Drowning soldiers in Ukraine: A tragic bid to escape endless war

Bodies of drowned individuals are increasingly being discovered in the Tisza River, which serves as a natural border between Ukraine and Romania. It turns out that not only those fleeing mobilization are perishing in the river, but also active soldiers. "The Wall Street Journal" recounted the story of a soldier who wanted to escape from Ukraine "after two years of exhausting combat with no prospects for demobilization."

It has been seven weeks since Ivan Podmalewski was supposed to return to the front line when rescuers pulled his body from the river at the Ukraine-Romania border.

Like dozens of other men who drowned in the Tisza, he tried to cross the border. However, unlike many other drowning victims, Ivan was not fleeing mobilization. He had been fighting for two years, and the lack of demobilization forced him to seek a way out of the army.

His family noted the toll the war took on the stout 32-year-old, but he never showed how deep that exhaustion ran. "I don't know what was happening in his soul," said Lyubov Pidmalowska, the soldier's mother.

"Bodies in the river are a grim manifestation of one of Ukraine's biggest challenges: the war is entering its third summer with no clear path to victory,” writes WSJ.

Many people who were initially mobilized to repel the Russian invasion are dead, missing, or injured, and those remaining are exhausted from more than two years of brutal fighting.

We have to do this so the boys can have normal rotations. Then morale will improve, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an interview with the BBC in May, after lowering the mobilization age from 27 to 25 and signing an unpopular mobilization law in the country.

According to a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace poll, 58% of Ukrainians support continued mobilization, while 35% are against it.

The borders for men aged 18 to 60 in Ukraine are closed. This benefits smugglers, who charge between $4,000 and $15,000 to help people escape the country.

Border guards catch dozens of men every day. According to WSJ, this represents a stark contrast to the tumultuous initial phase of the war, during which a large number of men volunteered to fight.

The mother of the deceased soldier recalls that her son's first year of service was successful.

The 32-year-old participated in the Kharkiv counter-offensive and was sent for training in France last spring as Ukraine prepared for a new major offensive.

Podmalewski told his mother that everything was fine. But a comrade who served with him in the 148th Brigade admitted that he and the rest of the unit were exhausted. “We begged for rotation,” said the soldier with the call sign "Horets." Protocol prohibits him from providing his first and last name.

According to Horets, Podmalewski complained that his commander did not permit him to travel abroad to meet his family in Slovakia and also paid him too little money. Since the beginning of the war, he had received leave only three times.

He returned to his village in the west from the battlefields in eastern Ukraine. Due to the intensified mobilization in Ukraine, 25-year-old Valery Minikhinov could also return home.

His mother persuaded him to return from Kyiv and hide from the draft. "I was afraid I would lose my son," says Ninel Kopekova.

As the WSJ writes, his mother did not know that Valery decided to escape via the Tisza with the help of a smuggler for whom he paid $4,000. The day after his disappearance, Minikhinov's girlfriend told his mother about plans to travel to Sweden, where he had already found a job.

Valery's journey ended about 25 miles down the river from Velykyi Bychkiv – his hometown. Rescuers retrieved his body from the river.