Far from the front, Western Ukraine deals with often overlooked effects of war

By Kelly Crawford, MALD 2023 Candidate, The Fletcher School
Ty O’Neil/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

War in Ukraine rages on, and the prospect of measuring the length of this catastrophe in years rather than months is becoming a reality. I spent months four and five of the war transiting between the small Polish border town of Cieszanów and the Lviv Oblast in western Ukraine, initially moving humanitarian supplies and later doing construction work.

Having never been to Europe, I marveled at the idyllic wheat fields, their parcels transected by rows of trees. Small herds of farm animals roaming the roadsides, ranging in size from chicks to large heifers, elicited awe that stood in contrast to the marvel of ancient architecture in Lviv.

The towns outside of Lviv were small. Two or three “mini-marts” provided what people didn’t grow or raise for themselves. Churches outnumbered hospitals by at least two to one, and sometimes two to none; the locals, especially the ones that fed and sheltered us, were some of the warmest people you could meet.

The war raged on. Local graveyards grew, unencumbered by bureaucratic guidelines dictating official death tallies. In almost every graveyard passing, we spotted new rows of graves marked by new, crisp Ukrainian flags. Sometimes the more solemn red and black flag flew next to them. This flag represents not the usual fertile fields and pale blue sky, but black, war-trodden ground stained with Ukrainian blood.

The roads interconnecting these small towns and Lviv all pass through military checkpoints. Usually, young soldiers—often a mix of men and women—are sweet and smiling when you are escorted by a local. Their moods turn to suspicion, however, when they encounter foreigners traveling unescorted. There is an assumption that you are not “Pomoc humanitarna” but an unsupervised American cowboy carrying kilos of military-grade equipment, like the others that came before you. Sabotage is a palpable fear. Sometimes my papers were checked multiple times, and I had heard of stern and physical warnings issued to others naïve enough to take pictures in front of the guards or of important buildings.

Bomb alarms are not uncommon. They come via loudspeaker or blaring through a Ukrainian government app. In this part of the country, at least, these alarms do not send anyone running, but the proximity of military bases—and the unexploded ordinance still lying dormant in local lakes—means these alarms are not quietly pushed to the back of one’s mind.

I was lucky enough to fall in with a group called Fundacja Folkowisko. Academically speaking, Folkowisko is a public diplomacy organization focusing on cross-border cultural ties between Poland and Ukraine that pivoted towards humanitarian assistance. I never once heard them describe themselves as such. A more apt description would be a group of artists and musicians—some Polish, some Ukrainian, some neither—that came together in the room of someone’s house when the war started. People were starving and freezing, and no one was helping.

Folkowisko had no intention of remaining in the role they took on for as long as they did, as they thought the “big organizations” would come in and take over. No one ever came. Half a year later, they are still providing humanitarian assistance, shifting focus as the war changes and the needs of Ukraine evolve. One reading of their story is heart-warming: a rag-tag group of kind-spirited bohemians with a network of local contacts and a knack for quickly organizing masses of people. But another reading is an indictment of the larger humanitarian organizations, characterized by absence and overlooked refugees.

The headline-grabbing problems of war, such as supply shortages, death, and starvation, often overshadow the very germane and mundane problems of those hundreds of miles from the front. The towns I visited and lived in were almost empty of military-aged men. The men remaining were often older, including veterans of the Soviet-Afghanistan war, or boys. In the smaller towns, the only fighting-age men around were one or two town drunks. In Lviv, the men were typically soldiers away on R&R, public safety personnel, or injured veterans. This last demographic hit me and my North American colleagues particularly hard. All of us are veterans, and as much as we complain about Veterans Affairs, we imagined that the compensation an amputee soldier of this war receives pales in comparison to our benefits.

The lack of military-age men meant that the women in these towns did all the work they would normally do, and then the work of the men who left for the front. One new responsibility multiple people spoke about was labor-heavy nursing work. Automated patient lifts and gurneys were a constant request from hospitals and clinics. Without men around, it took teams of much smaller women to lift their larger male patients from one bed to another, or roll them over to change bandages. A one- or two-person job before the war now could occupy the whole staff of a small regional hospital.

These hospitals housed another unique peculiarity of the war. With the flood of refugees from the now Russian-occupied territory comes the assumption that all are sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause. This is not always the case. Russian sympathizers were undoubtedly in the small minority, but needed to be fed and cared for just like everyone else. Those that came from the east and lost no love for Putin worked to change their language. One of the surest ways to tell which side of the Dnieper a Ukrainian hails from is their speech. Some refugees made an effort to erase the Russian “da” for the more patriotic “tak.”

The uniqueness of these hidden war problems gets worn out for some very quickly. A Ukrainian girl of about 20, adorned in cornrows and braces, whom I met at the border of Ukraine and Poland told me that she came from the east and moved to central Ukraine once the war started. When her new home started getting bombed, she moved to Lviv. This was conveyed to me in a manner no different than a housemate informing another they are going to get the mail. We gave her a ride across the Polish border with four other young men. All the men were turned back because of what I was told were forged papers.

Being a boy just shy of military age presents its own dilemmas. One refugee I met, who I would go so far as to call a friend, was a 17-year-old male university student. He made it to Poland when the war started, but was required to return to his hometown to finish his exams. His mother and sister could cross the border freely, but on the cusp of military age, that opportunity was closing quickly for him. He returned, unsure if he would make it back to Poland and uncommitted to joining the army.

I never once heard a discussion on how the war would end. There were many discussions about what would come next, but no one used terms like “off-ramp.” The conversations were about streamlining food shipments, where the money would come from next, and sometimes the audacity of hanging a Manchester United scarf from the back of the forklift. For people that live, breathe, eat, and die in the trenches, there is no off-ramp. Even if there were, it isn’t at the end of the war. Ukraine will need to rebuild, bury bodies, refurbish architecture, and restore its culture. The long slog of war extends beyond its official termination—something that takes an intimate involvement to understand.