After the war we will only talk to dogs. AND TO EACH OTHER.

We won't be coloring eggs tonight for Easter.

Tonight we won't be shopping for an Easter table. But instead we'll be shopping for hope. And for a calmer sky. For saving at least one more life. Tonight, here, we'll buy plastic. For 3D printing drones.

The conversations with them have grown sad. Although, perhaps they were never otherwise. “Someone noticed,” one of them tells me, “That dogs can attack anyone, bark at anyone, but they would never attack soldiers in uniform”. And then, very quietly, as if cheerfully, but with a note of sadness, he adds: “after the war, that's probably how it'll be, the only ones we'll have left to talk to, will be dogs and each other, nobody else will need us for a damn thing.”

The conversation with this soldier was one of a few, in which the interlocutor was painfully open, and his openness sometimes made me turn my eyes away. As though I felt shame, discomfort within myself, even though as he spoke, the man blamed nobody; he simply told, stated. And I listened, and with each sentence I grew increasingly uncomfortable.

“You said to me before,” I said quietly to the soldier, feeling uneasy, that I must repeat his earlier words, “that in society's eyes, a soldier is like some kind of total loser?”

“Yes, that's exactly right to the point,” the man answers calmly and lights another cigarette. “But at this point, I'll add something to my words. Of course we can't measure everyone by the same yardstick. There are all kinds of people. For instance, at the start of the full-scale war, in the very first year, when I had the chance to visit my family, I went to my hometown in uniform. I can say with certainty, that at that time, in public transport, about 80 percent of people wouldn't even look your way. Perhaps they were ashamed, perhaps there were other reasons.”

The man's voice is calm, without resentment. This is how a soldier who has seen a great deal in war and at the front speaks. “And after the war, we'll be left just like this: talking among ourselves and with dogs, nobody else will need that “our” war anymore,” he will later say to me, and I will carry those words in my head probably for the rest of my life.

Countless times I have already heard from my soldiers about civilians, and even doctors in hospitals and clinics, blaming soldiers with “well, you are making us sick, and that war of yours.” Soldiers have more than once told me, that especially residents near the front openly accuse soldiers, saying “if not for you being here, there would be no war”. That's why, every time I speak with soldiers, I try to hear their experiences with society too, and not only with their own family or loved ones.

“Of course, behind every soldier stands his strength, and that is his family, friends, real friends, let's put it that way,” he says. And people?  Well, they come in all kinds. There are those, who lived through occupation and miraculously survived it. There are people, who lost their homes. There are people, who lost their loved ones, their children. And such people, as a rule, are more conscious. They are the people, who lived through a face-to-face encounter with horror. They understand what is happening, what a soldier goes through, what happens to soldiers' family. They understand what loss is, what real friends are, what home is. When you lose all of that, you begin to understand the price of it, the price of what you lost and no longer have. There are people, who have come up to me on the street more than once: men, women, they just came up, with tears in their eyes, reached out their hand, and simply said 'thank you’. “Thank you, my son.” All of this, these are real stories, stories that happened to me. And in their eyes, you could see all that pain, all that understanding of what is happening”.

I thank the Media Support Fund for supporting the post series “War in Ukraine: The Gap Between the Military and Society”