Village depleted of its men as Russian invasion weighs heavily
Few men of fighting age are left in the village of Makiv in southwest Ukraine, and those who remain fear they will be drafted at any moment.
Their neighbours are already hundreds of miles east in trenches on the front lines. Some have been killed or wounded. Several are missing.
Others from this rural area – about 70km from the borders of Romania and Moldova – have fled abroad or found ways to avoid the war, either with legitimate exemptions or by hiding.
Ukraine desperately needs more troops, with its forces depleted by deaths, injuries and exhaustion.
Despite Russia’s own enormous casualties, the invaders still far outnumber Ukraine’s defenders. Ukraine’s parliament is debating a bill to expand the draft pool, in part by lowering the eligibility age to 25 from 27, but few decisions are being made in Kyiv that will quickly answer the army’s urgent needs.
Civilians here say that means military recruiters are grabbing everyone they can.
Oleksii, 30, was fixing his car last year when soldiers handed him a draft order. It was Valentine’s Day and the news broke his girlfriend, Elvira, who barely ate for weeks afterward.
After three concussions and shrapnel wounds, Oleksii recently returned home. Scrolling through his phone, he showed a photo of him with more than a dozen fellow troops.
Only two are still alive, he said.
This month, villagers in Makiv buried another of their own – Ihor Dozorets, a contract soldier who was wounded so badly that his son, also a soldier, identified him only by a scar on his hand. “He wanted to come home,” Ihor’s sister, Inna Melnyk, 43, said through tears. “He was tired of it all. But what can we do?”
Maya Proskurivska, 63, is hiding the truth about her son-in-law, Oleksandr, 41, from his children, who are 8 and 14. Sent to fight in the Donetsk region, he has been missing since December, she said, but the children think he is confirmed as a prisoner of war. These days, she said, “on our street, it’s hard to find a young man.”
It has been 16 months since Tanya Voropanova last heard from her husband, Serhii, who joined the army in March 2022 and disappeared while fighting that November.
A fellow soldier called at the time and told her he had two updates. “The first is he’s not among the dead,” she recalled him saying. “The second is he’s not among the living.”
She has lived in that limbo ever since – raising two daughters, now 4 and 8, alone.
Down the road from Makiv, in the small city of Kamyanets-Podilsky, a growing gallery honouring the dead fills a main square.
On a recent morning, Lyuda Shydey stood weeping in front of the portrait of her younger brother, Serhiy Kozynyak, who was killed in 2022 in Avdiivka. Shydey has never been to eastern Ukraine but still dreams of one day walking barefoot through the place where he died.
“And dreams have to come true,” she said. “Otherwise, what is the point of dreaming?”
Washington Post
“He wanted to come home. He was tired of it all. But what can we do?”
Ukrainiaan soldier’s sister