In the midst of such an acute manpower shortage, the Ukrainian government’s decision to give thousands of young men the option to go abroad has divided military experts. Zelensky has defended the new travel rule by saying that it will help dissuade young men from leaving at an even earlier age. “If we want to keep Ukrainian boys in Ukraine, then we need them to finish school here, and parents must not take them abroad,” he said at a press briefing after the rule went into effect. “But they are beginning to take them abroad before they graduate. And this is very bad, because at that time they lose their connection with Ukraine.” He went on to say that the change would have no impact on the country’s defense capabilities. Simon Schlegel, the Ukraine program director at the Center for Liberal Modernity, in Berlin, told me that while that might be true for now, the new rule could lead to problems in the future. “It narrows the mobilization pool for three years down the road when these men would become eligible,” he said.
The new rule has also been criticized by some of Ukraine’s closest partners. In a phone call on November 13th, the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, asked Zelensky to do something to prevent so many young Ukrainian men from coming to Germany. They should “serve their country,” Merz said after the call, though he may have his own country in mind, too. Although figures vary, the number of Ukrainian men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two entering Germany rose from nineteen per week in mid-August to between fourteen hundred and eighteen hundred per week in October, per the German Interior Ministry. (Since the war began, Germany has granted what’s known as temporary protection to more than 1.2 million Ukrainians, the most of any country in the European Union.) Poland, too, has seen a major influx of Ukrainian men in the same age range—more than a hundred and twenty-one thousand since the end of August, according to the Polish Border Guard, up from about thirty-four thousand over the previous eight months. Many of those men will pass through Poland on their way to somewhere else, but others, like Milchenko, have decided to stay. “It feels like I’m starting a new life,” he said.
Klim Milchenko by the Oder River.
Photograph courtesy Klim Milchenko
In early November, I went to visit Milchenko in Wrocław. We met at a café across from a KFC in the city’s Old Town. A bronze statue of a gnome, one of more than eleven hundred scattered around the city, stood out front. Milchenko, who is tall and slender, with short light-brown hair, was wearing a black sweater, gray jeans, and sneakers. He was only slightly more relaxed than he had been on the train. Sipping a pumpkin-spice latte, he told me that he had been spending much of his time since arriving in Wrocław looking for work. “I’ve sent my C.V. to thirty different places,” he said. “So far, I’ve only heard back from a swimming pool. I told them that I had worked as a lifeguard in Kyiv, and was certified, but they said they wanted someone else.”
Milchenko speculated that the swimming pool was looking for someone older—or a native Pole. He’d heard stories of Ukrainians in Poland being discriminated against, and worse. In September, someone spray-painted “to the front” on the hood of a Ukrainian woman’s car, and a thirty-two-year-old Polish man was charged with shooting and seriously injuring a Romanian man whom he thought was Ukrainian. Both incidents occurred in Wrocław. Nationwide, polls show that public support for accepting Ukrainian refugees has been slowly but steadily declining. It’s currently at its lowest level since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014 . Poland’s new President, Karol Nawrocki, has vowed to tighten restrictions on the government support they receive, and the far-right Confederation Party has accused Ukrainian men who moved to Poland of “burdening Polish taxpayers with the costs of their desertion.” (A study conducted by Poland’s National Development Bank found that Ukrainians actually pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.)
