Andrii Ryzhov, an assistant chaplain in the Ukrainian army, peers into the back of his battered Volkswagen van on a leafy side street in Kramatorsk, just 15 miles from the front line. These are the tools of his trade: dog-eared cardboard boxes containing packaged food, canned goods, and pocket prayer books, nestled among rolls of camouflage netting and combat gear, including bullet-proof vests.
Ryzhov had telephoned one of his commanders that morning and discovered that the officer was in the hospital—so now he is visiting, unbidden. The chaplain packs a box to take into the clinic across the street: two packages of cookies, a handful of hard candy, dried fruit, and nuts, as well as a copy of the New Testament. “We do whatever we can to support the men, believers, and nonbelievers,” Ryzhov’s fellow chaplain, Serhii Tsoma, explains to me. “And it’s often very simple—cook food, fix cars, tell jokes, whatever makes them feel better.”
I first met Ryzhov in early 2022, not long after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. His hometown, Irpin, a bedroom community outside of Kyiv, had fought off the first wave of Russian invaders, a show of resistance that stunned Moscow at a time when the Ukrainian capital was expected to fall in days. Most able-bodied residents left Irpin during the monthlong battle. But Ryzhov remained, driving into the shelling day after day to evacuate the elderly and provide humanitarian assistance for those who refused to go.
A short, compact man, 48, with a graying beard and slightly crooked smile, he’s a skilled craftsman and a lay deacon in the Baptist Church. (Most Ukrainians are Eastern Orthodox.) But he’d been in the army before and knew how to handle a gun, and in early 2023, he decided to re-enlist. A fierce patriot—he participated in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity—he nursed a deep hatred for Russians, who he says are determined to annihilate Ukraine. Also important, he wasn’t afraid, convinced that God would protect him.
Since then, he has served in Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar, supporting troops in two of the war’s toughest, most prolonged battles. When I visited Ryzhov a few weeks ago, he was based in Sloviansk, also about 15 miles from the eastern front.
The cities and villages behind the front line are like no other part of Ukraine—a vast, run-down, depopulated staging area for the trenches to the east. Ukrainians have been fighting Russians and Moscow’s proxies here since Vladimir Putin first tried to dismember Ukraine in 2014 by invading Crimea and fomenting a separatist rebellion in the country’s eastern provinces. After a decade of war, nearly two-thirds of the region’s population has fled. The coal mines and factories—mostly metallurgic and chemical—that once made this one of the most prosperous parts of Ukraine are shuttered. The remaining businesses stay open to serve soldiers—the several hundred thousand men billeted in a swath of territory, some 50 miles wide, running parallel to the line of contact.
Most vehicles on the road are military. Air alerts are constant, and explosions punctuate the summer days. Like the region’s other centers, Sloviansk is filled with Ukrainians in fatigues—in cafes, car repair shops, military supply stores, and those that sell building materials. Soldiers need tools and construction supplies to patch up the war-ravaged houses where they are garrisoned.
The fatigue-clad Ryzhov and I are walking through a park on my first day in town, discussing what it takes to be a chaplain, when we come across a soldier sitting on a bench staring into the middle distance. Tall and slender with a patch on his chest announcing his blood type, he, too, is a commander in Ryzhov’s unit. We stop to chat. “Sometimes you need a break,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of losses recently.”
I ask about the mood of the troops, and the man, who calls himself Mykola, tells me they are “tired.” This is his second rotation in Sloviansk, and he notes that the war has changed dramatically since he was here a year ago. “Back then, it was an artillery war,” he explains. “Today, it’s a battle of drones.” He brightens when I mention the Ukrainian incursion in Russia’s Kursk region, just unfolding in those days, but his face soon clouds over. “It’s going to be a long war,” he says, “and in the end, the outcome will depend on the West.”
When he and Ryzhov talk business, my interpreter, who happens to be Ryzhov’s adult son, Denys, whispers that they’ve told him not to translate the details. But I pick up enough to grasp they are worried about some men in their group trapped in a bad position on the front line and also, even more concerning, about the dwindling size of their unit.
“We’re supposed to have 120 men,” Ryzhov explains later. “We’ve never had 120. And even at our strongest, not enough of the men could fight.” The lion’s share is assigned noncombat roles—IT, logistics, paperwork, dealing with army bureaucracy—and of those fit for combat, many are wounded. Ryzhov won’t reveal numbers, but in the days ahead, it becomes clear—the situation is close to desperate.
Ryzhov seems to set his own schedule. Whoever he meets, he asks if they need something and then devotes himself to finding it, whether it’s medicine, a bit of gear, or, often, ammunition, which he cadges from other units that have more. A stack of calling cards sits on his dashboard, along with eye-catching postcards with Psalm 91 printed on the flip side—“He shall give his angels charge over thee to keep thee in all thy ways.” But if Ryzhov proselytizes, he does it with a light touch, and I never see him leading soldiers in prayer. He’s all about good works.
Among his most frequent and vital chores are hospital visits. Another chaplain, who didn’t want to be named, allowed me to accompany him as he made the rounds. He brought one soldier his phone, a power bank, and a change of clothes, and when we got to the bedside, the chaplain busied himself tidying up and plugging in the phone. A second man seemed to want to talk about the battle where he was injured, and the cleric listened quietly, asking occasional questions about when and where. With a third, severely wounded fighter who could hardly sit up in the bed, the chaplain leaned over and gently took the man’s phone, holding it to his ear as he spoke to what I gathered was his father.
