It was dusk when Major General Kyrylo Vyshyvany of the Ukrainian Army entered the yard of his childhood home in Duliby, a village in western Ukraine, shortly after his younger brother, also a soldier, was buried. . Their mother was still crying in the living room.
“I could see that she would visit him every day,” he said that day.
He's right, but he won't be by her side. A few days after the funeral, in March 2022, he was killed in a Russian missile attack on a Ukrainian military base and was buried next to his brother, Vasyl.
The Vyshyvany brothers were the first to die in Duliby and surrounding communities after Russia began its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022. Since then, an additional 44 Ukrainian soldiers in the area have died. network – more than four times the local death toll from eight years ago of fighting Russian-backed separatists in the east.
For Duliby and the surrounding Khodoriv region – a total population of about 24,000 people – waiting for the next solemn announcement of death and subsequent funeral has become a bitter routine. But even as the town met and buried its fallen with a modest ceremony, some neighbors quietly considered the price they were willing to pay for an endless war.
A divide has begun to form between war-agnostic residents – often those whose family members dodged the draft or fled the country – and those whose relatives were on the front lines or who fully supported the war effort.
In the early days of the war, before news of the first battle deaths arrived, people in communities across Ukraine flocked to draft offices. Among them is Khodoriv, whose family has a long history of fighting for Ukraine's independence and was executed or exiled during the violent Soviet crackdowns on the nationalist movement of this country in the last century.
At Duliby, the Russian invasion soon occurred with the deaths of the Vyshyvany brothers. Suddenly, residents were burying soldiers whom most people considered lifelong neighbors.
“Back then no one knew how to do things correctly,” said Natalia Bodnar, 41, the Vyshyvany brothers' older sister. She arranged both of her brothers' funerals, she said, and even wrote a speech for the priest.
As the war continued, the Khodoriv government took over funeral logistics, and inevitably, somber repetition helped smooth the process. Public services were moved to the central square, each time large crowds gathered.
“Now everyone knows what kind of coffin, what the standards are and what the procedures are,” Ms. Bodnar said from her apartment in Khodoriv last month.
Last fall, local deaths mounted and residents sought ways to remember the apparent loss beyond daily church services that drew dozens of worshipers. As a result, new stone and bronze memorial plaques were hung on the walls outside the schools the dead soldiers had attended.
At those schools, people also honor the fallen with memorial services with flowers and candles. However, Olha Melnyk, 46, head of the Khodoriv administration's social services department, said some parents complained that the offerings were too unsightly to see and needed to be removed. They objected to reminding their children of the war that occurred hundreds of miles to the east.
Still, the makeshift altars remained, and when the school the Vyshyvanys attended was renamed after them last fall, no one objected.
By 2023, lines at draft offices across the country gradually disappeared because most volunteers had gone to the front. Recruits were mostly called up by draft notices issued in batches, based on the army's needs, for men between 27 and 60 years old.
But gradually, the military increased its recruitment efforts, with several draft offices Forcefully remove people from the streets to speed up the process. Over the past six months, that tactic – widely known as forced mobilization – has frequently made headlines in Ukraine, showing signs of a chronic military shortage, which peaked this month when the government Give decision Lowering the military draft age in Ukraine to 25.
Local authorities said that, as of March, about 600 people from the Khodoriv community were serving in the army, including more than a dozen men from Duliby itself, some of whom were conscripted from street. Residents said that since then, men have begun to avoid going out during the day.
“Everyone is scared. No one wants to die,” said Bohdan, a school employee who declined to give his last name for fear of being punished by Ukrainian authorities.
Petro Panat, head of the territorial protection unit, a special military unit formed in the early days of the war to protect local communities, said 10 of the unit's 30 people received papers legally exempting them from combat. Exemptions are granted for reasons such as health problems or a relative needing care.
“There are a lot of people who are indifferent,” said Anna Kukharaska, 66, who runs a volunteer group that collects donations to support soldiers at the front.
In the Khodoriv region, relatives of soldiers who are fighting or have died at the front said that over the past two years, they have begun to resent the men in the community who were allegedly bribed to left the military while their son and their son. fathers are fighting – a feeling likely shared by many across the country as the Ukrainian government grapples with how to mobilize up to 500,000 additional troops.
“Sometimes people want to downplay the sacrifices of such families to justify their actions,” said Marta Hladii, 51, a therapist in nearby Stryi who works pro bono with troops and their families. justifying the bribery of their son.” Of the five mothers Ms. Hladii spoke to who lost their only sons in the war, she said two were criticized by neighbors for not bribing them to leave the army to protect their children.
There is no legal way to pay for exemption from military service in Ukraine, but there have been many reports of corruption in military draft offices, with bribes from 1,000 USD at the beginning of the war — “a buyback from death” — up to a price of $10,000 per head was revealed at a draft center in Kyiv. Some of the most prominent draft-related scandals have resulted The government fired top enlisted officers Late August.
One of the most recent soldiers buried in Khodoriv was ready to join the battle.
As a child growing up in Khodoriv, 9-year-old Nazar Yankevych attended the funeral of a local activist, Roman Tochyn, who was shot in the head during Ukraine's Maidan revolution. 2014 aimed at eliminating Russia's widespread influence over Ukraine.
“After that funeral, he told our mother, ‘When I grow up, I will go to war,'” his sister Maria Yankevych said.
She said her brother was accepted into a technology training program just before Russia invaded but instead she attended a military boot camp and joined an elite assault unit.
Mr. Yankevych was just 19 years old when he died in battle in February outside the city of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine. The shrapnel that killed him left a mark on his temple, in the same location as the bullet that hit his hero 10 years ago.
“A lot of young men from all over Ukraine wrote to me,” his sister said after posting about him on Instagram. “'Your brother is a hero to me, I want to be like him.’” They wrote.
