A Soldier’s Funeral and Its Social Undercurrents

On a sunny and chilly Friday morning, hundreds of residents gathered on the main square of their Ukrainian town to pay their respects to the latest of their neighbors to lose his life since Russia’s February 2022 invasion. The somber scene perhaps masked the growing tensions in society in the 33rd month of the full-scale war in Ukraine.

With more than a dozen black-robed priests, a camouflaged military honor guard and many flag-bearers in attendance, Rohatyn laid to rest the 65th of its residents to die defending Ukraine, Volodymyr Olifer, on Oct. 18.

The Telegram channels of Rohatyn – population approximately 8,000 – and its immediate districts in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, show that death and burial like that of Olifer, a 55-year-old tractor operator, have become all too regular events affecting life in Ukraine.

Since the beginning of September, some eight other men from the district have been killed in action on Ukraine’s front line, with its invading army. Most of them were in their 40s and part of the highly patriotic and comparatively older wave of those who volunteered for Ukrainian military service.

Speaking to Kyiv Post after the commemoration, Rohatyn’s Mayor Serhii Nasalek said his town had changed during the war.

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“There’s little joy left… We only organize; we work to the support the military. For example, our town budget goes only for the maintenance of our infrastructure and the entire remainder goes to help our troops,” Nasalek said.

“We can only continue with faith in God and faith in Ukraine,” a visibly tired but tough mayor said. “We have to believe that we can defeat our enemy and achieve victory.”

Rohatyn knows much about war and suffering. During World War I, frontline trenches between Ottoman Empire troops and Russian Empire troops ran through its center. During World War II, the Shoah – or Holocaust by bullets – saw up to 4,000 local Jews executed by Nazi German troops. Ukrainian nationalists were severely repressed by Soviet authorities throughout their reign.

Through it all, belief in Ukraine’s aspirations has historically run very strong in this part of the country. Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, which Rohatyn sits squarely within, is long considered the physical and spiritual home of Ukrainian nationalism, including as the birthplace and main operational territory of legendary World War II leaders Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych. Thousands of Ivano-Frankivsk residents were bused in from the region to participate and some say they led the Orange and Maidan Revolutions.

At the service for Olifer, for example, Kyiv Post counted as many red-and-black nationalist flags as there were blue-and-yellow national flags. To this day, locals continue to discover war paraphernalia secured in secret locations by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists; it is proudly displayed at the recently developed local museum.

Strain on small-town communities

In the last two months, as Russian forces have pressed harder in the country’s east in particular, even in this nationalist stronghold, locals’ belief is being tested as the loss of family, friends, loved ones, work colleagues and neighbors has become more frequent for many Ukrainian communities.

This is the result of Russian attacks having increased by some 20 percent in the recent period, according to statistics from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

The war’s growing intensity, including the now ubiquitous use of deadly drones, appears to be putting two separate but related strains on small-town Ukraine.

On the one hand, there are the direct and emotional impacts of the loss of life. While the Ukrainian military does not disclose casualty rates, the frequency of funeral processions and the establishment of new graves across the country’s smaller cities and villages is more apparent than ever before during the war.

“Here in western Ukraine, though we have had the occasional missile attacks, the war seemed someplace else,” Yaroslav, an elderly Rohatyn man, told Kyiv Post. “Now, there is nowhere else to look. The deaths have become daily and cannot be ignored.”

At the same time, and after years of grinding attritional warfare along the front, the depleted Ukrainian military – previously based in large part on voluntary, contracted soldiers – has increased its efforts to replenish its ranks through conscription.

This follows President Volodymyr Zelensky lowering the draft age to 25 from 27 in April and signing off on an overhaul of the draft process that entered force in May, which obliges men under 60 to renew their personal data at draft offices or online. In a press conference on Oct. 18, Zelensky categorically denied that there is any plan to further reduce the draft age from 25 to 18 and acknowledged the challenges of mobilization.

Nevertheless, to meet an unconfirmed current target of 30,000 conscripts per month to a speculated total of 200,000 in 2024, military recruitment authorities, together with police, have stepped up the enforcement of the new mobilization regime. Throughout provincial Ukraine, across the past summer and now picking up even greater momentum, there are regular and consistent reports and sightings of men being forcibly stopped for mandatory checks of their documentation and draft eligibility.

“Because cities are bigger, you don’t see the authorities doing the checks and sometimes directly taking people to the military base,” a draft-aged man in Rohatyn said. “But here, everybody sees when they’ve set up a roadblock or grab people coming out of the supermarket.”

The anecdotes, rumors and scuttlebutt run rife, as do verified factual incidents. Every resident that Kyiv Post spoke with recounted some story about the current mobilization drive. At the funeral of Olifer in Rohatyn, there were virtually no young men observable except for some members of the honor guard.

Footage shot outside mega-group Okean Elzy 30th anniversary concert at Kyiv’s Palace of Sports on October 11 showed recruitment authorities dragging a man in civilian clothes across the pavement as he shouted in protest and onlookers chanted "Shame!"

A taxi driver spread a rumor about how military recruitment authorities – referred to by their Ukrainian acronym T-Ts-Ka – allegedly receive bribes from rival businesses to crack down on the workforces of competitor companies.

Kyiv Post is aware of some half-a-dozen individual cases of draft-aged young men who have essentially become ‘home hermits,’ including in smaller cities and towns. Namely, these individuals do not leave their flats or houses for fear of being stopped, checked and immediately deployed for military service by Territorial Recruitment Center officers. Some are awaiting the processing of their bids for legitimate exemptions including for critical jobs or for home care responsibilities.

Last week, Ukrainian social media lit up with the story of a local prosecutor who became rich on the bribes of those paying for bogus exemptions from military service – an incident under discussion in small-town Rohatyn as well. The degree to which corruption based on the mobilization system is real, perceived or confected cannot be verified, but it does appear to resonate with some.

“It’s not an issue of fearing death – it’s an issue of fairness,” one ‘home hermit’ said to Kyiv Post. “Why should those of us who can’t afford bribes be sent to war when those who can pay others can get out of and keep partying?”

Others, however, see a broader context. Serhii Kuzan is Executive Director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center. Kuzan claims that “the negative incidents around mobilization are far outweighed by the positive but un-newsworthy occurrences of thousands of men are being conscripted with their full cooperation and without drama.”

“We should also not in any way discount the fact that a scare campaign about mobilization is clearly in Moscow’s interests and that the Kremlin is certainly behind many of the baseless rumors,” he said.

In Rohatyn, following prayers by the gathered group, the coffin of Volodymyr Olifer is carried to a hearse by his Army comrades. As the vehicle drives away, locals duck into the adjacent shops or greet each other and exchange quiet conversation. After the solemn service, life seemingly returns to normal, but the extraordinary challenges of wartime remain.