In April 2018, when conflicts in eastern Ukraine had lasted just over four years, Father Sergei Dmitriev was on the outskirts of the front line, near the town of Marinka.
It was Easter Sunday and the last few days had been quiet. The weather was good. The priest told jokes and prepared to lead a mass for the military in the following days.
But just as Father Dmitriev was finishing a joke, all the harmony of that day was interrupted by a gunshot—too loud and too close to be a bullet fired on the front lines of the conflict.
What actually happened was that a young engineer shot himself in a building next to where Dmitriev was.
According to the priest and Andrii Kozinchuk, a military psychologist who was also there that day, some officers walking around the area approached the dead man and, upon seeing him, mocked him.
“They said, ‘What an idiot, he shot himself,'” recalls the priest.
“I said, ‘We have a psychologist available, should the fighters talk to him (the specialist) more?'”
“They were like, ‘No, why?’
Father Dmitriev travels frequently to act as a military chaplain for troops operating east of Kiev. He’s not necessarily the person you think of when you think of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church: he has a pierced ear, swears a lot, wears jeans and a sweatshirt, and has a passion for cars.
He’s heard of so many military suicides by now that the engineer’s story in Marinka no longer stands out from the rest. But he remembered the engineer in December 2021, when he received a message saying that the officer who mocked that man who killed himself was also dead.
“That officer was the engineer’s strongest critic,” says Father Dmitriev. “And he shot himself too.”
As the brutal war in eastern Ukraine enters its ninth year, Russia is rallying soldiers along Ukrainian borders — which Western powers are reading as preparations for an invasion.
It is known that suicides of military personnel and veterans associated with the conflicts in Ukraine have taken place in recent years, but the numbers are uncertain. Suicides are recorded as “non-combat” deaths, which makes recording difficult.
In 2018, then-Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoli Matios said that 554 active-duty servicemen took their own lives in the first four years of the war, but the number has not been confirmed by the Defense Ministry. Military sources told the BBC that any official figures presented would almost certainly be underreported, because many suicides simply weren’t recorded as such.
“As long as the war lasts, they will never publish these numbers,” said Volodymir Voloshin, a military psychologist in Kiev. “They fear the Russians will use them to damage our morale.”
A Defense Ministry spokesperson told the BBC the figures were never hidden, but it would take a week to gather them.
Deputy Minister for Veterans Affairs Inna Darahanchuk said her records indicate that about 700 veterans have died by suicide since 2014, but acknowledges that it is difficult to know the real number.
Military families are only entitled to financial and social support if they can prove that the suicide was war-related, says Darahanchuk.
But “knowing that it is impossible to prove that the suicide is related to the conflicts, the relatives try to hide the fact that the veteran committed suicide because of his religious beliefs,” she adds.
It’s a tragic realization: relatives are left between a government bureaucracy and an unrelenting faith.
The country has one of the worst suicide rates in the world.
Suicide remains a crime in Ukraine and the Orthodox Church, the predominant faith in the country, is generally opposed to the presence of priests at the funerals of those who take their own lives.
“A priest cannot conduct a burial of someone who has committed suicide, he cannot even attend the funeral,” explains Father Dmitriev. “Especially if it’s a small town. The family just refuses to bury them.”
Dmitiriev does not share this opinion. Before the war, he worked in a hospital and insisted that funeral rites should be performed for those who took their own lives.
“I never once refused to bury them,” he says, explaining that he uses some loopholes in the rules to do so.
Being connected to the stories of the engineer who shot himself and the officer who ended up doing the same after mocking him, Dmitiriev ensured they had proper burials, attended by loved ones and prayers.
Ukraine has one of the worst suicide rates relative to the population and, at the same time, a deep stigma attached to the act.
None of the many relatives of military personnel who died by suicide addressed by the report agreed to an interview, under any circumstances.
Filmmaker Oksana Ivantsiv is directing a documentary on the subject.
“In Ukraine, the son or daughter who commits suicide is never mentioned in the same way as the one who died in combat. Their families are very isolated”, says the director.
The stigma is part of a much broader gap in mental health care in the country — one that has its roots in the Soviet era, when psychology was cited only in the process of detaining and punishing dissidents.
