Draft Dodgers and Veterans: The Chasm on Which Ukraine's Victory in the War Depends

There, in eastern Ukraine, where I've spent the last several years of my life, everything runs on rules that are harsh but maximally transparent. There's no room for half-tones or double standards. In our reality, the price of any mistake is absolute — human lives. So effectiveness here isn't measured by the number of comments and reactions on social media or loud slogans, but by targets destroyed and brothers-in-arms who survived.

But you only have to cross an invisible line and return to the rear — on a short leave or for official business — you instantly slam into the wall of a completely different world. The farther from the front, the more noticeable it is.

Cities for which the front is somewhere far away are full of cafés, of people hurrying about their everyday civilian business. This is exactly what we voluntarily went to fight for, leaving behind our careers, our families, our familiar comfortable lives. Some came back from abroad and joined the ranks of the military. But behind the façade of grateful billboards and drone fundraisers hides a deep social chasm.

Let's be honest: ordinary society is currently almost completely unprepared to meet those who are doing everything so that, in the thirteenth year of the war, Ukraine continues to exist and fight. I'm not talking here about the families and loved ones of servicemen, but about the millions of citizens and their families who are evading military service, for whom war is something far away.

Words we're missing

When I search for language to describe what I see in the rear, I find myself instinctively reaching for someone else's experience. There's something to learn from our partners here.

Draft dodgers — people who, during World War II, instead of joining the army, fled, forged documents, or hid — an evader in the purest sense.

AWOL (Absent Without Official Leave) — a category from a different plane entirely: unauthorized absence without any intention of deserting for good, a lapse rather than a final break with service.

Conchies — a colloquial shortening of "conscientious objectors." But there's an important distinction here that needs to be said honestly: a conchie is not someone who simply fled or hid. This is a person who, officially, through a tribunal, declared a refusal to serve on religious or moral grounds and bore responsibility for it — sometimes through alternative service no less dangerous than the front line, sometimes through prison. Frankly, there would be far fewer questions for our citizens if they fulfilled their duty even in this way, rather than setting the war with Russia aside somewhere else.

In Ukrainian, all the terms described above have "merged" into a single word — "ukhylyant" (evader). Judging by the state of society, it's apparently still more convenient for citizens not to distinguish why exactly a person didn't go to the front: out of conviction, out of fear, due to circumstances, or simply because no one ever really made them.

The British experience: a tribunal instead of a brand

It's telling that it was precisely the British — a nation that fought a war of attrition for six years straight — who found a procedure, not just condemnation. There were special tribunals that reviewed the claims of conchies.

The ruling could vary: full exemption, conditional alternative service, and only for refusal to comply — prison. In Ukraine, under martial law, such a narrow concept as alternative service is practically not used.

What's especially important: attitudes toward objectors in World War II were noticeably softer than in World War I, when men of conscription age were publicly handed white feathers as a mark of cowardice. By the 1940s this was considered too crude a tool. Partly because the conchies themselves worked as firefighters and rescuers during the bombing of London — and society saw that refusing weapons was not the same as refusing risk and responsibility.

I think about this when I hear my favorite phrase, "I respect your service, but…" The British, over six years of war, learned to distinguish between forms of participation. We haven't yet even learned to distinguish between forms of refusal.

A possible repeat of Vietnam syndrome in our reality

Analyzing how the civilian world in Ukraine's rear is preparing for mass demobilization and the return of servicemen, another historical experience comes to mind — the U.S. circa the 1970s, right after the end of the Vietnam War. This parallel is the most frightening, because we risk repeating someone else's social catastrophe while having our own, even more complicated starting conditions.

In terms of attitudes toward service, our circumstances correlate more with the Vietnam War. But there's a huge difference in the very roots of events then and now.

There, the war was fought on foreign territory, defending global interests, while in our case the war resembles World War II — an aggressor has invaded our land and wants to destroy us as a nation. Both then and now, men who have no legal grounds not to serve are genuine draft dodgers. Tens of thousands of young Americans fled to Canada and Sweden, publicly burned their draft notices, enrolled in universities for deferment. Society split in half: for some they were traitors, for others heroes resisting an unjust war. The split proved so deep that only in 1977, almost a decade after peace, did President Jimmy Carter issue an amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders — through a separate act, because society itself never reconciled on its own.

