Battle fatigue

The covered truck concealing 24-year-old Davyd Tarasiuk and his brother trembled and rattled as it sped toward the Ukrainian border. Inside the truck bed’s windowless hardtop, huddled under a blanket and squished among tightly packed boxes, Tarasiuk prayed they wouldn’t get caught.

Outside, the sun shone brightly in the February morning. But all Tarasiuk could see was darkness. He couldn’t sleep. His back ached from hunching. It was stuffy. And every noise translated as danger.

The day before, Tarasiuk had wrestled with second thoughts.

“What are we even doing?” he asked his brother.

“We made the decision,” his brother reminded him. “Let’s go.”

If captured, they could be cuffed, fined, and driven immediately to the nearest military training facility to register for deployment. Tarasiuk would probably go to the front line: “That’s how I will die,” he thought.

When they crossed the border at 10 a.m., all those fears melted away. But a new ache replaced them: They could never go home.

Tarasiuk and his brother are among more than 20,000 Ukrainian men evading the country’s draft since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Their absence has taken a toll, especially as the country’s fighting ranks begin to thin. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a mobilization bill in April to secure an additional 500,000 troops to strengthen battlefront divisions. But if that effort fails, Ukraine may not have enough soldiers to push back Russian President Vladimir Putin’s encroaching army.

While experts predict the long-awaited $61 billion in U.S. military aid will fortify Ukraine’s defense, the manpower shortfall has reached a critical point: Even if the war-weary country gets all the weapons it says it needs, it might not have enough soldiers to wield them. This could leave the United States and its NATO allies with a difficult choice: give up Ukraine or send their own soldiers to fight.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine forbade men between 18 and 60 to leave the country. Few wanted to anyway. In a fervent display of patriotism, volunteers piled into the streets in hours-long queues to get their guns and marching orders. But as the battle grinds through a grueling third year, flames of zealous passion have cooled to reluctant flickers. Those vengeance-hungry patriots are gone—whether dead, maimed, or locked into an endless hell on the front line. Now, only a few are volunteering to man the defenses.

After crossing the border, Tarasiuk and his brother navigated through four countries before settling in the United States. A family connection brought them to Asheville, N.C., where they took refuge with Igor Koroluchuck, whose 8-year-old son gave up his downstairs bedroom for the men. A year after Tarasiuk’s escape, Koroluchuck sits beside him in his dining room. A wide glass door frames the blue-gray Appalachian mountains behind them as Koroluchuck, who has assumed the role of “adoptive dad,” rests his left arm around the back of Tarasiuk’s chair.

I asked Tarasiuk why he ran away, especially since he was under the conscription age—27 years old—when he left. He stares at the floor, furrowing his brows in deep thought and presses his finger to his chin before answering.

“I didn’t want to die,” he finally says.

Nobody does. That’s why those who stay and risk their lives for their country struggle to understand how men like Tarasiuk and his brother could turn into deserters. Shortly after moving to the United States, the two young men visited the ocean for the first time. Tarasiuk posted a video of the experience to social media. The trainer from his amateur soccer team in Ukraine responded via direct message.

“How could you?” he asked. “How could you post something like this, a video clip during a time like this, when people are dying, and there’s a war in our country?”

It ended with one pointed barb: “Not only did you leave and avoid serving in the war, but you’re posting these kinds of videos. Have some heart. Remember what other people are going through!”

Tarasiuk admits it’s difficult to think about the past. He estimates half of the people still in his hometown view him and his brother as traitors.

WHEN THE WAR BEGAN, Ukraine surprised the world by putting up a sustainable fight against an army three times its size. Moscow anticipated it would quickly capture Kyiv. But in the first year, the underdog country thwarted that attempt and drove Russia’s forces out of other key cities.

By the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine had regained all but 18 percent of the territory it lost in 2022. It also increased exports, pushed Putin’s navy deeper into the Black Sea, and advanced toward occupied Crimea.

But insufficient ammunition, resources, and manpower have stalled those efforts. A monthslong delay in U.S. military aid also undermined Ukraine’s chances to counter Russia’s creeping advance. In May, Putin exploited the setback to launch attacks in the northern part of the country, shaking up battle lines previously locked in a stalemate.

Tarasiuk told me Ukraine’s men are becoming increasingly disenchanted with being patriots. Koroluchuck agreed and added that corruption scandals and questionable spending reports have made people more skeptical of the government. Further, the lack of clarity on mobilizing troops has led to aggressive recruitment tactics, with reports of military officers leaping out of vans and nabbing men in the streets. Channels on the social media app Telegram warn of recruiter sightings and share videos of soldiers forcefully taking men away.

According to Tarasiuk, many young Ukrainian men have never even fired a gun. He says the military sends them to the battlefield with minimal training. “We have seen the bodies of the patriots who went to the front line in the very beginning—the best of the best—thousands of them. Dead. If they died, how am I going to fight any better?”

He and his peers knew Zelenskyy could lower the conscription age at any time, he added. That meant he could be next.

Tarasiuk said he spent every day in Ukraine fighting utter despair. Phones constantly buzz with attack-related messages. Air raid sirens echo in the streets daily. The wind carries the sound of weeping from town squares, where caskets of those recently killed lie in state near galleries of dead soldiers’ portraits.

