Hanging tough

WE STEP ALONG BROKEN PAVING STONES into a run-down farmhouse. Inside, Ukrainian ­soldiers are biding their time in a field kitchen. The cook bangs around as he prepares lunch for the unit. Otherwise, the room is strangely quiet. None of the half-dozen men talks much. Some listen for drones, a constant menace this close to the front. 

We are standing fewer than 5 miles from the contact line between Ukrainian and Russian forces, in Ukraine’s southeast Zaporizhia oblast, or region. Survival here depends on hearing incoming projectiles—and finding cover in time. The ominous skies threaten more than rain. 

The walls of the house are covered in hand-drawn illustrations from schoolchildren that encourage the soldiers to keep up their spirits. Many bear the blue and yellow of Ukraine’s national flag, a fields-and-sky color combination that symbolizes the land itself. One large poster shows a motherly figure wearing a flower wreath—traditional headwear for Ukrainian and other Eastern European women. An expression arches over the woman: “Come home soon.” 

Taras Mikhailchuk, 58, welcomes us. A short, stocky major in the Ukrainian army with cropped hair and an intense demeanor, he commands this unit, a part of the 65th Mechanized Brigade. Despite his position, Mikhailchuk isn’t paid much. He earns less than $1,000 per month, he says. Even as an officer, even during wartime. 

“But do you know why I serve?” he asks me. “Because I love Ukraine. I love this country very much.”

Outside, the occasional boom of nearby fighting rings out between the gray clouds and brown land, once fertile with crops before the war.

Mikhailchuk’s words reflect a crucial factor in Ukraine’s defensive war: morale. Russia’s war on Ukraine broke the four-year mark in February. After the initial invasion and response, during which both sides gained and lost territory, the battle lines have remained almost static. The conflict is now a matter of attrition. By exacting maximum damage and death, each side hopes the other will capitulate.

But that requires soldiers able and willing to fight. It’s a challenge for both sides that could eventually decide the ­outcome of the war. Progress in peace talks has become as static as the front lines.

THE MAJOR’S OWN SPIRITS REMAIN HIGH. He chose to be here. Volunteering in 2022—“from day one,” he claims—Mikhailchuk came to Ukraine’s aid when Russia launched its full-scale invasion.

But morale at this base varies widely from man to man. Volunteers like Mikhailchuk came on their own. Others, like the draftees serving in Zaporizhia and nationwide, are obeying orders, whether they like it or not. Mikhailchuk acknowledged that draftees sometimes don’t want to fight.

“They need motivation,” he said, without elaborating on his motivational methods.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has run longer than the Soviet Union’s part in World War II, when the USSR’s Red Army faced down, and eventually defeated, Nazi troops fighting for Hitler’s Germany on their Eastern Front.

Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin is aiming to break records of his own. His leadership of Russia (2000–present) has run more than a quarter-century—nearly as long as Joseph Stalin’s effective rule of the Soviet Union (1924–1953).

Russia’s national memory around World War II, known there as the Great Patriotic War, is a main argument for keeping up the Ukrainian campaign. In 2022, Putin claimed, without evidence, that neo-Nazis were running Ukraine and threatening to attack Russia.

Like Ukraine, Russia deploys a mix of volunteer and conscripted servicemen. Their morale varies, too. Many enlist for the Russian military’s lavish salaries. But when patriotism and pay aren’t enough, soldiers find other ways to cope. Drug use on both sides of the front is rising, threatening the soldiers’ health and lives, even if they survive the war. Worse, suicide is a growing issue in the Ukrainian and Russian militaries.

Ukraine’s draft policies are controversial. Its enforcement, coupled with dragnet tactics that fall outside normal draft procedures, has provoked myriad civil complaints and pushed hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men to flee the country or lie low inside Ukraine. Ukrainian law doesn’t recognize conscientious objection, and those caught resisting the draft face three to five years in prison.

The Ukrainian government’s Territorial Center of Recruitment (TCR), a much-hated wartime institution, runs patrols in cities and towns nationwide. The TCR is known to grab men off the street and press them into service. In February, in the southern city of Odesa, a team of TCR personnel found itself outmanned. A group of civilians fought back—and sent several TCR agents to the hospital.