But American society back then pushed away not only evaders — it also pushed away its own veterans, because of deep rejection of the war itself. Coming home, soldiers faced aggressive protests, accusations, and complete disregard for their trauma.

Our war is existential; in many cases servicemen are respected only in words. It's an abstract, "remote" respect that works flawlessly on social media and collapses instantly on contact with reality. The isolation of Vietnam veterans arose against a backdrop of social hostility. Ours risks growing not out of hostility, but out of institutional incapacity and civilian fear of the hard experience of war. These are different diseases, but the result could prove equally destructive.

A paper army versus digitalization

In the U.S. of the seventies there was its own bureaucratic monster — the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which for years denied disability claims from soldiers harmed by chemical weapons, simply to save budget funds.

Ukrainian modern equivalent is the exhausting hell of military medical commissions (VLK) and disability assessment boards (MSEK). The state has created a parallel "paper army" in the rear. A person who gave up their health at the front is forced to stand for weeks in humiliating lines outside offices, collecting endless certificates with wet stamps to prove obvious things. State institutions still function in the paradigm of the Soviet attitude toward a person as a supplicant, completely ignoring a service-oriented approach and basic digitalization.

Stigma in the labor market and the value of military management

The situation looks no less alarming in the civilian labor market. When HR managers review a veteran's résumé, they often see only a "career gap" or a potential source of problems, fed by stereotypes about uncontrolled PTSD, so companies try to avoid unnecessary risk.

This is a colossal business mistake. Military service in modern technological units isn't just sitting in a trench. It's a continuous process of managing complex technical systems, coordinating many units, crisis management, and making strategic decisions under complete uncertainty and time pressure. It's the highest level of leadership and stress resilience.

Lessons we're obligated to learn

The United States only grasped the scale of its failure when the wave of suicides among Vietnam veterans exceeded combat losses at the front, and thousands of former soldiers ended up on the street or behind bars. Getting out of this deep crisis took more than a decade and rested on several fundamental decisions that Ukraine is gradually beginning to implement now:

Decentralization of support and the "peer-to-peer" principle. State hospitals and official offices scare off people with combat experience. In America, the problem was solved by creating a network of small community hubs (Vet Centers), where help was provided by fellow veterans who had undergone professional retraining. A veteran will never open up to a civilian psychologist who knows about war only from textbooks, but he will trust a brother-in-arms who shares the same experience. Some cities already have similar centers for veterans, providing legal, psychological, and other kinds of support.

Investment in human capital instead of social handouts. Instead of paying minimal cash compensation, which only preserved poverty and depression, the U.S. updated its legislation (the new GI Bill).

The state bet on fully funding higher education, providing preferential mortgages with no down payment, and grants for starting one's own business. This turned yesterday's soldiers into successful entrepreneurs, managers, and a driving force of the American economy. We already have the same thing in Ukraine, but at a very early stage. As an example — the housing voucher for internally displaced persons + combat veterans. It was approved for my family and thousands of others back in January 2026, but so far fewer than ten percent of program participants have received funding.

A new social contract

During my first trip to the U.S., random strangers thanked me for my service more times than during the entire full-scale invasion. The U.S. literally raised gratitude across the generations that came after Vietnam.

We're standing at a crossroads of the British and American scenarios at the same time. Britain found a solution through tribunals, which, though imperfect, still distinguished between cases — and, in the end, found within itself the capacity to recognize the contribution of those who refused weapons but not risk. America never found it at all, and the price was a division that dragged on for generations after the guns fell silent.

When the time comes for me and my brothers-in-arms to take off the uniform and return to civilian professions, we don't want to have to fight for our right to decent treatment.

We don't need pity, excessive toxic sympathy, or token benefits "for show." We need a functioning system, respect for our experience, and genuine barrier-free access — both physical and mental.

The inclusiveness of our cities, a reformatting of approaches in the HR sphere, and the complete elimination of paper bureaucracy in veterans' policy must become priority number one already today, while fierce fighting continues on the front line.

Adapting to peaceful life is a two-way road. We took our step toward it several years ago. Now it's the turn of Ukraine's civilian rear.

Viktor "Gideon" Cherniavsky, serviceman