Dmytro Krapyvenko

Early in the morning of February 22, Dmytro went to the military administration in Kyiv to join the territorial defense. Despite the chaos, he was promised a two-week training course, starting from the next day. Yet on February 23, his newly formed unit was sent back home, since the operational reserve of the first stage had just been mobilized, and there was no need for the rookies anymore.

Next morning, Dmytro’s close family friend, a serviceman, woke him with a telephone call.

“He said: get up, or you’ll oversleep the war,” Dmytro remembers. “I woke my wife, and we heard a few explosions.”

Dmytro knew what he should do; so he took his family to a safe place, gathered his essentials and went to the military administration. At 9 am, the unit commander told him to get ready, and by the end of the day, Dmytro had been given a weapon. Danger and chaos prevailed all around.

Dmytro spent the first two months of his service in Kyiv. He saw the and cautious city getting ready for its inevitable ordeal, and recalled what he had heard and read about the besieged Leningrad in WWII. He felt terrified and proud at the same time; he was sure that Kyiv would be ruined, but its every street would fight back. Yet since mid-March the city has begun to revive. Today, people in Kyiv drink their smoothies on summer terraces. Dmytro doesn’t judge anyone for that: life must go on at the rear, plus you never know how much money the others are donating for the army, or what exactly they are doing to help their country.

“The war has proved that everyone must struggle for their cities,” Dmytro ponders. “Once, we used to say, way too skeptically, like, who needs that Donbas at all? Now, on the contrary, the phenomenon of the territorial defense has worked. You can never say that everything is all right because it may very well be gone by tomorrow. And you can never opt out of moving forward once you’ve reached the border of your city.”

Dmytro himself did not opt out after the Kyiv region was liberated. He is still fighting in the war, but he’s not allowed to disclose his current location.

The backstage conditions of the military service did not come as a surprise to Dmytro. He grew up in a military town because his father was an officer. Many of his childhood friends chose military professions too, so Dmytro always knew what was going on in the Ukrainian army. Even more so as, since 2014, he was a volunteer in the Armed Forces, so his circle of contacts focused almost exclusively on the military and their environment.

“Full-scale war requires more people and more efforts,” Dmytro speaks of his decision to join the army. “I think that voluntary soldiers from each industry should come to the military, as used to happen in medieval cities; and there is no shortage of such people among journalists. I am physically fit for military service, I know how to handle weapons, and, most importantly, I’m not afraid to take a gun and shoot at the enemy. I’m neither a humanist nor a whiny romantic.”

Dmytro is not afraid of field conditions in his everyday life. He’s had a realistic idea of what war looks like, and he is fitter and more prepared for it now than he would have been at the age of 18 or 20. He’d hated sport since high school, but at thirty, his wife gave him a season ticket to the gym so he could shed some excess weight. So now his arms, legs and shoulders are often aching today, but he can withstand the pace of the military lifestyle. Dmytro is not used to sleeping on rigid bunks or children’s mattresses, washing his clothes in cold water, living in damp woods, or going to a drain hole instead of a toilet – however, he never complains about anything. He usually gets tired faster than his younger comrades in combat do, yet never shirks any work by saying that he is a journalist.

“The servicemen generally appreciate educated people,” he goes on. “I’ve never heard the word ‘intelligent’ said in that scornful Soviet tone since being in the army. Those who do their job are treated with respect.”

For Dmytro, the main disadvantage of the military is the lack of the privacy which he needs to read and write.

Dmytro has always read books for as long as he can remember. He prefers to skip dinner or sleep a few hours less for the possibility to read a page or two. As soon as Dmytro got home at the beginning of March for some respite, he took up a book immediately. And he still reads, even at the frontline.

“Whenever a soldier has a spare minute, what can they do? First and foremost – take care of their own hygiene. Have lunch. Then, instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media, I read. This is my way of seclude.”

Dmytro has made a conscious decision not to read anything about the war or the army. Of course, he reads a lot of tactical instructions or manuals for weapons, but it’s only books on philosophy, literature, or biographies that bring him pleasure these days. He enjoys discovering new facts about Alfred Hitchcock, the German Romantics, classicism and social realism, or medieval religion, and calls it exercise for the brain. His books have to be paperbacks. Dmytro carries them in the document pocket of his already stuffed backpack.

Conversely, he feels it almost impossible to write. He needs specific conditions to write a column: solitude, the laptop, music, and quiet. Meanwhile in the barracks, where everyone smokes, coughs, talks about equipment or watches videos, there is no way to hang a ‘do not disturb’ sign.

Besides, the question arises of what to write. Now, Dmytro has no time to monitor the informational space regularly. Moreover, he has already started to wonder whether it’s that necessary at all.

“I’ve met enough different people here to realize how drastically overestimated the political element has always been,” says Dmytro. “It was something that I’d long suspected; yet now it’s more than obvious that most people simply aren’t interested in which politician said what, hid what, or defected where. It’s a glass bead game. It’s insignificant to such a point that I’m even too lazy to track it on a regular basis. Still, there are some essential things that must not be neglected, like the situation with the national TV news marathon or Yuriy Butusov – and that is also politics. Everything is politics if you think so; but messing around with somebody’s vacations or interparty intrigues is not worth it.”

Nonetheless, Dmytro has no intention of leaving journalism. He will surely continue his military service until the very end of the war, but he’ll return to Suspilne afterwards.

“I love my job,” he explains. “I have never tried to get away from it. I hope that the new era brings new issues to discuss in Ukrainian journalism. I long to look at something in real depth – for instance, talking about the post-war reconstruction of Mariupol.”

Dmytro believes that no debates on reconciliation with Russia or returning to it will emerge in his lifetime. He is convinced that the final choice between Russia and Europe was made back in 2014. Despite that, though, there is the still more complicated issue of cultural discussion, for even Ukrainian servicemen sometimes listen to Russian music or watch Russian movies.

“Far more dangerous demons may settle in formless minds now than happened before,” says Dmytro. “And so we’ll have to fill all the voids to oust Russian culture from our Ukrainian space. We’ll have to create many more cultural projects, be they of high value or even something crude and basic. I may dislike some of them, but still, they’ll belong to Ukraine. As for the rest – nothing at all is preferable to something Russian.”

Dmytro does not think that there are any points of no return in the historical perspective. “For example, let’s take Russia itself,” he offers. “The country that used to brag about its victory over fascism has now turned into a fascist state itself. So there’s no need for self-consolation or looking at the war through rose-tinted glasses. People want objective reality to be pointed out to them. It would be harsh, but it’s better to let them come back to their senses than listen to some bullshit like, ‘there’s no one to fight any longer in Russia’. In psychology, there is a concept of the ‘significant other’ – a reputable person, in other words. There has to be someone who tells those willing to live in a fairytale that the war will last a long time, the losses will be great, and the consequences grave.”