Veterans in Odesa

Odesa’s monument to the unknown sailor is a granite obelisk in Taras Shevchenko Park, overlooking the Black Sea. It honours the sailors who died fighting the Wehrmacht. About two minutes’ walk away is a statue of a soldier sitting on the floor to commemorate the men from Odesa – around two hundred – who died during the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-89). Elsewhere, dotted around the city, are makeshift shrines to soldiers who have lost their lives in the current war.

The Afgantsy did not return to a grateful country. The 160,000 Ukrainians among them were met with indifference as their compatriots struggled to survive the economic turmoil of the 1990s. Ukrainian nationalism was at odds with the Soviet internationalist rhetoric used to justify the war. The nationalists condemned the invasion as a continuation of Russian imperialism and labelled its participants as ‘occupiers’ and ‘murderers’. Konstantin, an Afgansty in his mid-sixties, was deployed to Mozambique, alongside many Cubans and East Germans, whom he holds in high esteem. Still, he told me, ‘no one could explain why the hell we were sent to these places.’ After independence in 1991, he rose to the rank of colonel in the Ukrainian army.

Neglected and marginalised, some Afgantsy became involved in organised crime, which boomed across the former Soviet Union during the 1990s. In Ukraine they also formed a close-knit community. During the Maidan uprising in 2014, when police opened fire on student-protesters, the Afgansty intervened to protect the ‘youngsters’. After the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted, many Afgantsy fought in the ensuing war in the Donbas. Konstantin came out of retirement and rejoined the Ukrainian army. Some of his former comrades, notably in Donetsk, opted to fight for Russia.

When I asked Konstantin how veterans of the current war would be treated, he said that his mother was born in a Gulag camp north of the Arctic Circle. He then showed me a video of his twelve grandchildren singing a carol next to a Christmas tree. This isn’t Afghanistan or Mozambique; Ukrainians know what they are fighting for.

War amputees are a common sight in Odesa; I’ve had several rides from Bolt drivers with prosthetic limbs. The local athletes who have competed in the Invictus Games, an international sporting tournament for wounded veterans, keep their training sessions open to the public.

Not all veterans can compete in the Invictus Games, however. And a colonel serving in Donbas has warned that in the absence of economic opportunities, tens of thousands of veterans, ‘capable of carrying out large-scale operations, even changing governments … would disperse around the world joining the ranks of private military companies’.

Cases of domestic violence have almost doubled in the last year, and 60 per cent of perpetrators are veterans. In Odesa alone there have been at least two instances of veterans threatening to use hand-grenades in domestic disputes. Suicide is also a concern. As many as 28,000 US veterans of the ‘war on terror’ took their own lives: four times the number of combat deaths. Ukraine has already lost up to 100,000 soldiers in three years. The army doesn’t publish suicide data, but the country as a whole had one of the highest rates in the world before 2022.

There are currently 1.2 million veterans in Ukraine. If the war were to end and allow for demobilisation, the number could grow to five or six million. Ukraine can’t afford for them to become a lost generation. It is already in the middle of a demographic crisis. From a population of 40 million in 2021, emigration, war losses and low birth rates could leave the country with only 25 million inhabitants by 2050.

The Ministry of Veteran Affairs (MoVA), established in 2018, oversees housing, healthcare and financial support for former soldiers. But the road from the front to these reintegration programmes can be long and winding. In 2016, at the age of 21, Ivan joined up as an infantryman. Born in Donetsk, he had family who supported the Russian-backed separatists. He was wounded in 2023. Like many veterans from the east, he was unable to return home. For months he navigated a labyrinthine trail of paperwork and endless interviews, while going through physical rehabilitation and an intense regime of medication. He fell into a deep depression but emerged and is now helping other recently discharged veterans find their footing.

Erin McFee and colleagues at the Corioli Institute (an NGO based in Virginia, named for Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s misunderstood veteran) have collected many testimonies that align with Ivan’s experience. Up to 70 per cent of Ukrainian veterans fear the state will abandon them. The imperfections of the MoVA are unsurprising, given its modest funding and the number of veterans on its books. Civil society is trying to fill the gaps left by the state: Odesa’s network of veterans centres is growing; one charity pays veterans to train new recruits in basic tactical medicine.

Some veterans object to the term ‘reintegration’; society should adapt to them, they argue, not the other way round. The general public may not disagree: opinion polls show veterans enjoying an unrivalled – and unprecedented – level of public trust, suggesting that future political leaders are likely to be drawn from their ranks.

Like embittered veterans of the Great War, former servicemen could be tempted by radical organisations that blame the current stalemate – or the looming prospect of defeat – on the fickleness of the West, the weakness of liberal democracies and their flimsy cosmopolitan values. The Azov Battalion, founded in 2014 by the neo-Nazi Patriots of Ukraine, has since been folded into the Ukrainian army. Its image and ideology have softened, partly to reassure the West, partly because it has seen an influx of less ideologically motivated recruits and officers. But it remains staunchly nationalist and retains its connections to the far right. Its videogame-inspired recruitment campaigns are ubiquitous. Andriy Biletsky, Azov’s leader, will want to capitalise on veterans’ disaffection to entice them down an ever more nationalist path.

An inclusive beach in Odesa, with facilities for the disabled, is currently under pressure from seaboard developers. The authorities have reportedly cut off water supplies to the beach and impeded maintenance on the pretext of new regulations. The veterans are taking the city to court over it. It seems to be a classic case of corruption. In Odesa alone, several contracts totalling tens of millions of dollars have been awarded to businesses with suspiciously short corporate histories and little to no expertise or capital.

Konstantin told me he wants to see a larger shake-up. He thinks the former chief of the general staff and current ambassador to London, General Valeri Zaloujny, should replace Zelensky as president. Another potential candidate would be Vasyl Maliouk, the head of Ukraine’s Security Service, who is surfing on the success of the recent ‘Spiderweb’ operation on Russia’s airfields. Kyiv has many successful and outspoken first consuls. Have any of them read Coriolanus?