Theory and Practice of War
Ukrainian soldiers ride in a military vehicle in Mariupol, Ukraine, Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022. Russian troops launched their anticipated attack on Ukraine on Thursday, as President Vladimir Putin cast aside international condemnation and sanctions, warning other countries that any attempt to interfere would lead to “consequences you have never seen.” (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)
In the telling of many American and European media outlets, today marks the start of Russia’s war against Ukraine. But for Ukrainians, this war has been a reality for the last eight years, ever since Russian forces seized control of Crimea and invaded areas of eastern Ukraine. The war has already displaced families, destabilized regions and ended over 14,000 Ukrainian lives, including that of Volodymyr Pavliv, a Ukranian soldier who was killed by shrapnel in the Luhansk region in 2017. In A Loss: The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister, historian Olesya Khromeychuk describes what it is like when conflicts that you thought consigned to the past suddenly lurch into the present. The following is an excerpt from Khromeychuk’s book.
I have been studying wars for over a decade. Violence described in the pages of books, in oral testimonies, photographs, archival objects always left its mark on me. I couldn’t and, perhaps, didn’t want to detach myself emotionally from it entirely, but, with time, I became impervious to it. Now and again, I would leave an interview with one of my respondents—veterans of the Second World War—profoundly moved by their stories. Occasionally I would burst into tears in the archives having found a particularly touching letter or reading an interrogation protocol that was particularly hard to stomach. I invested a lot of myself into it, but it was a job, nonetheless.
When the war in eastern Ukraine started everything changed. I could no longer think of political violence as an object of research now a brutal war was unfolding in a land so close to my heart, although still at a safe distance to most west Europeans: in “a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
Following it from London, mostly through media reports and videos posted on social media, I was horrified that the words so familiar from my academic work—shelling, bombing, captivity, casualties, war crimes—were now being used in news reports about my home country. I got used to hearing about losses. Heavy losses, actual losses, official losses, loss of territory, loss of control, personal loss. These words acquired a different meaning. They were more real; they were more palpable. I saw my friends and relatives go to the front line. Some received draft notices, others joined up voluntarily. My two uncles were called up: one was nearly 60 years old and the other severely disabled. This was a good indication of the level of inefficiency in the military commissariats especially in the early days. I saw London’s Ukrainian diaspora growing in numbers thanks to new arrivals, mostly young men running away from the draft. I never judged them. No one wants to die, for one’s country or otherwise. I saw my London-based friends grapple with their emotions: they couldn’t decide whether they should return to Ukraine and join up or stay put and dive into the astonishingly efficient volunteer movement, contributing to the war effort financially but from afar.
Before the war began in eastern Ukraine, the phrase “before the war” meant “before the Second World War” to me. It referred to history, something I knew a thing or two about. Now, “before the war” meant the past that was just a step behind the present. The peacetime it described already seemed out of reach. It was disturbing how quickly Ukrainians got accustomed to the language of war: we learned the names of different parts of uniforms, the jargon of army supplies and, of course, army euphemisms such as “two hundreds” (killed in action), and “three hundreds” (injured). I sometimes joined my friends who spent days and nights protesting outside of the Russian Embassy, 10 Downing Street and the Parliament in London. The solidarity we felt in those moments made us feel a little less helpless, a bit more hopeful that miles away from home we might be able to do at least something, if not to stop the war, we knew we were powerless in that regard, then at least to draw attention to what was going on at the other end of Europe.
All this time, I was dreading a call from my brother, who had been living in Ukraine for four years after returning from the Netherlands, to say that his draft notice had arrived. Because he had completed compulsory military service as a young man, he held the rank of sergeant. At the start of the hostilities in the Donbas, the Ukrainian army was in a dismal state, not only poorly equipped, but also with poorly trained personnel. I was sure that his military experience would mean he’d be among the first to get drafted. But a year passed, and he hadn’t been called up. Each day seemed like a blessing to me. Until one day my brother phoned, not to tell me his draft notice had arrived, but to say that he had joined up voluntarily.
My immediate reaction was to get in touch with a good friend—a retired serviceman who had barely survived one of his missions when he was still in the army—begging him to have a word with my brother and change his mind about going to the front. Kolya agreed to speak to my brother, phoned [my brother] Volodya and told him to visit a military hospital where men returned from the front line were convalescing. It seemed to have the opposite effect to what I and my friend had intended: Volodya became even more sure that he wanted to go to war. There was no point trying to dissuade him.
My brother volunteered to go to the front. It was his choice. I will never know why exactly he joined up, but I believe that watching others, people younger than him, return from the front dead or injured had something to do with it. Guilt is a powerful motivating factor.
At first, he served as a machine gunner and spent much of his time in the Donetsk region, near the city of Horlivka. Towards the end of his service, he became the commander of a reconnaissance platoon stationed not far from the city of Popasna, in the Luhansk region. All in all, he spent almost two years on the front line. When he was briefly demobilized between his first and the second deployment, I tried to dissuade him from going back to the front.
He listened to my pleas and said that he had nightmares every night when sleeping in his civilian bed. As soon as he returned to the warzone, the nightmares ceased. Maybe if you are living a nightmare, you have no time to dream of it. Or maybe civilian life, with its multiple shades of grey, simply can’t compete with the clarity of the warzone: at least there you know who your friends and your foes really are.
So, as my brother went to the war, the war came into my home.
Quite literally. My flat started to fill up with all sorts of military supplies delivered from all over the world: China, Italy, Ireland, the UK, Israel, the USA. I had spent the first year of hostilities resisting giving money to charities that collected donations for the army. I felt that the more we supported volunteers who bought the provisions that should have been supplied by the state, the more reluctant the state would be to reform the army, to prevent the robbery of the armed forces by corrupt officials and actually supply it with the necessary provisions – from socks, t-shirts and food to appropriate ammunition and technology. I might have been right in principle, but once I heard that my brother had joined up, I immediately went online and started buying everything he might possibly need at the front.
Packages with uniforms, medicines and other vital items for front-line life piled up as I ticked off the list helpfully written for me by Kolya. I was ashamed that I hadn’t given money to volunteers who were collecting the same items for soldiers as I was now gathering for my brother. I was embarrassed about not being able to stick to my principle of holding the state accountable for its actions and ensuring it fulfilled its responsibilities. Writing anti-militaristic texts professionally, I could see myself being militarized privately, albeit unwillingly. I knew my actions were hypocritical: they were no longer based on the political views of an informed academic; they were driven by the fears of a sister. I no longer knew if I had been right in not supporting charities helping the army. I wasn’t sure if I was wrong when buying the supplies for my brother. I realized that one can be right and wrong at the same time.
That’s what wars do to us.
And then I saw my brother in a news report. My friend, Kolya, sent me a link, saying: “Take a look, 24 seconds in, they show your brother!”
I asked him how he had recognized him; they had never met in person, having only spoken on the phone. He replied: “Elementary, my dear Watson! I recognized him by the equipment I helped you buy for him.”
How strange it must be to recognize someone by their military paraphernalia. How much stranger it was to see your loved one on a TV screen in a news report wearing the military gear you had bought for him online. As I looked at my brother, so unfamiliar in his uniform, I wondered whether I knew the items I had bought for him better than I knew him.
From A Loss: The Story of a Dead Soldier Told by His Sister by Olesya Khromeychuk, Ibidem Verlag.