Ryzhov and his colleague Tsoma tell me the most challenging part of the job is leading funerals. Ryzhov attends as he can but confesses he can’t participate in all of them, even in his battalion. He estimates ten burials in recent weeks, plus five bodies the unit was unable to retrieve from the battlefield.
Tsoma, 45, a slender man with silky hair and a scruffy beard that belie his age, served as an Orthodox priest for 20 years before becoming an army chaplain. Peacetime pastoring was easier. “Most people had died of natural causes,” he recalls. “It’s very different when you lose your friends on the battlefield.” Besides, “priests get to perform weddings and watch children grow up. A chaplain must keep his spirits up by himself—for himself and the sake of the soldiers he serves.”
Ryzhov tries to keep up with the families of fallen men—wives, mothers, children. He takes out his phone and shows me an SMS thread: screen after screen of text, punctuated by emoji tears and broken hearts, from the mother of a middle-aged man who fell a few months ago. “I ask them about the men they have lost,” he explains. “‘What was he like?’” He urges the women to find support groups. “I never say I understand their pain,” he stresses. “I can’t and don’t understand it. But I tell them that if they want, I can share the pain with them. It’s about listening.”
“That’s the hardest and most important thing,” Tsoma agrees. “Not just to listen but to hear and feel the pain before you respond. When your heart is breaking, no one wants to be bombarded with homilies or quotes from the Bible. They want to talk, and they need to be heard.”
Ryzhov spends a lot of time on the road—some of the troops in his unit are billeted over an hour away—and wherever we go, he introduces me to soldiers.
The area north of Sloviansk was ravaged twice in the past two and half years, first by Russians pushing westward, then by Ukrainians beating them back in the Kharkiv counteroffensive of September 2022. Nearly two years later, villages are still in ruins. Pine forests are still charred, often with what look like sawed-off trunks—the tops of the trees have been shot away. Many villagers who remain in the region seem reluctant to make repairs. Who knows when the next fighters will sweep through?
At the end of one long drive through this territory, we meet two men named Serhii, an enlisted comms technician and a commander. Serhii, the enlisted man, stays in a crumbling village house recently occupied by Russian troops and still littered with their trash—food wrappers, broken equipment, and blood-stained bandages. Serhii sleeps on a wobbly cot surrounded by comms equipment: Starlink receivers, EcoFlow power stations, hand-held field radios, and more—much of it strewn across the floor.
A thin man with sloping shoulders and a dejected air, Serhii tells me he’s not pessimistic, just realistic. “I don’t see things getting better,” he says, then asks pointedly why the West is so hesitant. “Why do you help us with one hand and hold us back with the other?” he probes. “Don’t you see that this is also your war? Better to help us now than fight yourselves in a year or two.”
Serhii, the commander, goes by the call sign Mamai—the name of a revered Cossack minstrel—and is more optimistic. Tall with a close-cropped, salt-and-pepper beard, he runs a Kyiv-based engineering company in peacetime. The counteroffensive in Kursk is good news, he says. The flow of desperately needed 155-millimeter artillery shells has picked up. “In the six months ahead,” he predicts, “the table will turn one way or another. Ukraine is not standing still. The war is not stalemated. Western help will be crucial in this period, but our weapons technology and defense industry are developing fast.” He also senses that the Russian army is faltering—exhausted and in low morale: “When the wind blows, you smell the stench of their corpses.”
As with just about everyone I met in Sloviansk, his biggest concern is manpower. “It has nothing to do with Kursk,” he says. “We’ve been short of men for more than six months.” He expects reinforcements this fall. The mobilization enacted by Kyiv in April consisted mainly of minor adjustments without teeth, and unlike two years ago, there is little civilian enthusiasm for enlisting. Still, the new laws are said to bear some fruit: optimistic officials think the army could recruit an additional 200,000 soldiers by the end of the year. But Mamai, the commander, isn’t holding his breath—he’s concerned about quality and motivation.
I asked him what’s the solution. He points to the West. “More weaponry,” he says, “and more confidence that you’ll be standing with us”—plus better commanders and training—would ease the manpower shortage. “If we offered better conditions, there would be plenty of men willing to enlist.”
Just as we leave Mamai’s command post, Ryzhov gets a call. His unit is so desperate for fighting men that it’s ordering anyone it can muster to the front line—including commanders and, perhaps, the chaplain.
Ryzhov is philosophical. In three army stints, he has never seen action. But he’s hopeful he can help the other men—pray with them in the trenches and boost their morale.
We start the long drive back to Sloviansk and watch the sun sink into the rolling hills. Occasionally, a plume of smoke rises on the horizon—likely a missile hit. Maybe it’s just my nerves, but there seem to be a lot of ambulances on the busy road.
If Ryzhov is frightened, he doesn’t show it. “If you have to go, you have to go,” he says matter-of-factly. “And if they need me, I’m ready.” By the time we reach the city, it’s definite. He’s been told to pack his things. His son and I seem more anxious than he. But we down a coffee in a fast-food place, and Ryzhov hugs his son goodbye. “Don’t worry,” he says. “God will watch over me.” Then he gets into his dusty van and drives off into the night.
