I occasionally like to Google my last name, to see if anything scurrilous or interesting shows up. (Hint: if you teach for a living, unless you are in a particularly masochistic mood, don’t look at ratemyprofessors.com). The other day, for a change of pace I clicked on the “Images” icon at the top of the search. My research group was an early Internet adopter, so many of the images that show up are of a younger me, although there is one recent (and particularly grisly) photo in which I look like a reanimated corpse: It was this very picture that made me decide to grow a beard.
But another image caught my eye as I was scrolling down, with a caption in Ukrainian. I took a screen shot of it:
Wondering why this image showed up, I popped the title of the image into Google Translate, and got this:
Roman Pochapsky is a nominee for the title Sportsman of the Year of Zolochiv Oblast.
I went back to Google maps, to find out where Zolochiv is located, and here is another screen shot:
You can see that Zolochiv is a stone’s throw away from Pochapy, about which I posted a blog piece just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in the upper left-hand corner of the map.
Roman looks to be about nine or ten years old in the picture, and is wearing what appears to be a judo gi, so I would guess that is the sport for which he is being nominated. “Good on you, Roman!” I thought. Then I noticed the date, October 22nd, 2012. That was the year my own son, Teddy, at age eleven, was very much into baseball, and I coached his team through our town championship. So Roman and Teddy are probably within a year or two of the same age. Teddy turned 22 last month, and will graduate college this coming spring. But what of Roman? Men of military age, which Roman certainly should be, were forbidden to leave Ukraine after the invasion, and so he almost certainly is, or was, in the UAF.
At the time of this writing, Ukrainian forces are battling Russian troops and Wagner mercenaries block by block through Bakhmut, in Donetsk, one of the oblasts of Ukraine that Putin has decreed to be part of Russia. The toll of this battle has been horrific for all involved: The Wagner tactic of using poorly trained recruits from Russian prisons in human waves to identify Ukrainian positions has resulted in thousands of dead littering the approaches to Bakhmut and other towns on the front lines, but Ukraine has suffered as well. Not since the trench warfare of World War I, that decimated the young male populations of England, France and Germany, has an entire generation endured such calamity as the men and women of the UAF are at this moment.
The Ukrainian government has been reluctant to reveal their casualties, and in any case, I have no desire to know Roman’s fate. But at Mass this morning, I offered a silent prayer for the safety and well-being of a boy, about my son’s age, whom I have never met.