According to Zelenskyy, 31,000 Ukrainian troops had died in action as of February 2024, but six months earlier, The New York Times reported U.S. officials put that number much higher: 70,000 dead and as many as 120,000 others wounded.

“It hits you after seeing so many people dying and without results: There’s no getting better. It’s getting worse,” Tarasiuk says. “After the first couple months of the war, we realized this and asked ourselves, ‘Are we dying for nothing?’”

Despite the dismal change in trajectory over the last year, U.S. officials remain optimistic that security aid approved earlier this year, which arrived over the summer, will allow Ukrainian troops to reverse many of Russia’s tactical gains. But to do so, the battered country needs still more soldiers. And rallying troops is no longer an easy task.

A BBC investigation found that scores of draftable men shell out thousands of euros to falsify medical records or slip across the border. Others have died trying to traverse the mountains or swim across rivers to freedom. The few remaining combat-eligible men become hermits, hiding in their homes, afraid to leave lest a recruiter serve them papers. Some even disguise themselves as women to avoid detection.

Those discovered are fined, served a draft order, and often taken directly to the nearest military base for enlistment. A video from Tarasiuk’s town shared on Instagram shows military officers pulling 34 men out of the back of a green Mercedes van. As the men fall into a pile, the visibly disgusted officers smack the back of their heads and yank their jacket collars while spewing derogatory slurs.

According to the video, the draft dodgers each paid a smuggler nearly $11,000. He collected over $360,000 and now faces about five years in prison. The video couldn’t be independently verified, but it parallels Tarasiuk’s experience. He declined to say how much he paid for his escape.

Comments in the captured men’s defense filled the Instagram thread. “How strange, they don’t want to die,” one read. “Why fight when everyone dies?” said another. Other comments expressed disdain: “Here are people who want to live behind the backs of our native friends who defend Ukraine. Give them a Russian passport and they’ll be happy.”

Another voiced sorrow over the war’s realities. “What have we come to? People have become meat. It hurts to look at it all.”

Koroluchuck says people share videos like these all the time.

To expand the military’s pool of new recruits, Zelenskyy this spring dropped the conscription age from 27 to 25 and implemented laws to compel eligible men to join the battle.

Under the new laws, which took effect May 18, all Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60—living in-country or abroad—must update their information with the draft office to maintain passports, driver’s licenses, or marriage certificates. Ukraine’s prisoners can now join the military, with a few stipulations, mirroring Russian tactics Kyiv previously criticized.

The laws also omit any reference to an end to military service. Discouraged front-line troops now fear they’re committed to a lifelong sentence of carnage.

UKRAINIAN LEADERS have asked the United States and NATO to help train 150,000 fresh soldiers closer to the battlefront for quick deployment. But that could risk direct U.S. and European involvement in the fight. Putin has long warned that NATO boots on the ground would be a red line.

Ukraine’s allies, some of whom have supported the country since Russia seized Crimea in 2014, have differing views on how to ensure victory without crossing such lines. But there’s one thing they all agree on: Ukraine must not lose.

NATO has tabled the idea of training troops, and the White House insists no American troops, not even trainers, will be deployed into Ukraine. However, French President Emmanuel Macron declared in February that “nothing should be ruled out” when it comes to deploying Western forces in Ukraine. Other NATO allies have downplayed the idea, but some, like Lithuania and Estonia, are considering sending troops for training missions.

Retired Col. Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said he emphatically believes NATO should not consider sending troops—even to perform rear-­echelon-type tasks—but emphasized the crucial role of recruiting and training troops, as individuals and as units. Analysts place too much importance on particular weapons systems, he said. “Equipment is important, but it misses the training aspect, which is at least as important, if not more important. In many instances, less-well-equipped militaries defeated better-­equipped militaries because they were better trained.”

He added that Ukraine’s mobilization challenges are not unique. “Armies in extended conflict always end up in this situation: They run short of infantry and have to scramble to find new sources of infantry to improve their force structure,” he said. Ukraine’s situation is “normal,” because historically about 80 percent of casualties have been in the infantry, whose soldiers directly engage the adversary.

According to Cancian, Ukraine can do several “uncomfortable” things to acquire the needed number of soldiers, including lowering the conscription age to 18, instead of 25, drafting women, and relaxing medical standards. “That’s not what militaries like to do,” he said with a sigh. “But they will need to do it to fill out their ranks.”

Most Ukrainians will submit—willingly or unwillingly—to these extremities of war. Others, like Tarasiuk, have fled. He told me choosing to flee Ukraine wasn’t easy. He left behind his father and mother and a lifetime’s worth of other relationships. He left his church and his soccer team. Once he climbed onto that rusty truck, Tarasiuk believes, he killed his life to save it.

“The last two years before we left were wartime,” he said. “Everyone was scared, depressed, and dealing with all kinds of anxieties. I was in a position where I could get out and felt like I was able to live—like I could go on with my life and have hope for something.”

Meanwhile, those he left behind continue to hope and fight for victory, the only option for a country unwilling to surrender to Putin’s attempt to rebuild Russia’s empire.

—Jessica Eturralde is a military wife of 20 years, a mother of three, and a World Journalism Institute graduate. She has worked as a TV and podcast host and currently covers religion in the United States and the former Soviet republics.