At sunset, Major Kirilo Vishvany of the Ukrainian army walked into the courtyard of his childhood home in the western Ukrainian village of Dulibi, just after his younger brother, also a soldier, had been buried. Their mother was still crying in the living room.
“I already foresee her coming to see him every day,” he said that day.
He was right, but he wouldn’t be there for her. 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 Vasily.
The Vishwani brothers were the first to die in Dulibi and surrounding communities after the full-scale Russian invasion began on February 24, 2022.Since then, a further 44 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the area – more than four times the local death toll from the past eight years. Fighting Russian-backed separatists in the east.
For Dolibi and the surrounding Khodorif enclave, with a total population of about 24,000, the wait for the next solemn death notification and subsequent funeral has become a painful routine. But even as the town greets and buries its dead with modest ceremonies, some neighbors are quietly weighing the price they are willing to pay for a war with no end in sight.
Divisions have begun to form between residents who are agnostic about the war (often those whose family members have evaded military service or fled the country) and those who have relatives on the front lines or who fully support the war effort.
Early in the war, before news of the first combat deaths broke, people from communities across Ukraine flocked to recruitment offices. They include Khodorev, whose family has a long history of fighting for Ukraine’s independence and was executed or exiled during the Soviet Union’s violent crackdown on its nationalist movement in the last century.
In Dulibi, the Russian invasion came early with the death of the Vishwani brothers. Suddenly, residents began burying soldiers, whom most described as lifelong neighbors.
“No one knew how to do everything right back then,” said Natalia Bodnar, 41, the sister of the Vishwani brothers. She said she arranged the funerals of two brothers and even wrote speeches for pastors.
As the war progressed, Khodorif’s government took over the logistics of organizing funerals, and inevitably, somber repetition helped smooth the process. Public services have been moved to the central square, where crowds gather every time.
“Now everyone knows what kind of coffin, the standards and what the procedures are,” Ms. Bodnar said last month at her apartment in Khodorif.
As the death toll mounted last fall, residents sought a visible memorial in addition to daily church services that drew dozens of worshipers. As a result, new rock and bronze memorial plaques have been hung on the exterior walls of the schools where the fallen soldiers attended.
At these schools, flowers and candles are also used to commemorate the fallen. But Olha Melnyk, 46, head of Khodoriv’s government social services department, said some parents complained the offerings were too unsightly and should be removed. They objected to reminding their children of the war that took place hundreds of miles to the east.
Still, the makeshift altar remained in place, and no one objected when the school the Vishwani brothers attended was renamed after them last fall.
By 2023, queues at recruiting offices across the country were slowly disappearing as most volunteers headed to the front lines. Recruiting is mostly based on the needs of the army, with waves of draft notices issued to men aged 27 to 60.
But gradually, the army stepped up its recruitment efforts, and some recruitment offices Forcibly taking people off the streets Speed up the process.The tactic, widely known as forced mobilization, has frequently made headlines in Ukraine over the past six months and is symptomatic of chronic troop shortages, which the government decided this month to Ukraine lowers conscription age to 25.
Local authorities said that as of March, about 600 people from the Khodorif community were serving in the army, including more than a dozen men from Dolibi, some of whom had been recruited from the streets. Since then, residents say, men have started avoiding staying outside 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 repercussions from Ukrainian authorities.
Peter Panat, the leader of the Home Defense Force, a temporary military force formed at the beginning of the war to protect local communities, said that 10 of the 30 soldiers in the force have obtained legal exemption documents from participating in the war. Exemptions are granted for reasons such as health issues or relatives in need of care.
“There are a lot of apathetic people,” said Anna Kukharaska, 66, who runs a volunteer group that raises funds for frontline soldiers.
In the Khodorif region, relatives of soldiers who are fighting or killed on the front lines say that over the past two years they have become dissatisfied with men in the community who are said to have bribed their sons and daughters to keep them Retired.Fathers are fighting – as Ukraine’s government grapples with how Increase the number of troops by up to 500,000.
“Sometimes people want to belittle the sacrifices of these families to justify buying off their sons,” said Marta Hladii, 51, from nearby Stryi. Therapist, providing free services to military personnel and their families. Ms. Heraday interviewed five mothers who lost their only sons in the war, two of whom she said were criticized by neighbors for not protecting themselves by bribing themselves out of the army.
There is no legal way to pay for exemption from military service in Ukraine, but there are widespread reports of corruption at military recruitment offices, with bribes ranging from $1,000 at the beginning of the war — “Death Buyout” — The price per player announced by the Kiev Draft Center is as high as $10,000.Some of the most famous draft-related scandals have sparked Government fires top recruiting officer last august.
A soldier recently buried in Khodorif volunteered to fight.
Nazar Yankevych, 9, grew up in Khodorif and attended the funeral of local activist Roman Tochyn as a child. Tochin was shot in the head during Ukraine’s Maidan revolution, a 2014 protest that renounced Russia’s pervasive influence in Ukraine.
“After the funeral, he told our mom, ‘When I grow up, I’m going to go to war,'” said his sister, Maria Yankevych.
She said her brother was accepted into a technical training program just before the Russian invasion, but instead went to a military training camp and joined an elite commando unit.
In February this year, Yankevich was killed in fighting on the outskirts of the eastern Ukrainian city of Avdievka at the age of 19. The shrapnel that killed him left marks on his temple in the same spot as the bullet that struck his hero a decade ago.
“Many young people from all over Ukraine write to me,” his sister said after posting about him on Instagram. “‘Your brother is a hero to me and I want to be like him,'” they wrote.