“Psychology or psychiatry was purely punitive,” points out Ulana Suprun, Ukraine’s former interim health minister. “Dissidents were placed in mental hospitals. If a person had been committed to a mental hospital, he could never take a government job, not even work as a teller in a bank.”
According to Suprun, mental health care was virtually “non-existent” in Ukraine until 2014 — when protesters toppled then-president Viktor Yanukovitch and volunteer psychologists pitched a tent in Kiev’s Maidan Square to encourage them to talk about the traumas experienced during the revolt.
The psychologists noticed that people were not comfortable going to the tent in public, so they moved to a nearby union building. When the building burned down, the local McDonald’s provided a temporary shelter for the service.
Suprun also helped create the first suicide prevention hotline in 2018, Lifeline Ukraine — five to six decades after such initiatives emerged in the US and UK.
Lifeline Ukraine works out of a small office in an industrial area of ​​Kiev, above a car dealership that gives away the space for free. The organization employs a team of 26 people to answer calls 24 hours a day, paying their salaries with donations from the UK, USA, Australia, among others, and some private companies. The funding from the Ukrainian government is zero, although a congratulatory letter from the defense minister hangs on the wall of the office.
Some of the callers are veterans who, in turn, take many calls from fellow veterans, particularly on weekend nights when people at risk drink more. The team often asks these people to remember times before 2014 when they were happy, or to pick up objects that remind them of those times. It is an attempt to reconnect with a less stressful past, projecting it as a fresh start.
Svetlana, a veteran who later graduated in psychology and who was on duty at the office earlier this week, said she gave her husband an embroidered scarf when he went to the front in 2014.
“What helped a fighter deal with things before the war will help him deal with the future,” he explains.
But many veterans are failing to cope with their situations. They link with advanced PTSD, says Svetlana, “often trying to silence the pain with alcohol.”
A country under stress
The number of calls to Lifeline Ukraine has not increased with the escalating threat from Russia, but the logbook shows that the topics of conversation are much more addressing this looming situation.
“They’re anxious about this uncertainty, it’s something that’s been dragging on,” says Svetlana.
The situation is also leading to disagreements between people who were once close.
“No one knows who is an enemy and who is a friend anymore.”
Ulana Suprun says this is the situation that “Putin [presidente da Rússia] wants”: “A Ukraine constantly under stress, unable to make long-term plans, unable to invest in the future.”
The war has affected Ukraine’s ability to make progress in mental health care, but the country’s cultural taboos predate the conflict, says Andrii Kolunchik, a military psychologist who works with Father Dmitriev.
“It’s been that way for centuries,” he said. “In our culture, men would rather die than ask for help. We say that when a soldier is singing, his heart is bleeding. So if he says ‘I’m fine’, he’s not fine.”
Olexa Sokil, a reserved and brooding veteran who lived through some of the worst times the war had to offer in 2014, used to say “I’m fine” and almost killed himself several times, he says.
It wasn’t until he traveled to Lithuania to see a military psychologist that he felt he could really speak.
“I opened up to him,” Sokil remembers. “And he saved me.”
But in Ukraine, the military says, all veterans are suffering.
“It’s not just the stigma around suicide, it’s stigma around veterans,” he says. “Ukraine is killing its veterans. We have ministries spending millions to show off at sports competitions, while in small towns and cities veterans are dying because they don’t even have a social worker to come to them and ask how they are doing.”
Sokil has just had a baby, and he and his wife have been seeing a psychologist throughout their pregnancy.
“That psychologist put us back together in one piece,” he recalls. “We’ve overcome our fear of loss.”
Inna Darahanchuk, deputy minister for Veterans Affairs, told the BBC that improving support for mental health is the body’s priority for the year ahead.
Priest uses loophole to assist families
In central Kiev, along a wall near Father Dmitriev’s church, there are portraits of most of the Ukrainian fighting dead — which number about 14,000, according to government figures. It lacks the men and women, active soldiers or veterans, who killed themselves. Father Dmitriev would like his portraits to be there too.
A few years before the war, Dmitriev discovered that there was a sort of loophole in the church’s suicide rules that allowed a priest to attend a funeral to support the family of the dead person, as long as he didn’t conduct the funeral.
That’s how he bypasses the system. And when he can, he encourages other Orthodox priests to do the same.
“I say: go there and pray, say a few good words. Read the Our Father. The family won’t know if it’s the complete rite or not.”