MIKHAILCHUK’S PERSONAL HISTORY is almost as complex as the Ukraine-Russia relationship. He was born in Murmansk, a northeast Russian city above the Arctic Circle, to an ethnic Ukrainian father who gave his son his Ukrainian last name and a sense of their true homeland.

This is Mikhailchuk’s fourth war. As a teenage soldier in the last days of the Red Army, he took part in the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He also fought in the Nagorno-Karabakh region between Armenia and Azerbaijan and bore arms in Transnistria, a strip of contested land between Moldova and Ukraine. Later, he joined the French Foreign Legion.

Mikhailchuk moved to Spain in 2005, building a comfortable life for himself and his now-grown daughter. He worked construction in Barcelona before Russia brought full-scale war to Ukraine in 2022. His radio call sign is Ispányetz—“The Spaniard.”

Leaving everything—family, safety, and a few steady years before retirement—he answered the call, in his mid-50s, to defend his ancestral land.

I connected with Mikhailchuk through the Reimer Center, a community space that two evangelical churches maintain in the oblast’s main city, also called Zaporizhia. The Reimer Center holds worship services and organizes social programs for youth and the elderly. Like many churches across Ukraine, the center has transformed into a humanitarian aid hub, offering hot meals and spiritual support.

Current battlefield estimates put three-quarters of Zaporizhia oblast under Russian occupation. The city is full of refugees from occupied territories. Everyone knows someone living, and suffering, under Russian military rule. What’s left of Ukrainian-controlled Zaporizhia forms the southeastern edge of what is now called Free Ukraine.

Against all odds, it has become a fertile ground for ministry. My driver for the day, Viktor Kostenko, is a member of Light of Life Baptist Church. The congregation has devoted much of its outreach to the city of Zaporizhia’s beleaguered residents. He also directs Pereval, an aid organization whose mission is to deliver clean water, which can become scarce in conflict zones. The inside ceiling of his van is covered with patches from the military units to which he’s provided water.

Mikhailchuk describes soldiering here as boring—except when he leads assault missions. So far, perhaps owing to his long experience, he has managed to avoid serious injury.

Many other servicemen have not. Two months prior, Mikhailchuk told me, a Russian drone killed a Ukrainian soldier just 200 yards from this house. A week before our visit, he said, his unit lost six cars in three days. Given the overstretched state of the Ukrainian military, and the high burn rate for equipment in constant combat, soldiers depend on nonmilitary vehicles to position themselves, and their gear, for effective fighting. Many soldiers use their personal cars, paying for repairs from their own meager salaries. The major pulls out his phone to show me photos of old vehicles, some in pieces.

What Mikhailchuk has plenty of, is motivation to fight. He has already gone to fearsome lengths to defend his life. As if to stress his point, he unsheathes a pistol, which he says he took from a Russian soldier. The gun became a trophy of a successful assault.

I ask Mikhailchuk if having that gun meant he had killed its former owner. He keeps his eyes locked on mine and says simply: “Yes.”

Suddenly, he switches from Russian to Spanish, to utter an expression that feels right for the moment. “Todo por la patria,” Mikhailchuk says. “Everything for one’s homeland.”

His determination, and the good morale it produces, might carry him to the end of the war. If he lives that long.

VITALI SVIRCHUK, 52, IS SIMILARY DRIVEN. He serves as a sergeant major under Mikhailchuk. He wears a civilian-style gray sweatsuit—a reminder that, this close to the front, some army regulations just don’t apply.

Originally from Khmelnitsky oblast in west-central Ukraine, Svirchuk has a boxer’s build and piercing blue eyes. He prefers short, punchy sentences. He has a son in the border guard service who was deployed in the embattled southern Kherson region that neighbors Zaporizhia.

He also has three grandsons—all under 7 years old—who fuel his resolve. Does he feel an urge to protect them, his children and their children?

“Of course,” he tells me.

