Today I had the honour of SOMETHING GREAT
“Oh, and a tank ran me over too,” Osvaldas says to me, when we've already finished the conversation.
He says it, and I don't know, whether to just nod or burst out laughing. Well, I burst out laughing, and we both laugh. War is like that, if you don't laugh, it'll explode your mind completely.
The Legend Osvaldas has hundreds of stories he could tell. But today we met to talk about alcohol and drugs in war. A difficult topic, very difficult. Wrapped in layers of speculation and “pseudo-truths.”
That is precisely, why I wanted an interview with a leader on exactly this topic, so as not to leave room for unnecessary speculation.
“In Kursk, wherever we went, the first thing we did, was destroy the alcohol. Someone from our group would enter a russian shop and simply shoot all the alcohol standing on the shelves with a machine gun”. We spoke with him about alcohol and drugs in war, hence the photo matching the content. I hope you smiled.
“In wartime, the army is merely a reflection of society,” the soldier and I move without many words to the main topic of our conversation. And it needs to be talked about, too many myths, gossip, and speculation swirl around these addiction topics. “What society is like, so is the army, because a doctor goes to fight, a mechanic goes to fight, a driver goes to fight. And, you understand, if society has as many people with addictions as it does, then of course, they will end up in the army too. A specific topic, but a hellishly important one,” the man affirms.
“I think, none of us, even in the simplest peacetime job, would want to have a colleague, who is drunk at work. Say, a bus driver or something similar. Generally, in some zones of Ukraine, alcohol is completely prohibited, in Donbas, for instance, there is no alcohol at the retail points,”says Osvaldas Guokas, adding immediately, that he doesn't know, whether that is a good thing. "A stick always has two ends,” he says.
“What happened in Donbas when alcohol was banned?,” he asks a rethorical question. “The first thing, we need to talk about is this: if a person is already an alcoholic, he will always find something to drink. There are still quite a few local people left next to the frontline, and look, who tends to stay most often? It's either the so-called “zhduns” - the “waiters”, meaning those, who wait for the enemy to arrive and live in the russian world; the elderly also tend to stay, those who don't want to or have nowhere to go and choose to remain in their homes and meet death there; and of course, a great many antisocial elements remain there. These are people, who don't care about anything, who are completely apolitical. These include drug addicts and alcoholics who, even with a ban on alcohol, will still keep drinking. They have to drink something alcoholic, because it is an illness, and that is how the problem arises. That is, when illegal home production begins: at first they make it for themselves, but such production requires resources. You have to buy yeast and other ingredients, whatever you're going to use. Clearly, all of this requires financial resources, and that is when those people start offering alcohol to soldiers”.
Osvaldas Guokas says, that without doubt, people do indeed find soldiers, to whom they can push such “product”. “Most often, they produce nothing beyond homemade moonshine, but enormous risks are associated with it,” he says.
I thank the Media Support Fund (MRF) for supporting the post series “War in Ukraine: The Gap Between the Military and Society”