Deaths from drowning are on the rise as desperate men attempt to flee Ukraine by swimming across the river separating the country from neighboring Romania and Hungary.
“It was seven weeks after Pvt. Ivan Pidmalivskiy had been due back on the front line with Russia when rescuers pulled his lifeless body from a river on Ukraine’s western edge. His death added to a toll of more than two dozen other men who have drowned in the River Tysa” reported the Wall Street Journal Saturday, “many of them fugitives from a military draft aimed at sustaining Ukraine’s war effort.”
Pidmalivskiy’s circumstances were unique, the newspaper reported, because the private had previously fought for two years after returning from Slovakia to volunteer for the war effort. His change of heart as the intractable conflict drags on illustrates the strain experienced by Kiev’s diminished military as a controversial plan to draft younger men stalls amid public opposition.
One poll earlier this year found that 63% of fighting-age men in Ukraine are unwilling to be drafted, while half oppose attempts to conscript new soldiers. Another found that only 10% of respondents were prepared to join the country’s armed forces.
“At least 44,000 Ukrainians have left the country illegally,” according to the Wall Street Journal report, citing authorities in Moldova, Romania and Slovakia. “That doesn’t include men who crossed the border officially using documents exempting them from military service issued in exchange for bribes.”
A report in February noted that most Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 are forbidden from leaving the country, but thousands “have crossed out illegally by traversing fields, forests and rivers, often in the middle of the night and sometimes with the help of a smuggler.”
“More than 18,000 others have been stopped by Ukraine while trying to flee over the border, while thousands more were caught at border checkpoints with documents the Ukrainian authorities deemed fake. Moldova, a former republic of the Soviet Union, has seen the greatest number of the new arrivals among the four countries the men are primarily escaping to.”
Videos of draft officers publicly assaulting and kidnapping unwilling men have flooded social media, stoking resentment among many Ukrainians. Many soldiers complain they are underpaid and exhausted as a shortage of personnel prevents them from receiving regular rotation.
Human smugglers are reportedly charging as much as $15,000 to help men leave the country as the practice displaces the trade in cigarettes and counterfeit goods as a highly profitable industry. Those who try to swim to freedom across the River Tysa, such as 25-year-old Valeriy Minikhinov, risk death from exhaustion.
“They’re destroying our kids,” said the young man’s mother to reporters, blaming Ukrainian authorities for her son’s passing.
Reporting has demonstrated the key role of the United States in prolonging the conflict after it was revealed the country worked to scuttle multiple attempts at reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine during the early days of the conflict. In late 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the proposed Minsk accords, negotiated with the help of several European leaders, were merely a stalling tactic to allow Kiev to build up its military for an anticipated war.