While Svirchuk admits to a difference in morale between volunteers and draftees, he says it doesn’t get in the way of their mission: “We always complete our duties.”

Just then, a sound like a moped’s engine whirs close, before fading again.

“You hear that?” Svirchuk asks me, to make sure I understand.

“Yes,” I said. “What was it?”

“A Shahed,” he said, referring to the triangular, inexpensive drones that Russians use to target Ukrainian soldiers along the front, and civilians nationwide.

After warning me, Svirchuk looked totally relaxed. I felt completely rattled. Shaheds can, at any moment, deliver death from the sky.

Other soldiers gathered in the field kitchen show much less enthusiasm than their superiors. Oleksandr Travinsky, 43, arrived at this post a month prior, having been sent from western Ukraine’s Rivne oblast, where the TCR apprehended him.

MEMBERS OF THE 65TH MECHANIZED BRIGADE aren’t the only Ukrainians who face the constant prospect of death in this border region. As we head back toward the city, Kostenko pulls onto the sooty asphalt and switches into a kind of race car mode. He guns the engine, weaving among potholes. The faster a car goes, the less chance an enemy drone has to strike.

The road runs under bright green nylon netting, a recent response to evolving drone tactics. The nets prevent drones from colliding into their marks. Even if the drones explode, the space between net and target provides a slim buffer of protection. This limits the damage done, and lives lost. Russian forces are known to target military and civilian transportation, including public buses and trains. Like other Russian methods, targeting civilians weighs heavily on Ukrainian morale.

But as we drive, we pass scenes of stubborn, everyday life. A woman rides a bicycle, running errands as during peacetime. A man jogs, shirtless, along the netted road. Outside one house, two women wearing slippers and housecoats chat by the door, as if in total safety.

Passing a schoolyard, we see students milling around what looks like an outdoor electrical closet. The door leads instead to their classrooms, which, after four years of war, have been constructed underground. Students, teachers, and staff access their rooms by elevator. For Zaporizhians and other front-line residents, extreme adaptations like this have become normal.

Back outside the danger zone, we stop at the house where Kostenko lives with his wife, Anastasiia, and their two young daughters. The couple invites us in to warm up after the November chill. The adults arrange themselves around the kitchen table, while the girls watch Paw Patrol in Ukrainian on their living room TV.

Over tea and borscht—the beetroot-and-cabbage soup that is Ukraine’s national dish—we bless the food, and tuck in. The deceptively normal scene belies the danger the family faces. The tide of fighting could shift at any time, and the results, for themselves and their children, could be lethal.

“We’re not leaving,” Anastasiia says, turning away from the stove and her pot of borscht to look at me. “We live here. We serve our church here.”

The Light of Life Baptist Church has expanded its ministry outreach to the front-line community that includes volunteers, draftees, and refugees. That focus on ministry helps the couple maintain their own morale. They’re also holding the line, in their own way.

After our meal, Kostenko drives us back to Zaporizhia city, farther into Free Ukraine. The evening darkness deepens as a light rain begins. Standing above the road that leads away from the war, a billboard shows an illustration like the ones adorning the walls of the field kitchen, only super-sized.

The billboard’s background is blue and yellow, after Ukraine’s national flag. In the foreground stands the figure of a small child. With eyes closed and head bowed, she presses her hands together.

A simple plea runs across the sign: “Pray for Ukraine.”

He smokes constantly. His worn skin, faded tattoos, and decayed teeth suggest a lifetime of poverty. Poor men are the easiest for draft boards like the TCR to muster.

Travinsky has served before. He was an infantryman in 2016, deployed to the eastern Donbas region. Travinsky’s experience is a reminder that Ukraine’s war dates back to 2014, when smaller contingents of Russia’s military invaded the Donbas and annexed the southern Crimean peninsula.

In Zaporizhia, Travinsky’s rank is starshi soldát—an “older soldier”—roughly equal to a private first class. He handles menial labor around the camp, receiving deliveries—sometimes by car, sometimes by drone—to keep the place running.

My questions seemed to make Travinsky very uncomfortable. When I asked what he wanted out of his time here, he said only, “Well, victory.”