Homage to Ukraine, Part Three

From the journals of Haim Shweky

It’s time for another installment from the journals of Haim Shweky, an Israeli-American military volunteer in Ukraine. This is part of a short series reflecting Haim’s experiences navigating life on or near the front. If you want to read more about Haim, you can find everything he’s written for my Substack here, and you can subscribe to Haim’s own Substack here. And if you want access to this post, as well as all of Haim’s other posts and everything The Glenn Show archives have to offer, please become a subscriber!

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Photo by Oro Whitley

To get to Odessa, I would first need to get to Lviv. I had a splendid time of it in that photogenic western city, more fit for a food blog than a war journal, which tells you something of the atmosphere. Or at least the atmosphere when I was visiting: Lviv has since been rocketed. 

(For the details of that sojourn, turn here. Just make sure you book a return trip.)

I was the professional gadabout, exploring Lviv by the plate and by the cup. Yet as the week lapsed, so did I. I had arrived in Warsaw just over a month before, and had since that time passed through Krakow/Preśyml (the latter on the Ukrainian side, the former on the Polish), Yavoriv, Lviv, Odessa, and Mykolaiv. I had not yet begun the job I set out to do when I first boarded a plane in Tel Aviv. 

Inertia is for the soldier more difficult than any action, however difficult. A damp feeling of uselessness, a feeling of fraudulence—to myself, to those I have told about my mission, to the Ukrainians, to my friends—fell thickly upon me. My buddies, the Horsemen, were already in uniform; I was in shorts, eating my way through the still-free cities of Ukraine, bolstering the war effort only by supporting the local economy via wine bars, cafes, and restaurants. My former team had already begun reconnaissance missions; I was gathering intel on my next meal. They were crawling across no man’s land; I was shuffling over concrete, exploring the Land of Cockaigne.