The Ukrainian Anarchist Pacifist Writer Putin Drove to Take Up Arms

Maintaining this balance requires, in part, mobilizing enough troops to replenish its ranks, a task with which Ukraine has struggled. Under martial law, soldiers cannot be discharged except in cases of death or disability. Chapeye remains in the army, something he told me he never imagined when he enlisted. He works in a military office in kyiv, where his wife and two children have since joined him. At the start of the war, the army was overflowing with recruits; Today, videos of men violently resisting conscription have gone viral on social networks and some go so far as to live in hiding or try to flee the country. (Ukraine does not recruit women, although they make up about 21% of applicants in recruitment centers.)

In the book, Chapeye recounts his encounters with men avoiding war. He and another soldier visit a uniformed gymnasium in a town in which they will be stationed; bodybuilders hide, thinking 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 mother during the first year and a half of the war, met his war-dodging macho, martial arts fanatic neighbor, in a cafe; Chapeye nodded and left to avoid talking to him. Chapeye told me that overall he feels contempt for these men, but on an individual level he often feels empathy: “Not everyone is willing to change their lives, and even fewer are willing to risk their lives. Most people who were willing to do it already did so within the first year.”

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