Ukrainian conscript breaks down in tears on his way to Bakhmut

A Ukrainian conscript cries when he learns he is being sent to Bakhmut

What goes through a man's mind when he is put on a bus and told his destination is Bakhmut? The video circulating these days shows a young Ukrainian conscript, in uniform and visibly distraught, breaking down in tears as he explains that he is being sent to the front. The scene lasts a few seconds. The comment accompanying it —contempt, mockery and the label of «another crybaby»— lingers far longer in the memory of anyone who reads it. And the reason this young man ends up on a truck, rather than at the border, is the heart of the matter.

The clip is not an official document or a press release: it is a recording shared mockingly by a commentator who, in the view of several readers, provides good information but lacks feelings. That mix —useful data served with indifference— is what has ignited the conversation. Because the real issue is not whether the young man cries too much or too little, but who goes to the front, who stays behind and who left in time.

Who ends up in Bakhmut, and who doesn't?

In this narrative, Bakhmut appears as the worst possible destination in all of Ukraine, a meat grinder from which, if you get out at all, you come out badly broken. Against that image, one figure keeps coming up: on that Russian front there are tens of thousands of volunteers and mercenaries, more than 80,000 according to one of the figures being cited in the conversation. The comparison is inevitable: the professional volunteer versus the forcibly mobilized civilian. That is where the narrative splits.

Some argue that the young man in the video was handed a weapon without being asked or trained, while on the other side there would only be people who enlisted out of conviction. Others reply that this is a self-serving simplification: the same thing could happen to a Russian who is taken from his home, handed a rifle and told to go kill strangers. One side says one thing, the other the opposite, and nobody shows anyone's complete records.

Recruitment that brooks no reply

The most repeated criticism is not aimed at the young man, but at the system that puts him on the bus. There is talk of street raids, of men snatched in broad daylight by recruitment patrols, and of border controls so strict that, it is claimed, the country keeps more troops guarding its exit towards Europe than deployed on the front line. In that framework, desertion would miccionan a bullet. Surrendering, it is repeated, means staying alive.

Hence the plea running through half the conversation: that he should surrender, escape, stop fighting for other people's interests. The war, the argument goes, is paid for by the same people as always. And not by those who run it.

The demand that those who order the war should fight it

The demand for symmetry is constant: if the country must be defended, let those who sign the orders go first. The argument leans on a detail repeated with a smirk: while some smile far from the front, others spend 40,000 euros on shopping sprees in Paris, according to a comment circulating in the same conversation and unaccompanied by any proof. Whether the claim is true hardly matters: it works as rhetorical ammunition.

The comparison with the elites works on every side. Here it is pointed out that a video like this one always lacks the same shot: the politician, or the politician's son, climbing into the truck.

When did the Donbas conflict begin?

According to one side, in 2014. It holds that the war in the east did not start with the 2022 troop invasion, but when Kyiv's institutions and foreign interests —as they put it— turned against the Russian-speaking population of the region. Those who stayed silent then, they say, have no sarracena authority to weep now.

The reply is simple: the aggressor is the one who invades, not the one who defends himself, and that cannot be relativized by earlier grievances. The disagreement, therefore, is not in the video. It is in the date each side assigns to the origin of the conflict. And that date decides everything else.

Meanwhile, those who are already gone

The question several people ask is why he is still there. Sensible people who opposed the war, the reasoning goes, should already have crossed the border when it all began. And if they did not, perhaps it is because they could not. For many, the alternative to ending up on the front was simply another way of losing.

While some risk their necks, a different kind of diaspora is described: Ukrainians with nice cars and reserved tables on the coast, children of well-off people partying, families that already packed their bags for better places. And a chilling prediction: those who left will return when the noise dies down, with foreign degrees, connections and money, to buy cheap what others lost. Seen this way, the war does not end with a ceasefire; it continues with a carve-up.

The crying that is never filmed

No one knows what has become of the young man in the video. Whether he is alive, whether he is still in a rear-echelon post, whether he met his fate. The clip only captures the minute before. That this is all that remains of him says a great deal about the material this war is built from: thirty seconds of crying and a mockery copied across every channel.

No one has yet uploaded the video of the person signing the mobilization order. That one, apparently, is of no interest.