On October 10th, in a cabin on a sleeper train operated by Ukrainian Railways, I found myself sitting across from a quiet young man named Klim Milchenko. The train had set out from his home town of Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeastern Ukraine, at 8:48 P.M. the night before. About sixteen hours later, after travelling more than five hundred miles, it made a stop in Lviv, where I boarded. Milchenko and I were both bound for Poland. I was going to Kraków, on a hastily planned vacation. Milchenko was en route to Wrocław, where his mother lives. I planned to return to Ukraine in ten days. Milchenko didn’t know if he would ever go back.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian government barred nearly all men between the ages of eighteen and

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