A friend of mine is a draft dodger. Everything he does is governed by the unspoken rules of the nationwide hide-and-seek that is playing out between recruitment squads roaming the streets of Ukrainian cities and some two million men wanted for draft evasion.<\/p>\n
Buying groceries can be a life-or-death decision. He never steps outside without checking messaging apps where men share information about checkpoints and recruitment raids in our home city, Odesa. These channels count their subscribers in the tens of thousands.<\/p>\n
In Odesa, we clock the disappearances \u2014 a barista in my favorite coffee shop, an artist who painted cityscapes in the nearby square, a friend\u2019s brother. Coming across a gaping void where a familiar face used to be has become routine.<\/p>\n
More of us are taking action. Almost every week, videos appear online of bystanders trying to wrestle men out of conscription vans to rescue them. Last year, 341 clashes between military recruiters and civilians were registered<\/a> \u2014 nearly triple the number in 2024. I used to pause at these videos, dismayed by the brutality of the violence that permeated everyday life. Now I scroll past them, disturbed by my lack of reaction. I\u2019ve grown used to living in this male version of \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale.\u201d<\/p>\n Last autumn, my friend got caught next to his apartment building. It rained that day, and he slipped in the mud running from recruiters. A recovering drug addict who vomited all night and an older man who was picking up his prescription medication were among his fellow captives. \u201cIt felt like we were mere bodies there for sale,\u201d my friend said about the day and night he spent at the Territorial Center of Recruitment and Social Support, before he managed to raise the necessary sum and bribe his way out.<\/p>\n Would you accuse him of being a coward? I didn\u2019t. Because bravery has turned into a clich\u00e9 masking the profound social and economic injustices of this war.<\/p>\n \u201cIn fact, this is our brand,\u201d President Volodymyr Zelensky said<\/a> in the spring of 2022. \u201cTo be brave.\u201d He added, \u201cWe will spread our courage. We will start a special global campaign.\u201d Billboards in Times Square, a Vogue photo shoot featuring<\/a> the president\u2019s wife as a \u201cportrait of bravery\u201d and enthusiastic media headlines promoted Ukrainian courage at home and abroad.<\/p>\n Get Inside Voices newsletter. A weekly collection of ideas, perspectives and solutions from across Utah.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, NATO\u2019s secretary general, Mark Rutte, echoed the same theme, describing<\/a> his interaction with a Ukrainian mine detection dog: \u201cI even looked the dog in the eye, and he told me that he will never give in.\u201d<\/p>\n Even though self-preservation is a basic human instinct, we have been conditioned to despise and mock running from war by millenniums of literature and art. Throughout history, the fear of being labeled a coward has kept soldiers in the fight and sometimes kept wars going against the tide of dissenting public opinion. \u201cIf I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam,\u201d President Lyndon B. Johnson said, \u201cthen I would be seen as a coward.\u201d<\/p>\n During the Vietnam War, the largest antiwar movement in U.S. history appropriated the insult, rebranding war as moral cowardice. In \u201cThe Things They Carried,\u201d by Tim O\u2019Brien, the character of the same name says, \u201cI was a coward. I went to the war.\u201d Men went to war, he says, because it was more embarrassing<\/a> not to.<\/p>\n Estimates of the number of young Americans who left the country during the Vietnam War to avoid fighting range from 40,000 to 100,000, with Nixon\u2019s speechwriter Pat Buchanan dismissing<\/a> them as \u201cmalingerers, opportunists, criminals and cowards.\u201d When Ukraine loosened exit restrictions for men aged 18 to 22 in August last year, the number of men those ages crossing the border into Poland soared to 1,600 per day<\/a> over the following two months.<\/p>\n At the same time, hundreds of thousands of young Russians have chosen to leave their country since 2022.<\/p>\n Of course, I don\u2019t equate the two sides of this war. Ukraine was, after all, invaded, and in the days afterward hundreds of thousands of ordinary Ukrainians, men and women, volunteered to join the armed forces. With long lines snaking around enlistment centers, the number of volunteers was so overwhelming, some were sent home. But in the nearly five years of the brutal war, a new kind fear has taken over. We have grown used to drones and explosions in our cities. Now, what scares me and most people I know is the glaring absence of any realistic prospects for peace. We are scared to watch our country bleed its best people and its future.<\/p>\n Many men who refuse to fight are protesting the unequal burden of the war \u2014 while some sacrifice their lives, others amass wealth. When Andriy Yermak, Mr. Zelensky\u2019s former chief of staff and, until last year, the second most powerful man in the country, resigned his post mired in a corruption scandal, he told<\/a> The New York Post that he would go to the front lines. The promise remains unfulfilled, and as a friend of mine said with a chuckle, \u201cAll of us will end up at the front before he does.\u201d<\/p>\n So many bright and kind people have been killed. And, every day, Ukrainian soldiers show superhuman levels of selflessness and courage. But their bravery must not be cheapened and paraded as a cardboard cutout to divert attention from growing inequality and corruption. And from the lack of any honest and serious conversation about how we can achieve peace.<\/p>\n