He had a desk job in Ukraine. Now he's a hardened front-line soldier

In February 2022, Roman was working from his home office in western Ukraine. The biggest worry of the software development company he worked for was still COVID-19.

CBC is only identifying Roman by his first name, out of concern for his safety.

The last year has forced Roman to transition from his desk job to becoming a front-line military medic.

This experience, of being thrown into the life of a hardened soldier without warning, is not Roman's alone. Before the invasion, according to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, the country had 196,600 active military personnel. In the fall, Ukraine's defence minister suggested the fighting force has grown to approximately 700,000 soldiers, which he said, totals about a million if you add in other paramilitary groups, like Ukraine's border guards.

Less than 20 kilometres from the eastern front-line of Bakhmut, Roman, 35, throws open the heavy door of his armoured vehicle and climbs out. A very noticeable limp slows him down — the result of dodging incoming artillery fire as he worked to clear injured soldiers from the battlefield the week before.

"I jumped," he explains with a laugh. His sense of humour still shines through, even after the year he's had. "It was big calibre artillery, and we heard the sound that they came out … it was very close. And I just jumped under some armored vehicle … with all my ammunition and so on, and it was not a very good jump. I'm not so young and so prepared for said jumps."

Even here, so close to the front-line, life goes on in some strange shadow of the way it once did. A diner here is still open for business, mostly providing hot meals and caffeine to war-weary soldiers. Heavy sandbags are piled against the windows.

Those sandbags won't provide much protection though, he says. If a bomb lands there won't be much to do about it. He would know, after a year of tending to wounded and gathering dead bodies from across Donetsk and Kherson.

"The other day we ate here, we ordered pizza and we heard an explosion nearby," Roman recalls. "But the lights stayed on, so we knew we'd still be able to eat." This is said tongue-in-cheek. Roman is not callous, but it seems a dark humour does allow him to keep moving through this heavy chapter. 

"I have changed," Roman says as he drinks his latte. "Because war changes everything, you know? A moment when minutes, metres or seconds could kill you, and when you're moving through this line, you change your views on certain things."

But his own near-death experiences aren't what weighs on him here. What he's struggled with most, he says, is the loss of those who he has come to know as friends. 

"I have no problem with dead bodies, with blood, with bones; it's OK. It's part of my profession," Roman says.

"But if in the morning, you're drinking coffee with someone who you know for some period, you know something about him, about his family, about his mother and so on, and then within a few hours you get a call that you have to go and take his body from the field, it's difficult."

"You are doing your job. You're doing everything that you are supposed to do. But you are hearing his voice, you're remembering his smile," he says.

It's forced him to build "a wall," as he calls it, around his mind. A shield to protect him from the horrors he's seen in the last 12 months. Entire communities destroyed. These changes in the way he processes his reality aren't choices but a means of survival. His fellow soldiers who haven't managed to build this wall are having an even harder time here, he says. 

"You can lose your mind seeing all of these bad things around … and people are losing their minds," Roman says. 

The other thing that helps him to process his experience, he says, is a feeling like he's been preparing for this war his entire life, despite working as a civilian up until Feb. 24, 2022. 

He was a university student during Ukraine's Orange Revolution, which saw non-violent protests overturn the results of a presidential election that had been declared a victory for a pro-Moscow candidate. 

In 2013 and 2014 he was also in Kyiv's Maidan (Independence) Square during the Revolution of Dignity. Originally, non-violent demonstrators protested against then-President Viktor Yanukovych's refusal to sign an agreement that would have put Ukraine on a path toward EU membership, in favour of a deal with Russia.

But the non-violent protests became a bloody affair that brought Ukraine to the brink of civil war in February 2014 when security forces (Berkut) opened fire on protesters, killing 107 of them, now known in Ukraine as the Heavenly Hundred. 

"That day, I said to one U.S. journalist, 'That was not Yanukovych shooting us and not Berkut. It was Putin and Russia," he says. 

In that 2014 interview with ABC News, Roman said that Ukraine's fight for independence from Russian influence had waged for years and Ukrainians had no choice but to keep fighting until they won — for good. 

"We have only one finish, we must win and build our new country," he told the reporter, while donning a black balaklava. "What [we've been] fighting for for 200 years, we are fighting for this [again] today."

And so this transition to military life, though not what he wanted, is the natural progression of a fight he's spent his whole adult life waging alongside other Ukrainians, Roman says. 

"For a nation which feels Russian shoes on our heads during the last four centuries, it's completely not a surprise."

He says he finds all of the motivation he needs to keep going in the smiling faces of his two daughters and his wife who he left one year ago. 

"I can't imagine that my daughters, my wife, my sister will live in a country controlled by Russians. Because it's not safe, no protection, and no guarantees that they won't be raped, they won't be killed."

The changes he's experienced in his life this year, he says, will be with him forever. And while so many of those changes are bad, there are some positives that have come from this war. The first being the number of people he's met who will be friends for life, brothers in arms, Roman says. The other is how he values time.

"I have changed in my understanding of the preciousness of life, of family," he says. "And how precious time is. How high of a cost [that has been paid for] every hour and every day. Because here, you feel that very clearly. So yes, it's also one of the changes. It's good baggage which I will take."

Documentary produced by Sarah Lawrunuik, edited by Acey Rowe from the Audio Doc Unit