War in Ukraine: these Ukrainians who choose the front rather than the exodus

Bag slung over his shoulder and a cigarette in his mouth, Aleksander stands at the end of a small line of men in front of a building at the border post of Medyka, in Poland, stuck on the Ukrainian border. He is about to reach the Ukraine, while others, looking anxious, arrive in the other direction by a small stone path. This fifty-year-old is about to enlist in the Ukrainian army. When asked what motivates his decision, he remains silent, puffs a puff of tobacco, rummages in his pocket to take out his phone, which he brandishes while showing his wallpaper: a photo of a little girl. “It’s for her that I’m coming back, for my family, it’s for her that I’m joining the army. »

Many are these Ukrainians of the diaspora established in Poland, like him, who decide to join the front. In the line, behind Aleksander, there is also Vitaly, 50, who is about to return home with his wife, Lela. The couple living in Ternopil in western Ukraine crossed the Polish border shortly after the Russian invasion began. But, two days later, he decides to go back to his country. “We accompanied our 25-year-old daughter to Poland, who is pregnant, to keep her safe. But she won’t give birth in Poland: she’s five months pregnant, and we think the war will end before that,” says Vitaly. “She will come back to Ukraine, but for now she is safe under the NATO umbrella,” says the bon vivant, who claims to have already served in the ranks of the army, thirty years ago, in time of… the Soviet Union. “Sanctions are good, but we need concrete, weapons to defend ourselves, that’s not what will stop the war. Faced with the invasion, Western countries and the European Union are stepping up arms shipments and financial sanctions against Moscow.

“It is our land that is at stake”

A little further on, large blue suitcase in hand and hood pulled up over his head, Dmytro Marchenko walks with a determined step. This 24-year-old Ukrainian has lived for five years in Poland, in the city of Łódź, more than a hundred kilometers from Warsaw. He too wishes to take up arms to fight against the armed aggression of Vladimir Putin. “I have no apprehension, I’m going there to defend my country,” says the man who has no military experience. From the outside, however, you don’t feel an ounce of anguish in him. “We will have to learn everything from scratch, and if I actually have the time to train myself, I will take it. On the one hand, it’s a difficult decision, I’ve spent a good part of my life in Poland already, I have an apartment, it’s like I’m giving up everything. And I don’t know if I’ll go back there one day. But in Ukraine we have territorial defense, and I want to enlist in the unit of my region [près de Kiev] continues the green-eyed young man, looking placid.

His mother, who lives in Crimea, a region annexed by Russia in 2014, did not want him to return. Except that he decided otherwise. “There have been tensions with Russia for eight years, we knew that it was going to explode one day. Why wait to defend our territory? We have to go. Just traveling to the Kyiv region [bombardée par les forces russes], it will be complicated and dangerous. For the moment, as long as it is not secure, I cannot go there, so I am committing myself as a volunteer. At the border center of Medyka, many of them have, for the past few days, shown solidarity by offering trips by car or hot meals to Ukrainians arriving by the border, by vehicle or on foot. “I have to make myself useful, you can see how many women and children pass through here and need help. If ever the way is clear to go to Kiev, then I will go as soon as possible, that’s why I packed this suitcase. »

The hope of defeating the invader, for Dmytro Marchenko, “is not even a question”. “We will prevail over the Russian army, I am sure of that. In one direction, it is women and children who leave, and in the other, men who decide to go to the front. I know many people from the diaspora who have chosen to return to Ukraine. It is everyone’s responsibility to lend a hand to the army. It is our land, our country that is at stake.

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