Full of stoicism and unspoken fear, Ukrainian men steel for battle as they say goodbye to families

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LVIV, Ukraine – Iryna Kotz calls her husband each morning to ask if the night was calm, even though she monitors the air raid sirens from hundreds of miles away through an app on her phone and knows calm is a rarity. When her children ask when they'll see their father again, she has no good answers for them.

As millions of Ukrainian women and children move west to escape Russia's widening war in their country, a largely unspoken front line – open-ended, full of searing psychological hurt – continues to expand across Ukraine: the men they leave behind.

Many of the women Paste BN spoke to were too overcome with emotion to address the subject of leaving their husbands, but many Ukrainian men showed remarkable stoicism in talking about the pain of family separations that have no foreseeable end. They said it is their duty to defend their country.

"My family understands that if we don't win this fight, future generations – maybe even the whole world – will not have a good life," said Kotz's husband, Igor, 37, a property-developer-turned-amateur-security-chief for a Lviv-based humanitarian aid center that helps supply Ukraine's professional and civilian armed forces. "I have accepted that I may not ever see my wife and kids again." 

The Kotz women and children evacuated to a village in Poland near the German border three weeks ago. They keep anxious tabs on the man they left behind through daily video calls and bombard him with texts and calls when Iryna's phone app tells them the air raid sirens in Ukraine's western capital have stopped. 

"He told me his duty was to stay and end this war as quickly as possible," Iryna said when reached by phone Sunday.

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'My son will be the main guy'

The exodus of civilian women and children from Ukraine continues, many families showing up each day at Lviv's main train and bus stations, two of the major conduits to Poland. Men such as Stanislav, 34, come with heavy hearts and weak smiles that try to disguise the sorrow and turmoil of having to say goodbye to their loved ones as they hastily depart for a foreign land. 

An accountant before the war, Stanislav did not want his last name to be published because after dropping off his wife and daughter in Lviv, he was headed back to Dnipro, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine, to join a territorial defense unit, one of the volunteer civilian militias assembled in the wake of Russia's invasion. 

Stanislav was not sure what his role in the war would be. He said it might involve driving food and medicines to remote villages. He'd heard a number of orphans had been brought to his town. He might help care for them. 

After watching his wife and 8-year-old daughter board a bus for Warsaw, Stanislav stood directly behind the coach, out of view of his daughter Polina, who sat in a window seat on her mother's knee and convulsed with sobs. A few times, Stanislav walked up to the window to try to console her, then retreated. As the bus pulled out of the station his wife, too, began to cry, but he showed no emotion. 

"They will return, 200%. It’s a temporary measure. We will come back to Dnipro together," he insisted Saturday. "What can I say? It's very hard. She's my little teddy bear," he said of his daughter. 

Five minutes later, Stanislav was back in his car for the 700-mile drive back to Dnipro, where Russian airstrikes destroyed an airport runway and other infrastructure. 

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A short while earlier, Levgen Kosolapov, 42, also dropped off his family at Lviv's bus station. 

Kosolapov, his wife, son, mother and a niece with a toddler had all traveled by car from Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, which has been devastated by Russian missiles and artillery that hit residential apartment buildings. Piles of rubble line many of Kharkiv's streets. 

"My son will be the main guy, he will take the lead," Kosolapov, an economist who served in Ukraine's military 20 years ago, said of Dima, 15, who stood next to him.

The boy shifted his weight nervously from one foot to the other as his dad explained how the war made it difficult to plan for anything. Kosolapov planned to return to Kharkiv and put his mothballed military skills to some use. The most important thing for him, he said, was that his family would soon be safe overseas. 

"I brought him up for 15 years. He knows what to do," Kosolapov said, referring to fatherly lessons about looking after the female members of his family. 

Dima's eyes reddened and moistened, though he did not cry as he spoke softly about how he likes fishing and hiking in the forest and did not want his father to join the army.

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More than 3 million Ukrainians have fled their nation since Russia's invasion Feb. 24, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Two million are displaced within Ukraine. The United Nations estimated that 13 million people have been affected in Ukraine's hardest hit areas. These figures increase by the day as Russia's military offensive continues. 

There are no official estimates for how many Ukrainian fathers, sons, brothers and grandfathers ages 18-60 have been separated from the women and children in their families amid a government prohibition on adult males leaving Ukraine. There are some exemptions, such as men who are single fathers or have children with disabilities. 

As part of the martial law implemented by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, most men have been asked to bolster the war effort either through direct military service or by joining civilian territorial units that make Molotov cocktails, patrol checkpoints and build trenches.  

Others make themselves useful as translators, clerks, information warriors, makers of camouflage nets or anything else that can possibly contribute to the resistance. The United Nations has verified about 700 civilian deaths, though the numbers could be far higher. 

