Marta Havryshko
Its particular tragedy is that the system built by Zelensky and his allies demands that draft officers use coercion against their fellow Ukrainians: hunt men down, seize them, and send them to a front to their certain death.
But many of those same draft officers were civilians only yesterday.
Some were themselves picked up, mobilized against their will, and then ordered to become the enforcers of the very machinery that had swallowed them — soldiers of the system, compelled to turn against their own people.
That was the fate of Oleksandr Bodnar, 55. He was forcibly mobilized at the end of June this year and assigned a new task: finding more soldiers.
While carrying out that assignment in Lviv, he was fatally wounded by a 25-year-old man who did not want to become a hero. He wanted to remain simply a human being. Simply a man.
But the state militarized system was leaving him no choice. So he made his own — taking the life of another man who, in a bitter irony, was himself a victim of the same machinery.
This is the tragedy consuming Ukrainian men: they are being forced into circumstances they never chose, by people who will never send their own children into those same circumstances.
Author: Saikat Bhattacharya
