Suicide, the hidden cost of 9 years of war in Ukraine

In April 2018, when the war in eastern Ukraine had been going on for just over four years, Father Sergiy Dmitriev was behind the frontlines near the town of Marinka telling a joke.

It was Easter Sunday, a quiet day on that part of the front. The mood was good. The priest planned to lead a service for the troops.

But when Father Dmitriev was finishing his joke, a shot broke the calm, too strong and too close to be a bullet coming from the separatist side. In the next building, a young engineer had taken his gun and shot himself.

According to Father Dmitriev and Andriy Kozinchuk, a military psychologist who was also there that day, a group of officers approached the place where the sound of the shot came from and, seeing the dead man, mocked him mercilessly.

“The officers came and said: ‘What an idiot, he shot himself,’” recalls the priest.

“I said, ‘We have a psychologist. Maybe other veterans should talk to him.”

“They said, ‘No. Why?’ They acted as if nothing had happened. ‘The guy was a drunk,’ they said.”

Father Dmitriev travels to the eastern front from Kiev every few weeks to serve as a military chaplain for the troops. He’s not necessarily the person you imagine when you think of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church: he has a pierced ear, swears a lot, wears jeans and a hoodie, and has a passion for cars.

He has heard of so many military suicides now that the story of the engineer in Marinka no longer stands out from the rest. But he remembers that last December he received a message saying that the officer who had mocked him was dead. “He also shot himself,” he recounts.

non-combat kills

As the war in eastern ukraine enters its ninth year, and Russia is amassing invasion-sized forces along its borders, the country has yet to contend with the high number of suicides among its troops and veterans.

Suicides are filed under calls non-combat kills, but the Ministry of Defense has previously refused to make the figures public. The families of the victims cannot claim the honor of a death in combat, nor the economic support.

In 2018, then-Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoly Matios said 554 active-duty service members had taken their lives in the first four years of the war, but the Defense Ministry did not corroborate the figure.

Another anecdotal figure from 2018 put the number at more than 1,000. Military sources told the BBC that the official figures were almost certainly underestimated because many suicides were simply not recorded as such.

“As long as the war lasts, they will never publish those numbers,” says Volodymyr Voloshin, a military psychologist in Kiev. “They fear that the Russians will use them to damage our morale.”

The Defense Ministry did not respond directly to a request for statistics. A spokesman for the Ukrainian military told the BBC that the numbers had never been hidden, but that it would take at least a week to produce them.

Deputy Veterans Affairs Minister Inna Darahanchok said her records showed that about 700 veterans had died by suicide since 2014. But that it was difficult to know the real number because it was not always clear who was a veteran or how someone had committed suicide.

A veteran’s family is only entitled to financial and social support if they can prove the suicide was war-related, says Darahanchuk. But “knowing that it is impossible to prove that the suicide is related to the hostilities, the relatives try to hide the fact that the veteran committed suicide due to his religious beliefs”, a surprising admission that loved ones are trapped between a ruthless bureaucracy. government and an unshakable faith.

Suicide is still a crime in Ukraineand the Orthodox Church generally opposes the use of holy ground and the presence of priests for burials of those who take their own lives.

“A priest cannot officiate at the funeral of someone who has committed suicide, he cannot even attend the funeral,” says Father Dmitriev. “Especially if it’s a small town. The family simply refuses to bury them.”

granting help

Father Dmitriev does not share this opinion. Before the war he worked in a hospital and insisted on funeral rites for anyone who took their own life. “I never once refused to bury them.”

Because he was attached to the brigade of the engineer who shot himself and the officer who followed him, both men received a proper burial attended by fellow soldiers and marked by prayers.

Ukraine has one of the worst suicide rates in the world by population, and there is a deep stigma associated with the act. None of the many relatives of servicemen who died by suicide who were contacted for this story agreed to speak.

“In Ukraine, the son or daughter who committed suicide is never mentioned at the same time as the one who died in combat, and their families are very isolated,” says Oksana Ivantsiiv, a Ukrainian director working on a documentary on the subject.

The stigma is part of a much broader lack of progress in mental health care in Ukraine that has its roots in the Soviet era, when psychology was used to arrest and punish dissidents.

“Psychology or psychiatry was purely punitive,” says Dr. Ulana Suprun, a former Ukrainian health minister. “Dissidents were put in psychiatric hospitals, and if you were put in a psychiatric hospital you could never take a government job, not even work as a teller in a bank.”

According to Suprun, mental health care remained virtually “non-existent” in Ukraine until 2014, when protesters overthrew the country’s president, Viktor Yanukjovytch, backed by Russia; and volunteer psychologists set up a tent on the Maidan square in Kiev to encourage them to speak out about the trauma of the uprising.

