I really WANT my own FAMILY SO MUCH NOW...

I could write entire epics about my soldiers. About their heroism and their feats. And yet, I choose to write about them differently: I write about them as human beings, as people like you and me. About their daily lives, about their dreams and their wounds.

In the summer, Vegas, a soldier from my 210th regiment, celebrated his 35th birthday, and says, he is already very much longing to put down his weapon and do something that gives him joy, something that brings good, for instance, to set up a rehabilitation centre for soldiers, similar to those being built in America, where a person could come to shoot, could travel or go on organised hikes. But most importantly for him, as he puts it, to not have lived his life emptily.

“Some people live only for themselves, others, for ideas,” Vegas says and like many soldiers, he speaks of many things about the war calmly, without judging others. “The most important thought, the one I live by, is to preserve our Ukrainian identity, to not have lived life emptily. Because simply eating, buying yourself things, dressing yourself, buying a car: what is the meaning of all that? It's not so very joyful to do only that. We have already seen from my example,  the more a person has, the less he values it; he begins to take it all for granted. Today you wake up, you can look at your national flag, listen to your anthem, speak your native language. But it can all be otherwise. You can find yourself under a totalitarian regime, the best example being, that in 2025 a state like North Korea exists, where is no internet, where people are shot for watching a Western film. That is precisely, most likely, why I am fighting”.

But for now Vegas is at war. “Yes, in war a person gets tired, I get tired too, like any person. Only as a commander, I don't always have the opportunity to show it... I don't have much opportunity to show my emotions either. But I too, I am frightened sometimes; sometimes I don't know something; sometimes for a moment I can step away somewhere, cry, breathe out, come back with a smile, and saying, that everything will be alright, lead people forward, because they trust me. But I don't know what the future holds for me,” the soldier's voice grows quiet.

"I am 35, and I don't know how my future will look like. I really want children, but I don't know how, in all of this, I could think about children. I really want a home, I really want children. And I would really love to put down my weapon already,” he repeats it once more. And I simply turn my eyes away.

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