BEING HUMAN

I am one of the men standing in those lines for a military medical reevaluation. These are existential observations, a long way from Hollywood patriotism, and you will not read them in the news about the russian war in Ukraine. I dare to share them. Our Mission has not changed. I wish you a blessed Sunday, and keep your children away from war.

Long lines of tired men between twenty-five and sixty stretch toward the doctors’ offices, with hundreds of people crammed into narrow, stuffy corridors that lack both oxygen and daylight. Some have been coming here for several days in a row, arriving at seven in the morning to hold a place.

The corridors of this old Soviet-era hospital, where the military medical commissions take place, stretch on endlessly, much as Soviet reality itself did, grey and monotonous and hopeless. Narrow and windowless, they resemble tunnels leading somewhere unknown, and although decades have passed, they still hold the spirit of a system in which a person counted for nothing and the plan counted for everything.

The walls, once painted pale green, now resemble a shabby canvas on which time has left its marks. The paint has peeled and cracked, exposing grey plaster in places like old wounds that will not heal, and even the nails driven in to hang posters or instructions look like further wounds in the tormented body of this building. These walls are mute witnesses to how people’s fates were decided behind one door while lives were broken behind another, and all that despair seems to have soaked into their structure.

Old fluorescent lamps flicker dimly under the ceiling, and their cold glow only underlines the squalor, since they create the appearance of light rather than actually dispelling the shadows. The yellowish glare makes every face look paler, and in some places the lamps have stopped working altogether, leaving whole stretches of corridor in half-darkness, so that these islands of shadow deepen the sense of uncertainty. When one of the lamps begins to blink nervously, it registers as an ominous sign, as though each flash were pushing another patient toward the room where his fate will be settled.

The floor is a mosaic of different materials that records the whole history of the building: worn stone slabs that remember Soviet times, faded parquet that creaks and shifts underfoot, and ceramic tiles from the bright nineties that lost their colour long ago and are covered now with a grid of cracks. The whole surface is uneven and wavy, so you stumble and keep watching your feet. It has absorbed millions of steps and thousands of human destinies, and now, worn thin, it whispers those stories to anyone who knows how to listen.

Long wooden benches run along the walls, once perhaps light brown and now darkened by time and countless hands, their surfaces covered with scratches and dents left by everyone who ever sat here waiting. Men sit on them hunched over, staring at the floor, worn down by the heat and the closeness of the air and paralysed by what lies ahead, their faces holding the particular expression of a person waiting for a single word. Everyone here understands that the outcome of this commission can change a life with that one word: fit.

Behind the peeling numbered doors are the doctors’ offices where these men’s futures are decided, and crossing the threshold means entering a realm of formalism. The walls, covered with anatomical diagrams and here and there a patriotic slogan, look as cold as the eyes of the doctors sitting behind their desks like judges at a tribunal. To them all these people form a faceless stream that separates into fit and unfit, since what they see is a body to be examined and a form to be completed rather than a person with a story and a family. The massive desks, piled with papers and instruments, work as a barrier between those who decide and those whose lives are being decided.

The offices have the atmosphere of a conveyor belt, with doctors working at the limit of human capacity and moving mechanically through as many men as they can in the time available. The next patient goes through the same crucible: undress, breathe, stop breathing, turn around. A cold stethoscope against the chest, indifferent fingers probing the joints, and appraising looks that make you want to disappear. And you have to stand there and endure it.

Then, at last, the verdict, a single word that settles everything. Fit, and you no longer belong to yourself, with the unknown ahead of you and behind you a life that will never be what it was. Unfit, and you seem to have been given a chance to live. What do you do with it, though, and what kind of life is it when others go to die in your place?

The doctors stamp the documents and send men off toward the unknown, trying not to think that behind every “fit” stands a family that will now live in constant expectation and fear. That somewhere a wife will not know whether she will see her husband again. That somewhere children may lose their father for good. That somewhere elderly parents may lose the only support they have. If they let themselves think about it, the guilt would drive them out of their minds, and so there are no emotions and no compassion, only stamps.

Fear of the unknown hangs in these corridors like heavy fog, and, paradoxically, the younger men, those barely past twenty-five, carry less of it. They are still full of youthful certainty and belief in their own invulnerability, and they have not yet grasped what it means to hold a real weapon and look death in the face.

The older men, in their forties and fifties, worry a great deal more, since they have years of experience behind them that taught them to value every moment. They have already built their lives, found love, started families, raised children, and the thought that all of it could be destroyed in an instant paralyses them with a fear they keep hidden. Their heads swarm with questions. How will his wife manage alone with the children, and will she have the strength and the money to cope? What if he dies out there and never sees his family again? These men understand what a war actually costs, and that understanding makes their fear sharper.

And here is the thing that matters most: the real cause of all this hidden suffering is russian aggression rather than the doctors or the system. This aggression is what forced Ukrainians into an impossible choice, to go to war or to live with guilt. Because of it, every man declared fit is a potential casualty, every family a hostage to uncertainty, and every child a potential orphan.

The Kremlin regime, blinded by imperial ambition and supported by tens of millions of russians, including russian Christians, unleashed this bloody and unprovoked war against Ukraine. Russian soldiers set foot on our land and brought death, rape, torture and destruction with them. And now every Ukrainian, at the front or in the rear, pays for it with life, health and well-being.

Every family forced to send a husband or a father or a son to war is another casualty of that aggression. Every wife writing messages to the front with a trembling hand, not knowing whether an answer will come, is further evidence of russian crimes. Every child falling asleep wondering whether his father will come back alive is another indelible sin on the conscience of the russian invaders, and of russian Christians in particular.

Even the doctors, now forced to become soulless functionaries of a system and to stamp “fit” on documents, are casualties of the situation this aggression created, since in peacetime they would never have descended into such cynicism or taken on the terrible responsibility of deciding, for tens of thousands of men, who lives and who goes to look death in the eye against the russian occupiers.

So when I see these endless lines, these exhausted faces and trembling hands, I remember that behind each of them stands a russian soldier with a rifle, supported by hundreds of thousands of russian Christians. Behind every destroyed life stands a russian tank or a Grad. Behind every rare tear from a grown man stands a russian bomb tearing apart Ukrainian cities and the bodies of Ukrainian defenders and civilians. I remember.

And as long as russian soldiers trample our land and their missiles tear our cities apart, none of this will stop. We pray and do everything we can toward the day when the word “fit” loses its ominous meaning, when we can breathe out and begin living rather than surviving, when our families are reunited and our children play safely in a yard instead of a bomb shelter. Only then will we truly have won.

Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war.

Taras M. Dyatlik, Ukraine
829 days of the ongoing full-scale russian war