The Ukrainian Anarchist Pacifist Writer Putin Drove to Take Up Arms

Maintaining this balance requires, in part, mobilizing enough soldiers to replenish its ranks, a task Ukraine has struggled with. Under martial law, soldiers cannot be demobilized, except in death or disability. Chapeye remains in the army, something he told me he never imagined when signing up. He has an office job with the military in Kyiv, where his wife and two kids have since joined him. In the early days of the war, the military was overflowing with recruits; now, videos of men violently resisting the draft have gone viral on social media and some go as far as living in hiding or trying to flee the country. (Ukraine does not draft women, although they make up about 21 percent of applicants at recruitment centers.)

In the book, Chapeye wrote about his encounters with men avoiding the war. He and another soldier check out a gym in uniform in a town they will be stationed in; the bodybuilders hide, assuming they are from the recruitment office. Chapeye—an outspoken feminist who struggled with the fact that his enlistment effectively turned his wife into a single parent for the first year and a half of the war—ran into his macho, martial-arts-fanatic neighbor, who was ducking the war, in a coffee shop; Chapeye nodded and left to avoid talking with him. Chapeye told me that as a whole, he feels contempt toward these men, but on an individual level, he often feels empathy: “Not everybody is prepared to change their lives, and even fewer are prepared to actually risk their lives. Most of the people who were ready to do so already did it within the first year.”

In late 2022, Chapeye petitioned the government for fixed terms in the military; his missive reached the required threshold of 25,000 signatures for a response. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy replied that it was not possible under martial law. Chapeye compared serving in the army to experiencing the five stages of grief: The early days were denial followed by anger, the petition was bargaining, and he told me now, “I think I’m still in the depression phase.… How many people accept it?”