Seen from afar, Ukraine is a land of heroes, all ready to fight in defense of the homeland. I had already been warned when I arrived in the country, in the border city of Lviv, that there was a sector of the population that did not, that there were young people who would rather not risk their lives for the flag, or for democracy.
Hours after arriving in Kyiv, the capital, I went to Saint Michael’s Square, where they displayed war trophies, four half-destroyed Russian tanks and a couple of armored vehicles. There were families circling the square, children climbing onto the tanks with ice creams in hand: a scene of any kind, if it weren’t for the shadow of war.
The shadow approached me in the person of a 19-year-old boy named Stepan. He spoke to me in excellent English but betrayed nervousness, as if he wanted to vent with someone, better perhaps with a stranger, in a confessional tone, with me.
“It’s just, it’s just… I haven’t volunteered”, he told me. “Many boys of my age do, but I… I don’t want to go to the front to die.”
Stepan was a pale, dry, polite boy. From Rambo, nothing. He told me that he had a good job in an international logistics company, that he dreamed of being sent to the parent company in England, that he enjoyed working there. But he couldn’t because the Government had banned all men between 18 and 60 from leaving the country.
“From time to time I see myself in a bar with soldiers my age who have just arrived from the front and they reprimand me”, he tells me. “That I am a coward, that it is outrageous, scandalous, repulsive that I continue with my normal life as if nothing happened”.
Just at that moment a uniformed soldier passed behind us, not his age, but about forty or more. He had heard us. He understood English. He looked at Stepan with contempt. “You are shit!”, he said. “Shit!” And he turned his back on him and left.
“Do you see it?” Stepan said to me. “Like this every day”.
I didn’t quite know what to say to him. I didn’t scold him, that’s for sure. Who knows how I would have reacted in his place, at his age. We are not all made to fight.
Neither did another guy I started talking to, curiously enough in that same square where the Ukrainian war victories were celebrated. I didn’t write down his name but he must have been around 30 years old. He was with his girlfriend. Both had managed to escape in time from the devastated city of Mariúpol, in the south-east of the country. They hated the Russians, they told me. To everyone, not just Putin. But risk dying for the cause, no, no. Not this. When I told them that I lived in Barcelona, ​​they said: “How lucky! What a desire to be able to leave all this and escape to Spain!”.
The next day I went to visit one of the five centers in Ukraine to treat soldiers who have suffered post-traumatic stress on the front. It was in the town of Ivankiv, in the north of the country. The boss was a psychologist named Irina Prevor. He told me that hundreds of soldiers had passed through his hands since the beginning of the war, 14 months ago.
She was about 50 years old, Mrs. Prevor, a very prepared woman, sweet in character and appearance. Here is my surprise when I discovered after an hour of talking with her that the war had put iron in her soul.
Before, he told me, his job had been to help ordinary people cope with the difficulties of life in peaceful conditions. To adapt to wartime conditions he had studied the works of Israeli and American psychologists and then applied their therapeutic methods to the circumstances of his Ukrainian patients.
“All soldiers feel stress, of course,” he told me. “They bring me cases of boys who basically suffer from three symptoms: panic attacks, extreme aggression and serious difficulty sleeping.”
He explained to me that before sending them to his center, they were given a test with 200 questions and, based on the result, the heads of their military units decided whether they really needed therapy or not. What did the therapy consist of? I asked him, imagining long sessions in which the soldiers told stories of their childhoods, problems with their parents, recurring nightmares and such.
nothing to see The therapy consisted of practical exercises to get the soldiers back to the front as soon as possible. He told me, for example, about a complicated exercise focused on identifying an imaginary picture on a wall while controlling the breathing. Techniques of this style had very good results, he explained to me.
But, I replied, thinking of Stepan, weren’t there cases of boys who really weren’t fit for war? Shouldn’t they take the 200-question test before they’re recruited, not after?
“Look”, he answered me, with some impatience. “My job is not to determine who should or should not go to war. My job is to provide therapy to reduce soldiers’ stress and help them be more effective in combat.”
But not all of us were born to be heroes, I replied.
She is sweet, Mrs. Prevor, I repeat, but she was getting tired of my questions, since I, having arrived from happy Barcelona and its optional little problems, understood nothing of the context in which she and her country found themselves .
“All Ukrainians must do what is necessary in this war. If I spent my time worrying about the exact psychological profile of each boy, if the main issue was the mental well-being of each individual, then what would happen in the meantime? The Russians would eat us alive.”
All soldiers suffer from stress, he repeated to me. She wanted to help those who suffered from it a little more than usual to overcome it and continue to function. Nothing more. I stopped thinking about Stepan and kept quiet.
“I’ll explain,” he told me. “My job is to support my country’s military campaign, to help make the armed forces stronger. Yes, obviously, I want to help individuals, but at this moment in history the priority is to save Ukraine.”
