Duty and patriotism

Ukraine’s reluctance to expand the draft has collided with the war’s dire reality

A Ukrainian flag hangs on a trench wall in southeastern Ukraine days before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. The area is now under Russian occupation. (c. Martin Kuz)

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Artillery rounds thudded into the wet earth within a quarter-mile of where Artem Biliy stood in a muddy trench. The thumps arrived every few minutes and sounded close enough that I scanned the sky for smoke. He noticed my reaction and smiled.

“In the beginning, I wasn’t this calm,” the staff sergeant told me, recalling his first months in the Ukrainian army in 2016, soon after turning 20. Two years earlier, Russian forces had entered the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in southeastern Ukraine to foment an uprising, and since then, Artem had heard his share of incoming fire. “Now it’s...” He shrugged. “Routine. Normal.”

I followed him through the hand-dug trench that formed a jagged line in the earth outside Syze, a hamlet in Luhansk less than a mile from the Russian border. A desolate landscape stretched beyond the 6-foot-deep furrow where we walked. Only two of the village’s 14 residents had stayed. Weeds sprouted through missing rooftops of damaged homes abandoned during the previous years of shelling.

Artem kept his helmet clipped to his armored vest, and as artillery continued to fall, his gait and his voice remained relaxed. “I signed up because of my patriotism,” he said when I asked why he enlisted. He considered his motives for joining as ordinary as the enemy fire echoing around us. He shrugged again. “It is my duty, isn’t it?”

Russia’s full-scale invasion began days after I met Artem on that bright, crisp afternoon in February 2022. Two years later, Russian forces occupy the area that his unit patrolled, and the question of duty — and, by extension, patriotism — confronts Ukraine with growing urgency as the military scrounges for more and younger recruits.

Artem Biliy, a staff sergeant in the Ukrainian army, stands in a trench in the country’s southeast in February 2022, days before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. (c. Martin Kuz)

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The country’s mobilization law exempts men under 27 from the draft, an age restriction that has collided with the war’s dire reality. The loss of as many as 200,000 troops — killed and wounded — has forced Ukraine’s army to reach deeper into the population to replenish the ranks, pushing the average age of front-line soldiers to 43. The troop shortage has reduced the fighting strength of some brigades by 75 percent.

The rush on recruiting centers that occurred across Ukraine during the invasion’s first months has stopped as casualties rise, morale sinks and U.S. support wavers. Corruption among recruiting officials has further undercut President Volodymyr Zelensky’s efforts to attract 400,000 new soldiers to the cause. A bill to lower the draft age to 25 has proven a tough sell in Parliament as lawmakers debate the need for mass mobilization even as the country faces a war of attrition.

An estimated 650,000 men of fighting age — 18 to 60, as defined by the government — have fled Ukraine over the past two years, and tens of thousands of others have dodged the draft at home. I make no judgment about their choices.

I admit to wanting to believe that I would sign up without hesitation to defend my country’s freedom. But in truth I am unsure if I could summon the courage of Artem Biliy. Or my late father, who 80 years ago risked death for Ukraine in its ceaseless struggle against Russia.

Born to Ukrainian parents in 1923 in Lviv, a city then inside Poland’s borders, Eugene Kuz and his two older brothers grew up with a reverence for their true homeland that equaled their disdain for Russia. Weeks before he turned 16 in 1939, Ukraine reabsorbed Lviv after the Soviet Union, led by Josef Stalin, annexed a swath of eastern Poland under a secret treaty with Adolf Hitler prior to WWII.

Hitler broke their non-aggression pact by sending German forces into Ukraine in 1941. Two years later, Eugene dropped his medical studies to enlist in a Ukrainian division formed under German command. He and his comrades, vowing to liberate Ukraine from all foreign control, sought first to cast off the Soviet oppression that Stalin personified. The Russian dictator, in power since 1924, had by then killed millions of Ukrainians, who perished in the Gulag, mass purges and the state-imposed famine now known as the Holodomor.

Eugene served as a field medic, treating his wounded brethren as the unit battled the Red Army in Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia and Yugoslavia. In May 1945, when Germany surrendered, the division’s remaining 10,000 soldiers gave up their arms to British troops in Austria, who transferred them to a prisoner of war camp in Italy. Following their release in 1947, he split time between England and Ireland before immigrating to America in 1955, searching for his stolen future.

Eugene Kuz circa 1958, three years after immigrating to America.

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My father’s Ukrainian patriotism burned bright even after he gained U.S. citizenship and until his death in 2015. His ardor for his mother country matched his appreciation for America, where he found the precious freedom that Russia ripped away from Ukraine and for which he was willing to give his life.

His survival allowed him in later years to take the full measure of his fateful decision. Eugene joined the military at the same age as Artem, and he bore deep scars from the trauma, loss and sorrow he endured. But he died believing he had fulfilled his duty to his country and his conscience.

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Etc.

— Russia unleashed waves of missiles and drones on civilian and infrastructure targets across Ukraine this week. A lack of air-defense systems — one result of isolationist Republicans in Congress blocking military aid for Ukraine — has hindered the country’s ability to counter such attacks. Every day that U.S. funding is withheld, more Ukrainians die. The math is simple, brutal and outrageous.

— On the topic of politics, I joined the estimable Fred Wellman and Michele Hornish this week to talk about Ukraine at a virtual town hall organized by the advocacy group Forgotten Democrats. We delved into the human cost of the congressional funding delay, Ukraine’s draft dilemma and other matters. Catch the discussion here.

— ISIS claimed responsibility for an attack that killed more than 130 people at a Moscow concert venue late Friday. In a surprise to no one, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by trying to shift blame to Ukraine. The grisly episode brings to mind the murky circumstances under which Russia justified starting the Second Chechen War in 1999.

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