Bad Backs, Dodgy Knees: Old Men Take Over the Defense of Ukraine at the Second Anniversary

CHASIV YAR, Ukraine—In front of a small country house in eastern Ukraine, two gray-haired Ukrainian soldiers are tinkering with a worn-out dune buggy, their hands and faces covered in grime. The rickety contraption is powered by an engine ripped out of a Soviet-built Lada and wouldn’t look out of place on the set of a Mad Max movie. “We built it ourselves,” says “Kherson,” who introduces himself as the commander of the unit before inviting us in for a cup of instant coffee.

The frontline is located a couple of miles away and artillery and the roar of jet engines echoes regularly in the distance, yet Kherson seems oblivious to the danger: in spite of his age and the injuries he’s already sustained, the father of three tells us he’s been fighting at the front for months without leave. “Someone has to be doing the fighting,” he says with a wide grin that reveals half a dozen metal fillings. As part of the 17th tank brigade of the Ukrainian army, Kherson’s unit is tasked with conducting medical evacuations near the devastated town of Chasiv Yar, in the Donetsk oblast.

Following the fall of the neighboring city of Bakhmut last May, Chasiv Yar has come under increasing pressure from Russian forces set on conquering the entirety of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, and only a handful of the town’s 12,000 inhabitants still remain, surviving in the basements of bombed-out residential buildings. “On average, we go out once or twice a day, but it depends on how intense the fighting is,” Kherson tells us. The morning of our visit, the homemade buggy used by the unit to evacuate casualties had broken down, impeding their operations and leaving the men frustrated.

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