Ukraine’s professional and citizen-soldiers are fighting a two-front war. The professional military has grown in capacity and number, although citizen soldiers–the teachers, architects, students, nurses, and doctors who enlist and re-enlist for short-term deployments–still fill its ranks. Everyday citizens recognize that the war in Donbas is a fight for Ukraine’s very existence. These soldiers return from their time in combat to confront another struggle. They must fight the current bureaucracy, part-Soviet and part-reformed, to gain the support they desperately need for their reintegration into civilian life.
