The soldier at war is the one who, who stands ON TWO LEGS ON THE GROUND.

The soldier at war is the one who will win the war. Without a soldier at war, no matter how powerful your equipment is, no matter how expensive and modern your drones are - nothing will help you.

The soldier at war is the one who goes out alone into the darkness of the night, it doesn’t matter that he goes with his brothers-in-arms through all this. The soldier at war is the one whom nobody waits for upon his return. The soldier at war is the one who receives the least care, protection, and compassion... Because, after all, you know, he is a strong soldier. He doesn’t need anything.

Those who know best what a soldier lacks, are their chaplains. With time and mutual trust, the soldiers open up to them completely.

“They have many problems in their families, at home,” the military chaplain shares the soldiers' troubles with me. “His own family sometimes doesn't understand the soldier. And it so happens that the soldier's true family is 'there': somewhere, someone, far away, at the frontline. The soldier's 'family' is those around him, his brothers-in-arms. It happens not rarely, that a soldier leaves for vacation, spends three or four days with his family at home, and says: I want to go back to my bothers-in-arms, to my real family.”

Then the mission of the chaplain is to explain to the soldier that his family is at home, not here. "At home, at your own home, your family is there. At home, can you understand this? I also ask them: when the war ends, what will happen then with you? Where will you be then? Where will you go then? You must understand very clearly that your path will be back home, that your place is at home.”

The clergyman tells me, that a soldier often also receives reproaches from his family: why is he fighting somewhere far away, and not somewhere closer to home, closer to his family? He tells of soldiers experiencing pressure from their wives, with demands to transfer to some unit closer to home, to stop being at the front at all or even to stop fighting and serving altogether. But he says, that for a person, who has spent more than a month in the trenches, being anywhere else, than trenches, is something he can barely manage anymore. 

“There, at the frontline,” as he puts it, “is one kind of life, here is another. There everything is very clear," he adds. “There, it's a different life. You fight for a day, two days, or much longer, then you come back, you rest. You receive an order; you carry it out. Here? Here you don't know what to do with yourself, where to put yourself.”

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