Nicolas Tonev (special correspondent in kyiv), edited by Gauthier Delomez / Photo credits: Sergei SUPINSKY / AFP
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9:42 a.m., February 21, 2024
“I don’t want to fight. Fighting with machine guns against tanks is totally stupid… I don’t want to waste my youth and my life, for what in fact?” Danil breathes. This Ukrainian, almost 27 years old, has just finished his hydrological engineering studies. And at the dawn of the two-year war against Russia, he feared enlistment.
The Ukrainian Parliament in fact supported at first reading the lowering of the age of conscription from 27 to 25 years, although sparing students. The government wants to recruit up to 500,000 additional soldiers to swell the ranks of the troops and better resist the Russians, and also to be able to organize a replacement.
“Severe surveillance”
This is out of the question for some, determined not to die in this war, like this young man met by the special envoy from Europe 1. But this life that he precisely wants to preserve is getting organized strangely. “Recently, there has been severe surveillance,” he relates. “I avoid the metro. I’m in my car all the time, so I see what’s happening.”
Danil also explains that with other “refractory” young people, they communicate through coded messages. “We have a Telegram channel between us, it is hidden as a weather channel. For example in Cherska, the weather is nice, in Vouijgorod it is raining, that means there are cops. If there are olives, it are soldiers, if it snows at a given gas station, that means that you should definitely not go there,” says the young engineer.
The choice of escape
Danil keeps a thought for the soldiers. “They are losing their health and their lives in the east, but I believe that there are few patriots left,” he says, he who does not want to be part of them. If pressure from the authorities increases, Danil will opt to flee: “I will swim across a border when it is warmer.”
That’s it for the ten minutes of interview granted to the special correspondent from Europe 1. Danil and his anonymous white car leave to merge safely into the traffic.