‘My Son Used to Dream of Football, Now He Dreams of Hand Grenades’
KYIV – AMID hundreds of joyous civilians pouring onto the streets of Kherson to welcome the soldiers who liberated them from Russian occupation, there is a man named Mykhailo.
A former soldier whose son has been serving in an elite unit in the Ukrainian military since 2016, Mykhailo – whom I agreed to identify by his given name only – refused to leave his hometown when the Russians invaded. He has been waiting for this day since Russian forces moved in, and he calls his son to tell him.
“They’re gone,” Mykhailo, who is in his late 60s, tells his son in a phone call. “The fuckers are finally gone.”
Mykhailo’s son is a paratrooper serving in the reconnaissance company of an Air Assault Brigade that’s been fighting for months in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. The paratrooper, who asked that I not reveal his name out of concerns about targeted reprisals, told me about his dad when we met back in June, saying that he has only been able to communicate with his father sporadically since the war began in February.
“My dad’s in hiding,” the paratrooper told me at the time, when his unit was fighting a desperate defense in the environs of Severodonetsk, shortly before it fell to the Russians. “He’s a retired soldier with a son in the ZSU [the romanized Cyrillic acronym for AFU, or the Armed Forces of Ukraine]. If the Russians find him, they’ll shoot him.”
Many relatives of Ukrainian servicemembers, who were stuck in Russian-occupied territories after the invasion, have been forcibly relocated to so-called “filtration camps” in Russia or summarily executed, according to numerous soldiers across multiple battlefronts with whom I have spoken over the course of the war.
Nine months into Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, and the conflict remains an abyss of sorrow.
