Ukrainian men on how four years of war has changed them

0:00Tracey McVeigh:This is The Guardian.

0:08Shaun Walker:Today, how war has changed Ukraine's men?

0:18Shaun Walker:Just before we start, this episode does contain strong language. Four years ago today, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Even though some of the world's most capable intelligence agencies had been warning this could happen, the Ukrainian leadership were still caught off guard by the scale and the speed of the Russian attack. And in the early hours of the 24th of February 2022, President Zelensky announced they were at war with Russia.

0:57Shaun Walker:and put the country into a state of martial law. Immediately, if you were a male aged between 18 and 60, you were not allowed to leave the country. So there was all these hard choices going on behind closed doors in every family. If you were married and maybe had young children, did your partner take the kids and leave? And all those incredibly difficult conversations were happening in a very short space of time. And I'm not sure you're ever prepared for that kind of conversation within a family. Almost overnight, Ukrainian men stopped just being builders or business owners, lawyers or doctors.

1:38Shaun Walker:Now they were also soldiers with a duty to protect their country from a foreign aggressor. Their future was suddenly one filled with guns, tanks, trenches, drones, and the very real prospect that they might end up on the front line. In the four years since, up to 600 ,000 Ukrainians are believed to have been killed, injured or have gone missing. And the war continues to grind on with no end in sight. Tracy McVeigh, one of The Guardian's most experienced conflict reporters, has spent decades travelling to war zones around the world looking at the effect that war has on civilians, particularly women and children.

2:25Shaun Walker:Yet she wanted to find out what was happening to the sons, fathers and brothers called up to fight in Ukraine.

2:38Shaun Walker:I felt that it was such an extraordinary situation what happened in Ukraine. I don't mean to say that the voices of women are not important, of course they are, but it felt to me that this war uniquely was involving an awful lot of men whose voices we hadn't heard. And I'd grown up hearing stories from grandparents, older members of my family, about what happened during the Second World War, when ordinary men suddenly became soldiers, suddenly became fighting men, and they didn't talk about their experiences to their families, to their wives, and that always just struck me as extraordinary. and to think how relationships have changed, to think of this kind of generation of men going off to war and then coming back and not being able to discuss it with wives and families today seemed to me really an extraordinary thing.

3:29Shaun Walker:This winter, Russian attacks on power stations have plunged major cities into darkness and freezing conditions and the front line remains in deadlock. and the country has been irrevocably changed forever by the war.

3:47Shaun Walker:You still see actually when you're going into Ukraine at the Polish border a lot of women and children that have gone over the border to see dad or husband or brother or son for a very short period of time and then gone back again and so you still actually see those really heartbreaking scenes at the border now. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus. Scars, shame and brotherhood. What has the war meant for Ukraine's conscripted soldiers?

4:25Shaun Walker:The summer before the full-skull Russian invasion of Ukraine, life was looking pretty good for Alex. He was young, loads of good friends, and he was working in Odessa in the south of Ukraine as a DJ.

4:39Tracey McVeigh:It was so perfect for me. It was the most perfect and most beautiful summer for all my life. I don't know. Some people say like, when I was to Maldives or when I was to like Bali or someone else or when I was to USA, it was my perfect summer. No, my first perfect summer in the south of Ukraine. And I met a really good girl and new friends And it was like this last summer before the war. And after that, everything changed.

5:11Shaun Walker:Before the Russian invasion, the idea that he would ever go near the military seemed impossible.

5:17Tracey McVeigh:I hate it. I hate it. Because the war, it's equal death or destruction.

5:29Shaun Walker:Then overnight, everything changed. Russia invaded, martial law was announced. Alex was banned from leaving the country and told to mobilize into the military to defend Ukraine. But unlike some of his friends, Alex didn't go and sign up.

5:51Tracey McVeigh:I was scared, so I didn't want to go to the war, of course, because I know that I'm not that kind of type of guy that's going to be in the frontier. and killing someone because, I don't know, it's just not me.

