‘You Are Left an Empty Vessel’: A Ukrainian Soldier on Bakhmut, Vovchansk and the Human Cost of War

By Dr Matthew Parish, Editor-in-Chief, the Lviv Herald

There is a tendency, particularly among those of us who write about wars rather than fight in them, to impose a narrative upon military experience. There are heroes and villains, advances and retreats, famous battles, stirring acts of patriotism and eventually, we hope, victory. Maps acquire coloured arrows. Towns become symbols. Soldiers become statistics, photographs or characters in stories about courage.

MACE does not see the war that way.

MACE — the callsign by which he has asked to be identified for this interview — is a serving Ukrainian soldier who has experienced some of the most violent fronts of Russia’s full-scale invasion, including Kupiansk, Vovchansk, Izium, Kherson and Bakhmut. He spoke to the Lviv Herald about what those names mean when one has actually been there. His answers were frequently angry, sometimes bleak and occasionally difficult to hear. They were also strikingly devoid of the romantic language with which societies have traditionally described their wars.

The interview was conducted principally in Russian, the language in which MACE chose to give his answers, notwithstanding that the questions had originally been prepared in Ukrainian. The interview below has therefore been translated from Russian into English and edited for clarity, repetition and readability. MACE’s opinions are his own. His descriptions of particular events are his recollections and should be understood as the personal testimony of one serving soldier rather than as an official account of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Some profanity has been moderated in translation, although not eliminated altogether. To remove it entirely would be to remove something important from the way MACE talks about war.

Matthew Parish: Tell me a little about yourself. What were you doing before Russia’s full-scale invasion, and how did you find yourself in the Armed Forces of Ukraine?

MACE: I was a student. After graduating from Karazin University, where I studied radiophysics and microelectronics, I went to work for the police. After leaving the police I started a business in IT.

Then the war began, and I became involved in volunteering. That was, so to speak, the beginning of my military career.

Matthew Parish: You have served on several very different fronts: Kupiansk, Vovchansk, Izium, Kherson and Bakhmut. What was your first combat experience like, and what do you remember most from that period?

MACE: The problem is that I don’t want to remember it. If I remembered all of it — all that shit — I would probably go insane.

There is so much blood, so much pain. Friends lost. People close to you lost. Evacuations, including evacuations of civilians. It becomes one continuous stream of horror coming towards you, and it never ends. You try not to live inside that. You pull yourself towards the more positive moments instead.

I see nothing positive in sitting in a tree line or a basement with a weapon, waiting until you kill somebody or somebody kills you. I prefer remembering my days off: walking through different cities, seeing nature, spending time with friends. I would rather remember that than the horrors of war.

My mind rejects those things. I don’t want to remember them.

But of course I do remember. I remember travelling in a pickup when my comrade was shot through the head. His blood and brains were on me. And we kept moving because, if we had stopped, we might have remained there forever.

I don’t want that memory. I don’t need it. I would rather remember being with my friends, being with my girlfriend, going for walks or fishing. Things like that.

Matthew Parish: When you think about the different fronts, how did they differ — the nature of the fighting, the terrain, daily life and the psychological atmosphere among the soldiers?

MACE: Fundamentally it is all the same. What changes is the landscape: differences in elevation, whether there are coniferous trees or other kinds of forest.

Vovchansk has flatter areas and forests. Donetsk Oblast has a different landscape, including the spoil heaps. On the Kherson front you even get tarantulas. You can lie down to sleep in a tent and discover them around you. Everything depends upon the terrain, and over two or three hundred kilometres it can change enormously.

But the soldiers’ mood is essentially the same everywhere: make it until tomorrow.

Matthew Parish: Which front was personally the hardest for you? When did you really understand how close death can be in war?

MACE: Death in war is there twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It follows you around. One mistake and you die. Careless handling of ammunition, careless handling of a weapon — these things can all have fatal consequences.

After that, there is simply chance.

The hardest place for me was Vovchansk because I lost close friends there. It was also extremely difficult because I knew that Kharkiv was behind us. Kharkiv is my home city and the people close to me live there. During that period my grandmother also died, and that was very difficult for me.

Death can come from the stupidest things. A car accident. You might even make it home and then a Shahed falls on you. It never ends.

Matthew Parish: Bakhmut became one of the great symbols of this war. What was Bakhmut like through the eyes of somebody who actually fought there, rather than through the image the rest of the world saw in the news?

MACE: To me, Bakhmut was a normal city. There was a long road approaching it. There was an aircraft monument and nine-storey buildings. We were evacuating civilians while the city was still relatively intact, although fighting for Bakhmut was already taking place in the urban areas. You would go in, come out, pull back, go in again.

Was it unusual? Yes, in the sense that it was a large city and therefore a large urban battlefield. But that’s about it.

I cannot say that Bakhmut is the icon of this war. Personally, for example, I find what the 92nd Brigade did in defending the approaches to Kharkiv more significant to me. A very large Russian column was advancing towards Kharkiv, and Ukrainian soldiers stopped that advance. Very few of those people survived.

I remember that because I survived too, in part because those people stayed there.

