Ukrainian Men Desperate to Escape War Are Drowning as They Flee

"It was seven weeks after Pvt. Ivan Pidmalivskiy had been due back on the front line with

Russia when rescuers pulled his lifeless body from a river on Ukraine’s western edge.
His death added to a toll of more than two dozen other men who have drowned in the River Tysa since Russia invaded, many of them fugitives from a military draft aimed at sustaining Ukraine’s war effort. Pidmalivskiy was different: He had fought for two years after returning to Ukraine from abroad to defend his country. His family had seen the war take a growing toll on the burly 32-year-old, but he never revealed the depths of his exhaustion to them. “What was happening inside his soul, I don’t know,” said his mother, Liubov Pidmalivska. Many of the men who initially mobilized to repel Russia’s invasion are dead, missing or wounded—and the rest are worn out from more than two years of brutal combat." WSJ