2023-08-31 14:11:40
‘I saw a severed head, someone being shot’: After a month at the front, Ukrainian conscript Ivan Ichchenko deserted last year, even if it meant paying a fortune in bribes and suffering infamy .
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Like him, other men initially determined to fight the Russian invasion preferred, faced with the violence of the conflict, to take the tangent by taking advantage of the networks of corruption that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is now trying to uproot.
“To stop seeing this,” he paid $5,000 in bribes to have a car with a government license plate drop him off in a forest near Hungary, where a hole in a fence left him. permission to cross the border illegally.
Because of the war, Ukrainians between the ages of 18 and 60 are not allowed to leave the territory, except with special permission.
Deserters are liable to sentences of up to twelve years in prison, while those who refuse to serve risk five years in prison.
Ivan Ichchenko is therefore now forced into exile. It has circulated in Europe and is currently in Dresden, eastern Germany.
False medical certificate
If the Russian invasion united the nation, some still prefer to leave. Since the start of the war, 13,600 people trying to leave the country illegally have been arrested, according to border guard spokesman Andriy Demchenko.
President Zelensky very publicly attacked the problem at the beginning of August by dismissing all the regional officials in charge of conscription, and more than 200 recruitment centers were raided.
The Head of State denounces the corruption of the administration of the conscripts which he qualifies as “treason”.
This type of arrangement is far from new, however, as corruption has been endemic for decades in Ukraine.
He was discharged in May thanks to a false medical certificate, paid 5,000 dollars.
“I know it’s wrong, it’s disturbing,” said the 24-year-old.
tugging
The guilt these Ukrainians who refuse to fight face when they meet compatriots across Western Europe. This is the case of Evguène Kouroutch, sometimes confronted with embarrassing situations at the wheel of his taxi in Warsaw.
“I was told: ‘our husbands are fighting at the front and you cowards are hiding!'” Breathes this 38-year-old reserve officer, who was in Poland when the war broke out and gave up return to his country.
A man of his age does not go unnoticed among the million Ukrainians welcomed in Poland: half of the refugees are children and more than three quarters of the adults are women separated from their spouses, who have responded.
He says he understands that this is a “painful” and “conflictual” subject. “I know I have to defend my country but at the same time, my family needs me and I have a duty to take care of them,” he explains, torn.
Originally from Odessa, in southern Ukraine, he brought his 5-year-old son Kirill and his 8-year-old daughter Anastasia, along with his wife. “When I look at them, it gives me strength and comforts me in the idea that I am not doing this for nothing”.
It was also with the future of his family in mind that Bogdan Marynenko took the road to Poland in August 2022, two days before his eighteenth birthday, pushed by his relatives and while his father was fighting arms in hand. .
“If something happens to him, my mother and my sisters will only have me,” recalls this young man swimming in clothes that are too big. Today, he toils on construction sites to boil the pot.
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