So personally I don’t attach some unique significance to Bakhmut. This is only my opinion, and perhaps I am wrong, but to me Bakhmut became a heavily promoted brand. Were the people fighting there somehow more heroic than people fighting on another front? No.

Look at Vovchansk. Almost nothing was left of it.

I hate all of this. I have lost some of the best years of my life — years in which I could have built a career, built a family and done all the things people normally do.

Matthew Parish: What do you remember about the civilians around Izium and Kupiansk?

MACE: I remember the destroyed buildings. The 93rd Brigade, Kholodnyi Yar, fought there, as did the Kraken special unit. I was more often on the third line rather than the foremost assault positions. Everybody had their turn.

But again, I don’t want to remember it. Frightened people’s faces. Blood. Severed arms and legs. Medical evacuations.

It is an enormous stream of horror. I don’t see anything there that I would want to remember.

Matthew Parish: Vovchansk has suffered extraordinary destruction. What did that battle mean to you?

MACE: For me Vovchansk was a Rubicon they could not be allowed to cross. If Vovchansk fell and Russian forces advanced further, the threat to Kharkiv would become still greater. That mattered enormously to me because Kharkiv is my home.

I lost my friend Kyrylo there. People were often killed while moving into or out of positions. There were FPV drones, Grad and Uragan rocket systems, mortars. The shelling did not stop.

Many brigades fought there. I was serving at the time with the 113th Territorial Defence Brigade. It was extremely hard.

For me, that was the worst of it.

Matthew Parish: What do you remember about the Kherson front? How different was the war there from Donbas and Kharkiv Oblast?

MACE: I arrived around the time of the flooding. I remember towns and small villages disappearing beneath the water. Everything living was trying to escape this enormous body of water washing through homes and cemeteries.

The cemeteries were washed out so badly that coffins were floating downstream.

I remember one woman who simply remained inside her flooded house, apparently prepared to drown there because she could not see anywhere else to go or anything else to do. In a way, I understood her. There really was nowhere to go.

It was an extremely difficult situation. Everything was flooded and washed away. At the same time Russian forces were firing artillery at us.

So you are effectively carrying out a humanitarian mission, trying to evacuate local civilians, while somebody is attempting to flatten you with artillery shells.

That is what I remember about Kherson.

Matthew Parish: How does prolonged exposure to war change a person? Do you notice changes in yourself?

MACE: Yes.

I notice myself beginning to hate everything around me. I have become somebody who doesn’t want contact with people beyond my small circle. There is a destructive hatred inside you because you have killed people. Whatever the reason for doing it, you have killed.

I am not naturally like that. I don’t want any of this.

But if you cannot accept what you have to do, you cannot survive. You have to find some kind of balance, except there isn’t one. It is madness.

War isn’t a film about Pearl Harbour and love. It is nervous breakdowns. Tears. Loss. Losing everything you love. You leave your home to go and fight other human beings.

When you kill somebody, you try not to think that you have killed somebody’s son. You reduce it mentally to a number: one more. Then you move on. Because if you stop and think about it, you may not be able to cope.

I have known people who died by suicide because they could no longer withstand the pressure. It requires an enormous psychological strength.

This has killed part of me. Imagine that I began with one hundred per cent of my soul. Perhaps twenty per cent is left.

And I know now that killing another person does not present the psychological barrier it once would have. That frightens me. You have to suppress flashes of aggression. Somebody steps on your foot in a supermarket and you have to control what happens inside you. If you lose that control, something terrible could happen.

I don’t want to be like that.

I have two dogs. I want to walk quietly through a park. I don’t want to see soldiers. I don’t want to see anybody. Sometimes I just want to live outside the city and be away from people.

The family suffers enormously as well, because in some ways the person they knew isn’t there anymore. Part of you stayed behind.

Matthew Parish: What does friendship mean at the front? Is there a particular kind of trust between soldiers that civilians cannot easily understand?

MACE: There is, but I don’t romanticise it.

There is a saying — Turkish, I think — that promises made in wartime are forgotten in peacetime. Society changes very quickly. You can do everything for somebody and then, when you need them, that person may turn away.

It depends entirely upon the individual.

I don’t romanticise war. I hate it. I want to be doing other things.

But I have to do this.

Matthew Parish: How do soldiers deal with fear? Does fear eventually disappear, or do you simply learn to live with it?

MACE: Some people seek help from psychologists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists. Some are afraid to seek help, and sometimes they die by suicide. These are not isolated cases. I have lost many friends that way, whether through medication, firearms or other means. They couldn’t withstand the pressure.

How do you cope?

First you are tired. Then you become even more tired. Eventually you simply stop caring.

Somebody can threaten to kill you and your reaction becomes: All right. Go ahead.

You don’t feel fear in the same way anymore. You become an empty, hardened vessel. The boundary between retaining what remains of your humanity and losing it altogether becomes extremely thin.

At some point you can even forget what it feels like genuinely to smile or to be happy.

That is one of the hardest things: when you feel yourself ceasing to be human.

