IVANKIV, Ukraine — Recently, one of the companies in our battalion returned from a mission in eastern Ukraine. When we saw our comrades a month earlier, they were smiling and cheerful. Now they don’t even talk to one another, never take off their bulletproof vests and don’t smile at all. Their eyes are empty and dark like dry wells. These fighters lost a third of their personnel, and one of them said that he would rather be dead because now he is afraid to live.