6:11Tracey McVeigh:You know, there's always that type of guys that like to fight at school, even at a university, and if you take me, if you see my photos, and me killing someone in like 10 years, no. And was there any kind of shame or like stigma about not joining up? Yeah, of course, of course. Every day. Every day you're thinking about it. I'm still thinking about it. I don't know. It's a really difficult question, actually. Because we have this social, social community that everyone will think about you. Oh, you're killing them. You're a cool man.

6:56Shaun Walker:For those first few months of the war, Alex started volunteering in other ways, helping out at a civilian kitchen and running a music club. But he avoided military recruitment centres. Then in the summer of 2022, he was making his way back from DJing at a three-day party in Odessa when his bus was stopped at a checkpoint.

7:18Tracey McVeigh:And I was like, what the fuck, what's going on? He was like, hello. And I said, hello. What's your name, Alexander? can you show me your documents? I said, yeah, of course, see? They said, like, get out, get out. You don't have special documents, so you don't have nothing. You just, who are you? You're a soldier. You need to be a soldier. Right now, there's mobilization going. You need to be a soldier. And that's all. They took me, and that's how I became a soldier.

7:43Shaun Walker:Alex was taken to the military recruitment center, where his university degree and language skills got him onto a posting away from the front line and instead into an office job in Kyiv. But first he had to go through basic training.

7:59Tracey McVeigh:So I come in this camp and this camp was like really, really camp for adults where you like live only with guys, with the men, with the older one, the younger one, different kind of like characters and personalities and they're so different. And usually some people, if I met them in like in Kyiv or somewhere, where I was like, don't speak to me, don't speak to me. But after spending time with them, like for like almost like 60 days, it was really, it was like a game changer. It's changed everything because when you see the people in the same clothes as every day, you don't meet them. You know, we had this traditional phrase that you meet people, how they look like.

8:48Tracey McVeigh:and then you're like saying goodbye to how they think.

8:52Shaun Walker:And how would you feel about being sent to the front line to fight?

8:57Tracey McVeigh:I'm working and it is like doing exercise every day. I'm accepting this thought that I could get there and be in the worst moment of my life. And I just need to accept it.

9:24Shaun Walker:Alex was one of the men Tracy interviewed when she was in Ukraine. Some had been badly injured. Others were tortured in Russian captivity. All of them bore the mental scars of what they'd been through. The men that you went there to meet, could you tell me a bit about them? What were their backgrounds and what did they do before the war? A whole different range. there was a young guy who'd just come out of university he'd just met a woman that he wanted to marry they'd only been together for I think about six months and that was all he was thinking about the minute the invasion happened he was unlucky enough to be in Mariupol and he was one of the Ukrainian soldiers who ended up in Russian captivity which is a really hideous experience for anyone many people don't come out alive many people just disappear the cruelty and and the barbarism that's going on in some of those prison camps is just hideous.

10:20Shaun Walker:This poor guy, he was there for three years. He came out last year from captivity under one of the prison exchange operations that were going on, and he met up with this young woman who he'd fallen in love with. She'd had his baby. You know, he said it was the hearts and flowers stage, and he comes out after three years, after the most traumatic, awful experience, to this woman he barely knows and their child. It's all about very traumatic change that happens very suddenly and I think everyone makes their adjustments in their own time. But one very clear theme that came through is how much being with other men and talking to other men had actually helped them all psychologically deal with what had happened to them.

11:06Shaun Walker:And just crazy to think that there's all of these people that you met, it was just a handful of men but there were poets when those are boxers and so men from all different types of backgrounds all different types of experiences of life up to that moment what I really found moving was the way they had all thought very deeply about their relationships with women I mean they all were heterosexual men it was extraordinary how much thought they'd given to how that had changed and it really really had changed for all of them Alex was talking about how he had been a bit of a flirt when he was younger.

11:44Shaun Walker:He'd enjoyed quite a few relationships with women. He really enjoyed female company, had a lot of women friends. And he was saying that now when he comes back on his time off, when he's going through the city, he's got this kind of crippling anxiety. He doesn't like to look at women anymore. He's a bit nervous about speaking to them. He doesn't think he's got much to offer women in a strange way. It's almost like he's completely lost his confidence in being around women. What about their experience as soldiers? What have the last four years been like for them in that respect? Well, most of them have been injured.