Matthew Parish: What is hardest to explain to a civilian about the ordinary life of a Ukrainian soldier — not the fighting itself, but the hours and days between battles?

MACE: That’s perhaps the hardest thing of all because you cannot explain what it is like to wait for the next departure or the next operation knowing that somebody may not return.

Unless you experience it, you don’t know.

Perhaps there is no point trying to explain it. People say, “I understand you.”

No, you don’t.

An hour ago your friend was sitting beside you in a vehicle, smoking a cigarette. Now he is a cold body with a bullet wound through his head. Then somebody has to explain to his mother how it happened.

How do you explain that?

Matthew Parish: When you return from the front to a comparatively peaceful Ukrainian city, how do you react to ordinary life — restaurants, shops and people walking through the streets?

MACE: Badly.

I find myself asking: why is that person sitting in a café while I am going through this so that he and his family can live normally? I am the same sort of person he is. I simply made a particular choice at a particular moment.

Then I return and see people drinking, partying and enjoying themselves while I have been risking my life. Of course I feel anger towards them.

People say, “We’re patriots, but we weren’t born for war.”

Was I born for war?

I had an IT company. I wasn’t interested in war. The closest I came was playing Counter-Strike. Circumstances forced me into this.

Civilians often ask when the war will end. My answer is: it cannot happen without you. Personal participation matters.

There is a scene in The Lord of the Rings involving Boromir that I have begun to understand differently: the idea that other people’s lands remain safe because somebody else stands at the frontier and pays the price.

A person who stays at home can build a business, buy a car, buy property and accumulate money. Meanwhile your money disappears into equipment: body armour, weapons, sights, Mavic drones, FPVs, detectors, whatever is needed. These things are expensive.

Then I meet somebody I went to school with. He looks healthy. He has slept properly. I have returned from a position sick, nervous, twitching and angry with the entire world.

How am I supposed to feel about that?

I am not claiming to be a wonderful person. I am certainly no Mother Teresa. But the question inevitably enters your mind: why him and not me? Why should one of us fight while the other does not?

Matthew Parish: After everything you have seen in Kupiansk, Vovchansk, Izium, Kherson and Bakhmut, what does Ukraine mean to you today? What, in your view, are Ukrainian soldiers fighting for?

MACE: That’s a provocative question because I am supposed to give you an answer about the Ukrainian national idea and so on.

But when you have actually done these things with your own hands and lived through all of it, the answer becomes much more complicated. You become exhausted and deeply traumatised. Sometimes you feel like a resource.

Of course I want children to be able to live here. I want everything to be as good and bright as possible. I want there to be a decent future.

But when all of this happens at your expense, you become deeply disappointed and it always hurts. You remember the horrors and you remember the people who died.

I am not going to pretend to be some bright-eyed young man shouting slogans. I have seen my friends’ bodies. I have seen them die in front of me.

Those aren’t good memories to carry through life.

Matthew Parish: When the war ends, what would you like your own life to look like? What sort of Ukraine would you like to see, and what would you most like to do on the first genuinely peaceful day?

MACE: Leave.

I don’t want to see all of this anymore.

I walk through the city and pass somewhere I once stood smoking cigarettes with a friend. He isn’t here anymore. He was left in the mud near Bakhmut. They couldn’t even recover him.

I see people walking their dogs and another image comes back to me: Vovchansk, where dogs were feeding upon the bodies of soldiers.

You cannot erase these pictures.

Perhaps I would like to start a farm, or do something involving animals. Something good. Something peaceful. Something connected with life rather than death.

I don’t know whether I will have enough left in me to do it. I don’t know how long I will remain in a normal state of mind.

I have seen too many people break under this war.

It is very hard.

MACE’s account is uncomfortable precisely because it offers so few of the consolations traditionally associated with stories about war. There is little glory in his telling of it. Bakhmut is not a legend but a city reached by a long road. The different fronts are distinguished as much by trees, terrain, insects and weather as by the names historians may eventually attach to their battles. The common ambition among soldiers, as he describes it, can be reduced to four words: make it until tomorrow.

His anger towards civilians may trouble some readers. So may his insistence that killing changes the person who kills irrespective of the cause for which he fights. These are not propositions the Lviv Herald asks its readers to adopt. They are the testimony of a man who has spent years experiencing circumstances that most civilians, including this author, have not.

There is nevertheless something important in resisting the temptation to tidy such testimony into a patriotic parable. Ukraine’s soldiers are not fictional characters. They do not necessarily emerge from battle ennobled, eloquent and eager to explain the higher meaning of their sacrifice. Some emerge exhausted. Some are furious. Some want nothing more than to disappear into the countryside, walk their dogs and never see another uniform. Some discover that surviving a battlefield is different from escaping it.

Perhaps the most revealing answer MACE gave was therefore also one of the simplest. Asked what he wanted after the war, he did not talk about medals, victory parades or political programmes. He imagined animals, countryside and quiet: something, as he put it, “good, peaceful and connected with life rather than death”.

For a man whose adult life has been interrupted by years spent amongst the dead, that may be as comprehensible a definition of peace as any.