"I don't have any military skills, but I want to stay in Ukraine, to work and pay my taxes and support my country in any way I can," said Oleg Kyrychuk, 34, a public relations manager for a Kyiv law firm who has been working as a driver for aid groups and international media, including Paste BN. "People are coming together to save our country because we don't have any other option. The whole country cannot flee."

The whole country isn't fleeing. 

Millions of Ukrainian women opted to stay behind with the men. They engage in direct combat with Russian forces, serve as health workers and in vital logistics roles or try to get on with their lives as best they can in frightening and unpredictable circumstances. Some women came back after getting their kids to safety. Others returned to their besieged country after years working abroad, to rescue relatives. 

"I will never leave Ukraine," said Valia Maksymiv, 35, a Lviv resident who was laying flowers and a miniature toy fighter jet on the grave of her high school friend, Kyrylo Lisin, a special forces soldier who died Feb. 27 during a battle in Kherson in southern Ukraine. Lisin, 36, was buried in the city's main cemetery.

"Every day, my son takes his grandmother down to hide in the basement during air raid sirens. After Kyrylo's death, he knows what this war is about, and he is not afraid. I am ready to protect my country," she said. They declined offers to leave for Poland. 

Fears and worries

On Wednesday, Zelenskyy appealed for a "no-fly" zone over Ukraine and more sanctions against Russia in a virtual address to the U.S. Congress. "Russians have turned Ukrainian skies into a source of death," he told lawmakers.

Even as diplomatic efforts to end the war have stepped up, "I call for you to do more," he said, addressing the Biden administration.

The human toll of family separations may not be understood for some time, said Tetiana Rudenko, a Kyiv-based psychologist for VeteranHub, which has  counseled Ukrainian military personnel since the beginning of Ukraine's conflict with Russia in 2014, when Moscow seized Ukraine's Crimea territory and backed separatists in its southeastern Donbas region.

"It's easier for men to perform their defense function when they know their families are safe," she said. "The anger that Ukrainian society is generally experiencing (toward Russia's invasion) is a lot greater than the pain for the wives and children they are missing, because people feel the motivation for what they are fighting for."

Father Vsevolod Semenenko, a military chaplain who has presided over the funerals of Ukrainian solders from Lviv killed in recent days, said that in his discussions with bereaved families, there remains a strong appetite to "resist the injustice" of Russia's attacks, even if doing so requires prolonged or definitive absences from loved ones. 

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The men who came to Lviv to say goodbye to wives, daughters, sisters and other relatives clearly carry the weight of these farewells in ways big and small. They stuck hands deep into pockets, paced in irregular circles or absent-mindedly thumbed phone screens. 

Sergei Oliyarnyk, 35, a sales manager trying to get his wife and two kids to Lviv from Kharkiv, helps to make camouflage nets in a public library. He mistakes appliance white noise from a fridge or gas furnace as the sound of approaching Russian fighter jets or artillery shells. 

Taras Bozhko, 26, a heavily tattooed bartender from Kyiv with smiling Buddha ornaments in each ear, sent his girlfriend off to Poland. Saturday, he was back in Lviv's bus station, making his 7-year-old sister laugh by clowning around as she and their mom waited to depart. 

"They keep telling me to reveal more of my emotions," Bozhko said of the women in his life. "They are crying and say I am cold-minded. But (what they don't know) is that when I am on my own, I get worried."

The next morning, Bohdan Krasniukh and Maryna Bezukh, both 22, sat on a bench near Lviv's central railway station. They had arrived from Kyiv and were looking for a place to stay, preferably somewhere they could have some privacy. They had planned to get married. Then the war started. 

The young lovers traveled to Lviv, so they could send Bezukh across the border to Poland if the fighting in Ukraine spreads west. 

Earlier that day, a Russian missile strike on a military training base near Lviv killed at least 35 people. The attack rattled a region that has served as a major crossing point for refugees going to Poland and for arms supplied by Western countries flowing into Ukraine. 

"I am also waiting for the borders to be open for guys," Krasniukh said. A friend tried to volunteer to join the military but was told there was no longer any capacity to do so, Krasniukh said. 

A subterranean passage directly beneath the train station's platforms doubles as a bomb shelter when the air raid sirens blare several times day.

A few hundred people formed an orderly line to board trains to Krakow, Warsaw and other destinations in Poland. Women and children outnumbered men by about 20-1.

In the war's third week, the men in line weren't going anywhere. They were there to hold hands, wipe tears and brace their families, and maybe themselves, for the difficulties ahead.    

Pawel Reinz, 42, a longtime Ukraine resident from Poland, prepared to bid farewell to his wife and two daughters, the youngest of whom is 5, before he enlisted. His elder daughter, a teenager, wasn't taking it too well. 

"Please," he asked Paste BN.

"If you could finish faster," he said. "I want to spend these last moments with my family."  

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