need people. I can’t do anything.”

The screws turned slowly at first. But wait, I think. You can’t get away with it that easily. We still have people like women. Women can’t be forced, can’t be subdued! And if the women decide something for themselves, no one can stop them. You can probably do what you want with the men. We have become helpless. But the women – just try to touch them. They will not be defenceless.

When you write this up, mention the “busification”. Describe the little white buses. How any man who can’t show his exemption is pulled from his own vehicle, grabbed right in the middle of the street, and dragged into the bus in front of everyone, screaming and resisting, while passersby film on their phones, and there is nothing that can be done for him.

We are in a situation we never imagined. We are devouring ourselves. Shelled by Russia, at war with Russia, and now at war with those who have decided we must question nothing.

The people here are drenched in propaganda. They exchange photos of corpses, photos of the front. They send something to the front, all my worries and the worries of everyone I know revolve around relatives and friends on the front line. Our hometowns and outskirts are under non-stop fire, sirens and shellings. And all this patriotic news even has a calming effect.

Meanwhile, people are waking up in the morning to find their hospitals shuttered and the doctors gone. There are policemen crawling the streets, ready to collar any man they find. And no one knows where to flee. Who should they turn to? Who should they tell what is happening to them?’

 

I don’t hear anything like that from him again, though we spoke again days later. I’ve noticed how fast the fury over these social catastrophes fades for my friends and I. At first, ‘closing hospitals’ seems monstrously unjust, a wrong the whole world needs to hear about. By the next day, an ironic detachment sets in: ‘We’re all going to die, so why worry about hospitals.’ A day later, and the pain of injustice is hard even to recall. This pattern of outrage fading to apathy happens even among friends who’ve cut me off mid-phone-call to report forced conscriptions taking place in their towns.

Emotional fatigue takes over. It becomes clear that reporting all of this to them – shorthand for the West – is pointless. They will not care anyway. They will only misinterpret the situation. And anyone who tries to right these injustices will be branded a traitor.

A friend in Zaporizhzhia calls, saying, ‘Tread carefully. You don’t have to tell the whole truth. The main thing is safety.’ What I think he means to say is, ‘Truth doesn’t matter anymore.’

Amid the stream of videos depicting violent detentions on Ukrainian streets, some are evidently filmed in Russia, featuring staged scenes that repeat nearly all the stereotypes of Russian propaganda. In the Ukrainian videos, one can usually identify the city, even the street. The nuances of the local accents and linguistic intonations are almost impossible to fake. The Russian videos are filmed in unrecognisable spaces, and rely on carefully crafted scripts, costumes, and TV-style acting.

It is as if a foreign TV director is meddling in Ukrainian civil rights conversations, attempting to discredit our claims. Later, those who choose to ignore the reality of these abductions can attribute everything to Russian propaganda: ‘That never happened. It’s just a fake.’

When the air-raid sirens sound many times a day, and every hour in Zaporizhzhia, the only thing one can feel is a dull pain. People are dying, houses are being destroyed by the shelling, and the regional hospital is overflowing with the wounded. And, at such a moment, they – this time the Ukrainian government – close the hospitals. There is no point in objecting. Let them do what they want.

 

Video, Clouds and Rain

My friend sends me a video of an elderly woman shouting outside a military enlistment office, ‘Let my son go! He has cancer!’

I discover that TikTok is flooded with these videos: ‘mobilisation’ officers stop men in the street, take them out of cars, sometimes with force, and drag them into small buses on the way to enlistment offices. The word ‘бусификация’, or ‘busification’, is bandied about in all its declensions: busify, busifies, busified. The phrasing is childish, and seems to minimise what is happening, make it feel less alien and alarming.

According to the updated conscription law, ‘On Mobilisation Preparation and Mobilisation’, if a person does not respond to a draft notice, they can be forcibly brought to these military enlistment offices, the territorial recruitment centres.

To this end, all men must carry military registration documents and be ready to show them at any time at the request of the police. Police officers and military representatives are on duty at subway exits, at transport stops and near shopping centres.

It has spawned an entirely new kind of OSINT (‘open-source intelligence’, which has monitored Russian aggression since the war began). Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers post sightings and coordinates of patrols.

They log their movements, and classify them, as if talking about the weather. Police in blue uniforms and military in green are referred to as ‘clouds’. The delivery of draft notices, and the detentions, are described as ‘rain’ and ‘thunderstorms’.

The posts read like this: ‘At the exit of Darnitsa metro station, four green clouds and two blue clouds are pissing rain on a guy right into the car. Near the Levoberezhnaya subway it’s starting to pour.’ Pour means ‘They stop many men at once’.

One video shows young military men driving a car around town. Bellowing out the window, they are impersonating the tour guides who used to shout out the names of routes for tourists on the beaches: ‘Vouchers to Liman, let’s go!’, ‘Rest up in Kharkiv!’, ‘Zaporizhzhia Oblast, rejuvenate in nature!’

The clip nearly made me abandon this piece. Beneath their jokes and gallows humour, I could sense in those men the same despair, courage, and acute feeling of abandonment that has accompanied me throughout the war. These Ukrainian soldiers, many of them civilians until recently, feel betrayed, condemned to fight on forsaken fronts. They had hoped that they would be demobilised, taken off active service, but it has not happened. They had also hoped for reinforcements.

But I don’t want to dwell on such thoughts, or be led astray by my habit of sympathising with all sides. My task is simply to present a few honest glimpses of people grappling with the reality of war.

I’ve noticed that along with the whole new Ukrainian vocabulary emerging to describe the front lines and the collective horror at the possibility that literally anyone could end up there, certain terms are appearing in German media coverage and official statements too.

One is ‘aushalten’, meaning to endure or bear. I’ve heard it in contexts like, ‘We will support Ukraine for as long as Ukrainians are willing to bear the hardships of war,’ or ‘Ukrainians endure war; they fight for our freedom!’ Even more pointedly, directed at me: ‘You are dying for us. Thank you for enduring.’ The decision not to make any decision is clear in these statements. The strategy is to ‘watch and wait it out from a safe distance’, because apparently, somewhere out there, there’s a special group of people who will volunteer to ‘endure’ unspeakable violence, invasion and mass death, indecision and restrictions on liberty.

 

Image © Olexiy Samsonov