KHARKIV OBLAST, Ukraine—When Yulia’s husband, a Ukrainian soldier fighting on the front lines against Russia’s invasion, told her that 25 men in his unit had died in a single day of fighting, she was absolutely furious.
The Ukrainian woman—who lives in Kyiv and spoke under a pseudonym—told The Daily Beast she had seen photos of one of her colleagues sipping drinks in Berlin on social media earlier that day. They used to work at a foreign IT company together, she said, and he had illegally slipped out of the country. At that point, her rage for draft dodgers had peaked.
“In my former team [at work], there were eight men. Five of them left the country illegally,” she said, calling her former colleague an “arrogant prick.”
At the beginning of the war, a patriotic fervor overran Ukraine, with men and women volunteering in the tens of thousands. The borders with Poland and Moldova were thronged not just with refugees leaving the country, but with Ukrainians flocking back to take up arms to defend their country.
Now, it is a different story. A year of grueling attrition warfare has been described as ‘hell on earth’ by at least four soldiers who spoke with The Daily Beast this year, stripping much of the glamor away from combat service.
In turn, the number of Ukrainian volunteers has drastically dipped, forcing the military to rely heavily on conscription. Those drafted in that process, which is opaque and seemingly random, are often inexperienced.
In an interview with The Washington Post this spring, a Ukrainian lieutenant colonel complained that he was now leading a unit composed “entirely of inexperienced troops,” some of whom would not fire their guns because they were “afraid of the sound of the shot.”
The Daily Beast was invited to watch a combat medic with the Ukrainian Army’s Third Tank Regiment give a crash course in battlefield medicine to a group of freshly mobilized men. The new recruits had been called up to serve in the Ukrainian army as it prepares for its long-heralded counter-offensive. In recent months, Ukraine has created around a dozen new attack brigades with estimates of 40,000 additional troops ready to force the Russians back towards their own border.
A new recruit participates in a demonstration with a Ukrainian combat medic.
A new recruit participates in a demonstration with a Ukrainian combat medic.
Tom Mutch
“If you have a neck wound, you have 90 seconds to put on a tourniquet, told the group of soldiers in a training ground in Kharkiv Oblast near the Russian border this week. “Or you will likely die.”
His model for the demonstration was a baby-faced young man with slightly chubby cheeks and a mop of bright blond hair. He was barely 18 years old and just out of high school. Rather than preparing for university or hitting up a bar for the first time, he was getting ready to deploy to the front line as part of an assault brigade.
Sitting under a series of canopies next to him were a collection of tanks, mostly T-72 or their variants, donated by Warsaw pact countries. The tanks were well camouflaged, and the base was outside of artillery range. But as one of the soldiers pointed out, the men were not out of danger.
“Where we are now… the front line is not far away. The enemy is not far away. And they can attack us… at the distance we are right now they can attack us with unmanned aerial vehicles or missiles,” one officer said. We could hear the faint thumping of artillery in the distance, and on one occasion, an explosion uncomfortably close to us.
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While many of the other observers in the group of more than 10 soldiers—(they didn’t want to disclose exact numbers)—seemed resigned to their fate, the 18-year-old recruit had been watching intently, asking questions and volunteering himself. His desire to get through this war alive was clear.
A group of recently mobilized Ukrainian men receiving training in Kharkiv Oblast.