Psychologists found that people were unwilling to go near the tent in public, so they moved to a nearby union building. When the building caught fire, the local McDonald’s stepped in to offer them free coffee and a temporary home.

Suprun took up the cause of this fledgling mental health movement, and in 2018 helped establish the nation’s first suicide hotline, five or six decades after similar phone lines were established in the US and UK. Suprun appointed a Dublin-born Kiev publisher named Paul Nilan to run it.

Lifeline Ukraine he works from a small office in an industrial area of ​​Kiev above a car dealership that donates space for free. It employs a staff of 26 people to man shifts 24 hours a day, with their salaries paid for by donations from the UK, US, EU, Australia and some private companies.

The Ukrainian government’s donation to date is zero, although a congratulatory letter from the defense minister hangs on the office wall.

The line is staffed by several veterans of the recent war with Russiawho in turn get a lot of calls from their fellow veterans, particularly in the wee hours of the weekend when drunkenness is more common.

Staff often try to connect with veterans who are having suicidal thoughts, asking them to remember a time and place before 2014 when they were happy, a kind of reset to a less stressful life. Sometimes they suggest the caller find an object that reminds them of that time.

Svetlana, a veteran who later trained in psychology and was on duty at the office, said she gave her husband an embroidered handkerchief when he went to the front in 2014, hoping he would allow her to carry him if those kinds of thoughts ever came to mind.

“What helped a fighter get through the situation before the war will help him get through the situation in the future,” he says.

invisible scars

But many veterans do not manage. They call with advanced posttraumatic stress disorder, says Svetlana, “often trying to silence their pain with alcohol.” The number of calls to Lifeline Ukraine has not spiked with the escalation of the Russian threat, but the content of what callers are talking about has noticeably shifted towards the imminent threat.”

“They are anxious about this uncertainty that continues,” says Svetlana. It was causing rifts between people who were previously close to each other, she says. “No one knows who is your enemy and who is your friend anymore.”

this distancing, such as suicides, alcoholism and domestic violence, it is one of the least visible scars of war. She has divided friends and family and even branches of the Church, and has stressed the population.

“This is what Putin wants, a Ukraine that is constantly under stress, unable to make long-term plans, unable to invest in the future,” says Suprun, a former health minister.

The war has affected Ukraine’s ability to make progress in mental health care, but the country’s cultural taboos predate it, says Andriy Kozinchuk, a military psychologist who works with Father Dmitriev.

“It’s been that way for centuries,” he says. “In our culture, men would rather die than ask for help. We say that when a soldier is singing, his heart is bleeding. So if he says ‘I’m fine’, it’s because he’s not”.

“Ukraine is killing its veterans”

Olexa Sokil, a taciturn cane-walking veteran who lived through the worst of the war in 2014, used to say “I’m fine”; but she came close to suicide on several occasions, she says.

It wasn’t until he traveled to Lithuania to see a military psychologist that he felt like he could really speak. “I opened up to him,” she says. “And he saved me.”

But in Ukraine, he says, he is failing all veterans. “It’s not just about the stigma towards suicide, it’s about the stigma towards veterans,” she says.

“Ukraine is killing its veterans. We have a ministry where millions are spent bragging about sports competitions, while in small towns and cities veterans are dying because they don’t even have a basic social worker to come and check on them.”

Sokil just had a child, and he and his wife saw a psychologist during her pregnancy. “That psychologist got us back in one piece,” he says. “We got over our fear of loss.”

Inna Darahanchok, deputy minister for veterans, told the BBC that improving mental health support was the ministry’s priority for the coming year.

In the center of Kiev, along a wall that borders Father Dmitriev’s church, are portraits of most of the Ukrainian combat dead, numbering about 14,000 according to government figures.

Missing from the wall are the men and women, active soldiers and veterans, who committed suicide. Father Dmitriev would like his portraits to be there too, but although the wall was his idea, it just wasn’t possible, he says. “We couldn’t take on that battle.”

Some years before the war, Father Dmitriev discovered that there was a kind of loophole in the church’s rules on suicide that allowed a priest to attend a funeral to support the family of the deceased, as long as the priest did not officiate. service.

This is how the system gets around. And when you can encourage other Orthodox priests to do the same. Not many agree, he says, and those who do are still barred from reading royal funeral rites.

“He just asks them, ‘Will you go?’ says Father Dmitriev. “Go over there and pray and say some good words. Read the Our Father. The family will not know if it is the full burial service or not.”