Boys

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is a Ukrainian writer. He has authored a number of books, as well as leading two television documentary films. From May 2015 to July 2016 he performed military service in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. His experiences from this period became the basis for his non-fiction book “Absolute Zero” (2017), which was shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage. His latest book, District <> (Район «Д»), was published in Ukraine in 2019.

An excerpt from a new book by a Ukrainian author, capturing his daily experiences as a soldier in the war in Donbas. Five years on, the war still divides Eastern Ukraine.

The locals call us “boys.” We are all “boys” in their eyes. I don’t know what they call us in their private kitchens – cartels, robbers, pirates, invaders, liberators, armed forces, combatants, ATOs, heroes, westerners, these same ones, those same ones, simply military and soldiers, maybe even young soldiers, but to our face they all call us “boys.”

“Boys, have some water.”
“So there the boys stood, saw everything.”
“Come on, boys, help me with the stroller.”

They come

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Artem Chekh:

is a Ukrainian writer. He has authored a number of books, as well as leading two television documentary films. From May 2015 to July 2016 he performed military service in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. His experiences from this period became the basis for his non-fiction book “Absolute Zero” (2017), which was shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuściński Award for Literary Reportage. His latest book, District <> (Район «Д»), was published in Ukraine in 2019.

Translation: Olena Jennings, Oksana Lutsyshyna

Publish date: 23.09.2020

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Łukasz Saturczak:

Living alternately from writing, editing, and taking photographs. A graduate of journalism from the University of Wrocław. For a decade, collaborated with the magazine "Lampa", spent two years as a cultural journalist for the weekly "Newsweek Polska". Currently, a freelancer who spends every free moment traveling to Ukraine and alternates between writing and editing.

“War is normal for my son. He was four years old when it started. Now he’s ten and for the whole of his conscious life he has lived with the awareness that the Russian occupation is a running sore for Ukraine. Does it bother him? He simply doesn’t know that it could be otherwise,” says the Ukrainian writer Artem Chekh, author of Absolute Zero.

Łukasz Saturczak: You’re off to join the army. You are meant to go to war. You get on the train and… what next?

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Sometimes I Dream About the War

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