The only poem that Artem Chapeye wrote as an adult began with the line, “When war comes, I’ll be a deserter.” Growing up in the late 1990s in western Ukraine, he could find translations of French left-wing intellectuals like Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre only in Russian; the leftist, anarchist, and pacifist writer later translated works by Mahatma Gandhi and Noam Chomsky into Ukrainian for free. He wrote to Chomsky, and on a visit to the United States, made sure to visit MIT, where Chomsky, perhaps the most famous intellectual critic of U.S. imperialism, taught for decades. “For me, he was a hero,” he told me recently.
Full-scale war came to Ukraine on February 24, 2022, but Chapeye realized that Gandhi’s nonviolent tactics would be of no use against Vladimir Putin’s imperialist war. (He clarifies now that he is a “practical pacifist.”) He feared that the war effort would fall on ordinary people, while intellectuals like himself would have the luxury of waiting it out. With his wife and two young children, he made his way from Kyiv back to his hometown of Kolomyia, and signed up at the local military enlistment office. Before going abroad with their two children, his wife tried to reassure the kids: “Don’t worry, Dad will just get sent, you know, to guard … to guard roadblocks.”
She wasn’t too far off. Chapeye—who was then 40 and lacked military experience beyond a stint in military school as a teen, which he quit because the young anarchist hated hierarchies—was assigned to the military police, guarding sensitive objects. Far from something from Full Metal Jacket, he said that his unit was sometimes like a creation of nineteenth-century Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who advocated for self-governing communes. On assignment in the frontline town of Pokrovsk guarding a prisoner of war camp, its top three leaders were killed by a rocket, and the unit had to elect new leaders. The soldiers “boycotted” the next in line, he said, and instead, they elected new leaders: “Ukraine has a grassroots protest tradition,” he told me.
Chapeye [CHAP-ay], who wrote a short story collection called The Ukraine, which was excerpted by The New Yorker, has published his first book since the full-scale invasion, titled Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns. It was translated into English earlier this year. When we met recently at a coffee shop off Independence Square in Kyiv, Chapeye told me that he wanted to address Chomsky and other left-wing critics of Ukraine, who view it through the lens of U.S.—but not Russian—imperialism and have cast Kyiv as a puppet of U.S. interests. “The Trump-versus-Biden situation shows how little Ukraine is dependent on what the U.S. thinks,” he said. “We do need support, but nobody’s playing the cards given by America.” He added: “Nobody gives a flying fuck about JD Vance’s opinion.”
In many ways, he’s right. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy plans to meet Donald Trump at the White House on October 17 and hopes to come away with Tomahawk missiles, the administration has zeroed out spending on Ukraine’s arms. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Europe has overtaken the United States in spending for military aid to Ukraine: the U.S. now provides only weapons that Kyiv must finance itself. Chapeye told me that Trump’s comment that the Zelenskiy kerfuffle made “great television” illustrated how unserious his peace efforts are and that “he’s more prone to continuing it indefinitely than solving it.” At the same time, to maintain its new normal of allowing life to go on in most places while defending itself, Ukraine still needs U.S. air defense missiles to defend against increasingly damaging and deadly aerial attacks. The morning we met in near-normal Kyiv, it seemed to be notable that there wasn’t a barrage of missiles and drones the night prior.
Maintaining this balance requires, in part, mobilizing enough soldiers to replenish its ranks, a task Ukraine has struggled with. Under martial law, soldiers cannot be demobilized, except in death or disability. Chapeye remains in the army, something he told me he never imagined when signing up. He has an office job with the military in Kyiv, where his wife and two kids have since joined him. In the early days of the war, the military was overflowing with recruits; now, videos of men violently resisting the draft have gone viral on social media and some go as far as living in hiding or trying to flee the country. (Ukraine does not draft women, although they make up about 21 percent of applicants at recruitment centers.)
In the book, Chapeye wrote about his encounters with men avoiding the war. He and another soldier check out a gym in uniform in a town they will be stationed in; the bodybuilders hide, assuming they are from the recruitment office. Chapeye—an outspoken feminist who struggled with the fact that his enlistment effectively turned his wife into a single parent for the first year and a half of the war—ran into his macho, martial-arts-fanatic neighbor, who was ducking the war, in a coffee shop; Chapeye nodded and left to avoid talking with him. Chapeye told me that as a whole, he feels contempt toward these men, but on an individual level, he often feels empathy: “Not everybody is prepared to change their lives, and even fewer are prepared to actually risk their lives. Most of the people who were ready to do so already did it within the first year.”
In late 2022, Chapeye petitioned the government for fixed terms in the military; his missive reached the required threshold of 25,000 signatures for a response. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy replied that it was not possible under martial law. Chapeye compared serving in the army to experiencing the five stages of grief: The early days were denial followed by anger, the petition was bargaining, and he told me now, “I think I’m still in the depression phase.… How many people accept it?”
At the end of 2022, Chapeye sought therapy. He wrote that it wasn’t PTSD, depression, or even hatred of Russia so much as “the painful search for fairness within my own society,” meaning how the brunt of the war fell on people lacking social status. He told me he realized he had a problem when he had fantasies about killing civilians who were hiding from the draft. He took video calls from civilian therapists, sometimes from the bushes because there was no other place to get privacy.
Therapy and medication helped, and he no longer has those fantasies, though he still has dreams where children get hurt. But as it has been since the early days of the war, his biggest dream is one where Ukraine survives, the war ends, and he doesn’t have to put on a uniform again. (Seeing one of his children play a tin soldier in a school play made him almost break into tears.) Though Chapeye was dressed casually when we met for coffee in Kyiv, he had a uniform in his bag: He had work.
For Chapeye, signing up for an indeterminate term in the army exemplifies Sartre’s thesis that humans create meaning through their own choices—but it also seems like no choice at all in a country under relentless attack for three and a half years, with no great power coming to save it. “We need to defend the opportunity to make our own choices,” he wrote. “Be it the right one or the wrong one, but our own choices regardless.”
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