RUDNE, Ukraine – Yurii Brukhal, an electrician by profession, did not play a very dangerous role when he volunteered for Ukraine’s territorial defense forces at the beginning of the war. He was assigned to make deliveries and man a checkpoint in the relative safety of his sleepy village.
Weeks later, his unit deployed from his home in the west to a frontal battle in eastern Ukraine, the center of the fiercest fighting against Russian forces. He was killed on June 10.
Andrii Verteev, who worked in a grocery store in town, spent the first months of the war guarding a small bridge to work and returning to his wife and daughter at night. Then he also volunteered to go east. He died in the battle in Luhansk, just weeks before Mr. Brukhal.
Their deaths drove the extent to which the war reached into every community across the country at home, even those far from the front. It also underlined the risks that volunteers, with limited training, face, which are increasingly heading towards the kind of battles that even the most experienced soldiers test. Their bodies are returned to fill cemeteries in largely peaceful cities and towns in the country’s west.
“He went there to protect us here,” said Vira Datsko, 52. Brukhal’s older sister, said and praised her brother’s patriotism. “But it is a tragedy for us – so painful – that the best of our nation is going to die in this war.”
At the beginning of the war, Ukrainian men aged 18 to 60 were banned from leaving the country, but were not automatically conscripted, and many volunteered to fight. Volunteers from the country’s territorial defense forces, reserve units of Ukraine’s armed forces, were initially assigned improper but safe tasks in relatively quiet regions such as western Ukraine, where the Russians did not invade. But severe losses of manpower in the Donbas region, where Russia is advancing with furious bombardments and shelling, have forced Ukraine’s army to withdraw reinforcements from the West.
Many of the fighters like Mr. Brukhal, who had no previous military experience, is simply unprepared for that heightened level of fighting. And the training they receive is limited – sometimes two weeks or less.
Volunteers from the territorial defense group are not forced to redeploy with their unit, but many do, prompted by patriotism or a sense of duty, and perhaps a desire not to let their comrades down. And while they know it will be bad at the front, there is little to prepare them for the violence of frontline involvement, veterans say.
“These are people of peaceful occupations, people of peaceful territories,” said Colonel Valeriy Kurko, commander of the 103rd Brigade of Territorial Defense, where Mr. Brukhal served, said.
Col. Kurko said most of the people who joined his group had never served in the military. The idea that people can simply jump into action as the war draws near is wrong, he said; then it’s too late.
His brigade, currently stationed in the eastern Donetsk region, consists of men from the Lviv region. Several of the men have died in the past month, Col said. Kurko said, with at least three buried in Lviv in early June.
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Despite limited time, they receive basic skills and training, he said, but acknowledge that the unit’s morale has undoubtedly shifted.
“I will not hide from you that some people were not ready to leave the territory of their region,” he said in an interview, adding that there were no soldiers from his brigade who refused to go east. .
He acknowledged that the relentless artillery shelling was “a challenge that not everyone can handle” and added that some families have asked why their husbands and sons are being asked to deploy outside their home regions without training.
Attempts to move more territorial soldiers with limited training to the east have destroyed some units.
One territorial defense company, which consisted of 100 soldiers from around Kiev, suffered 30 percent losses on its first day on the eastern front, around the town of Bakhmut in late spring, according to soldiers from the unit.
Territorial defense soldiers did not expect that kind of intense involvement, said one soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive topics. “And here we ended up on the front line, like infantry sitting in trenches,” he said.
Reports of half a dozen territorial defense soldiers surveyed for this article were largely the same: They were trained as glorified guards during the early months of the war and were then, as the casualties increased, sent to the front.
The Kyiv unit was also given the choice to go east, and those men were quickly attached to an ordinary Ukrainian army unit. The territorial defense soldiers said they had only rifles, machine guns and few Western-supplied tank weapons.
They lacked the one weapon that defined the war in recent months – artillery. They also had few ways to communicate with the units that had those heavy weapons.
In short, the soldiers said, they were mostly on their own.
“We are torn to pieces, people fall down like flies, and why are we here?” said the soldier. “It’s unclear.”
These kinds of deployments began to provoke small protests as women, mothers and daughters of some of the people who died expressed their dissatisfaction.
But others, such as Mr. Brukhal’s family, said they supported their family members’ decision, despite their grief.
Before leaving for the war, he built a house for his two daughters. At a memorial service two weeks after his death, villagers gathered in prayer around a long table in the house, the walls of the pews still open, a distribution of food laid out before them.
It was the first meal in the still unfinished house, said me. Datsko, her sister, said.
“It’s just awful when you see what’s going on in the cemetery, and you do not know when it will stop,” she said as she reflected on the rows of new graves that have appeared in Lviv’s military cemetery since her brother’s funeral. “We are going to have many women without husbands and children without fathers.”
Oksana Stepanenko (44) is also dealing with grief, along with her daughter Mariia (8). Her husband, Andrii Verteev, was killed on May 15.
As Mr. Brukhal, he was a volunteer with the task of protecting a bridge just down the road during the early weeks of the war. Then he joined an air defense unit of the army and was redeployed to the east.
His death added a new level of pain to the family. Me. Stepanenko’s son, Artur, died of an illness three years ago at the age of 13. Now a corner of their little sitting room has become a sanctuary for the boy and his father.
Ms Stepanenko said she finds solace in her faith and the fact that it was her husband’s choice to go to the front lines. But, like so many others in Ukraine, she asked, “How many guys have to die before it ends?”
Despite the losses, families of fighters sent to the east said they saw it as their patriotic duty to defend their nation.
Natalia Rebryk, 39, who married her husband Anton Tyrgin just three months before the Russian invasion, said she naively thought she would be spared any personal connection to the war.
“This war started for me twice,” Ms Rebryk said. “The first time it started was the day of the invasion, and the second time was when Anton joined the army.”
Mr. Tyrgin worked in the music industry before the war and had no military background when he volunteered for the Ukrainian National Guard. He spent the early weeks of the conflict guarding strategic sites, but in early June his unit was told it could also be sent east.
Ms Rebryk said he was worried he did not have enough training and was preparing herself daily for that call she hoped would never come.
“We expected it to end in two or three weeks. Then in another two or three weeks, ”she said. “When you talk to the soldiers, you realize it may not even end this year.”
In Rudne, away from the chaos, destruction and death on the front line, the brutality of war can sometimes seem remote. While air raid sirens are still ringing, it has been months since they sent residents to scramble to shelters.
But the funerals of men like Mr. Brukhal brings it surprisingly close, and others from Rudne’s small community are still fighting in the east.
Yordana Brukhal, 13, said her father felt it was his duty to join the war, even though he was her primary caretaker after divorcing her mother last year.
“Until recently, I felt this war only mentally, not physically,” she said. “And since my father died, I feel it physically too.”
Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak reported from Druzhkivka, Ukraine.