What would I do if ...
I wake up from my half-sleep every morning with a weight on my chest, a constant feeling of impending doom gnawing at me. My mind races with worries, big and small, rational and irrational, each one amplified until it feels like they're all you can focus on. Simple tasks become daunting challenges, and social interactions can feel like navigating a minefield of potential embarrassment or judgment.
The overwhelming sense of anxiety makes it difficult to shake them off. I feel physically exhausted from the constant tension, yet unable to relax or find peace. Sleep is elusive, with the mind refusing to quiet down even in the quiet of the night.
Simple decisions become agonizing, I am endlessly afraid of making the wrong choice and facing the consequences. I find it all to be tough, and unable to break free no matter how hard I tried.
I imagine that would be my life if I were a Ukrainian young man living in Ukraine.
The NYT reports that thousands of Ukrainian men have chosen to risk the swim and cross the Tysa River where it forms the border with Romania rather than face the dangers as soldiers on the eastern front. “As Ukraine’s battlefield prospects have sagged, draft dodging has been on the rise.” And, “Ukrainian border guards often find their quarry — men seeking to escape the military draft”.
Not everyone makes it. The bodies of 22 men have washed up on both banks, said Lt. Lesya Fedorova, a spokeswoman for the Mukachevo border guard unit.
More have most likely drowned, officials say, though their bodies have never been found. The fatalities have earned the river a grim nickname, Death River, though it is hundreds of miles from the violence along the front.
That’s brutal!
Tim Judah, who has been reporting about the conditions in Ukraine writes in the NYRB that “two years after the Russian invasion, Ukrainian morale has plummeted.”
[With] the failure of last year’s counteroffensive to take more than a few villages, and with Russia now launching its own counteroffensive, Ukrainian morale has plummeted, and many foreign analysts are painting a gloomy picture.
Whether it is a young man, or an older woman, or a young woman, or a ten-year old, the conditions in Ukraine do not appear to me to promise a better, rosier tomorrow.
Alice Mirovská, a Czech volunteer who has spent much of the last two years with P’yatykhatky-Bam, added a few things that some Ukrainians might be embarrassed to say to a foreign journalist. There were growing tensions “between those who are doing something” for the country “and those who are just living their own lives. There are a lot of Ukrainians who don’t give a shit.” She is not the only person I have met recently who has talked about such tensions. “People don’t have money, and it seems never-ending,” she said.
(P’yatykhatky-Bam is an aid group from just outside Kharkiv.)
Judah adds:
The Ukrainian commanders I met said that the desperate shortage of artillery shells forced them to pick their targets with the utmost care. The Russians, by contrast, could choose an entire area and just bombard it with shells. A major reason for the shortage is that Republicans in the US Congress have blocked a $60 billion aid package for Ukraine. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who met with Donald Trump on March 8, reported that Trump said that if he is elected in November the Ukrainians would get not “a single penny” from the US.
The US House of Representatives needs to authorize spending money on Ukraine, but this has been on hold for a long time. Speaker Johnson “has yet to make any final decisions on how he plans to structure a new round of American military assistance to Ukraine,” reports the NYT. As if there’s plenty of time to think through the political ramifications of the vote with the rapist’s base. And, of course, Johnson wants to make sure that he doesn’t lose his job as the Speaker:
Johnson is toiling to navigate those dynamics with his own job on the line. Ms. Greene has long said she would seek to oust him were he to bring up legislation to aid Ukraine without securing sweeping policy concessions from Democrats on the border.
Edward Luce, the Associate Editor of Financial Times, writes this, which is a point that we need to keep in mind for a long, long time:
Trump's Republican Party treats Ukraine as the enemy and Russia as a friend. Defining that stance as isolationist is lazy and wrong. It is actively pro-Russian.
When it is the US that has the capacity to provide Ukraine with the support that it needs to fight back against Putin’s forces but the US aid has been stalled because of an actively pro-Russian major political party here in the US, and when trench warfare on the eastern front—with seemingly no end—is what you are looking at as a 29-year old Ukrainian male, would you volunteer to fight, or try to swim across the Tysa River?