12:22Shaun Walker:The 53-year-old was an amputee, although he'd gone back to the front line again. He'd spoken at length to his wife after he lost his leg about what he should do next. and he was very, very much of the opinion that he should go back to the front line. And he said that he and her sat down and they weighed up the needs of the young men at the front line who were under his command and the needs of his own two children who were in their late teens, early 20s. And the decision was made that it was the young men at the front line who needed his leadership and his experience more than his two children needed him.

12:56Shaun Walker:there was another chap who had lost his fingers there's a real sense from many of the men that there's also a resentment among women who've been left behind one guy actually said to me we hear from a lot of women now who almost feel like right you've had your fun the war's gone on enough as if the war itself is a very masculine entity they feel very separate from it and they feel almost that it's in the men's gift to stop it. I mean, you were talking about these injuries that many of the men that you spoke to had sustained. Did you get a sense that any of them kind of felt that the war had brought them anything positive?

13:35Shaun Walker:A lot of them talked, in fact, all of them talked about what it had done to them as an individual. And a lot of them talked about how they had welcomed understanding themselves better. all of them referenced being curious to find out how they would themselves feel and react when tested to the extreme. One guy said when I went to war I thought well I'm curious am I a coward or am I not a coward? Did they have it in them to face a battlefield, a war to actually pick up a gun and stay in a trench and fight and a lot of them linked that to their own sense of masculinity. It's a very different world.

14:16Shaun Walker:And none of them were scared to say it's terrifying, because it is, especially with the drones now. I mean, I spoke to one man who'd been injured in the front line. He spent two days with his injuries, bleeding badly, in a field with drones overhead constantly, waiting to be medievacked off that battlefield. And he talked quite openly of how fearful he was. Did you get a sense from any of them that they saw beyond this war, that they saw a time when their lives would go back to normal? No, that was something else that they all shared. None of them were thinking that far ahead. I mean, I tried to draw a couple of the younger guys into conversations about whether they saw their lives, including wives and children further down the line, and nobody wanted to talk about that.

15:01Shaun Walker:But the thing that struck me most was a real sense of this not coming to an end anytime soon.

15:16Shaun Walker:And you're a soldier now. How do you feel when you look back on your old life? Do you feel like you'd like to go back to the way things were before?

15:29Tracey McVeigh:I'm definitely going to do directly what I want to do and what I can do the most because I don't want to spend any last or any second, only any free minute after the end of the war on some bullshit because I know that the life is so valued and life is so fragile that you can like tie any second. Because maybe before that, before the war, I was scared of something like to get the refuse from a girl or to get the refuse from a job, to, I don't know, to not get something that I want. But right now it's already also like, I don't know, it doesn't matter. Now the scariest thing is death, I think. Death of your close friends, death of your parents.

16:21Tracey McVeigh:This is how it changed me.

16:29Coming up, after four years of war,

16:32Shaun Walker:is there an end in sight?

16:43Shaun Walker:Sean Walker, you're The Guardian's Central and Eastern Europe correspondent, and you have reported extensively in Ukraine. So as we mark the four-year anniversary at the beginning of the war, could you just tell us where are we with everything? What's the current state of play?

16:59Tracey McVeigh:We're sort of really where we started in that what Russia wants and what Ukraine is willing to accept still haven't come close enough for a deal to be possible. And that's despite the fact we've had this awful winter in Ukraine. Russia's again hit the energy infrastructure, people are exhausted, people are freezing. It's very rare that there's any dramatic movements in the front line. There's a kill zone in between the two lines where drones basically make it impossible for people to operate. But I think they're not yet at the stage where they would say, okay, we're ready to go for Russia's demands.

17:42Tracey McVeigh:And part of that, I think, is because the Ukrainians kind of know that the guarantees being offered by the West, that if you sign a deal, the war won't start again in two months or a year or three years, are kind of flimsy. On the Ukrainian side, It's about holding the lines until the economic situation in Russia gets bad enough that Putin is forced to start revising his demands. And on the Russian side, it's keeping up the pressure until Ukraine and Ukrainians become so exhausted to the extent that Ukraine is forced to do a deal that it doesn't want to do.