Oleksii Vasyliuk

My name is Oleksii Vasyliuk, I’m 24. I’ve been serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine for four years, because I wanted to be part of the painful time Ukraine is going through. I explored different ways to enlist, and my friends said if I really wanted to understand military life, I should sign a contract. So in 2021, I chose a unit, started training, and eventually joined the Marine Corps. At first, it was very unusual. I even considered transferring to another branch of the military. Military service can be very different, and the first thing I met was a very traditional approach. By the time the war started, I’d been serving for six months, and I realized this is what I wanted. The reason why I joined. From the start of the full-scale invasion, I spent about two years in the Marine Corps. Got several injuries. The most recent one was hard not just physically, but mentally as well. For the past year and a half or so, I’ve been serving in the unmanned systems unit, working rather intellectually than physically.

It’s definitely the fact that I can still serve in the military despite my injuries. As well as the fact that I can balance family life with military service. Because sometimes you get tired when military service is all you see.

I recently graduated. Combining these two things was very exciting. I tried to find moments when I could not just serve and work, but also study. Work out. It’s rare, but I try to find the time.

I started university just as the full-scale invasion began. So, it didn’t coincide with the earlier service, but with the war. In summer, we were in Mykolaiv, and I told my commander that I needed to pass my external exam. He asked, what for. I said, I won’t be at war my whole life, I need an education. So, in 2022 I started at the Ostroh Academy, the Department of National Security.

Definitely my family, my wife. Closest friends. And maybe some personal experience of how things can always be worse, especially given the chance of dying in war. And the fact that I’m still alive.

Your past always brings you back to that thought: you’re still alive, man.

I can only think of Mykolaiv, the first city I served in. But these are more like memories of the early service, in the Marine Corps in particular, and my young years, not because it’s a place of power, but just memories that are connected to that city.

This year. Service can’t exist without humor, especially in combat, where you’re walking side by side with death. Humor is everywhere, especially dark humor — I can’t point to any one specific moment though. I’d say service is, in a way, even fun. Jokes are what keep you going. I don’t know how we’d get through any of this without joking about ourselves, about the situation we’re in, and about everything around us.

I talked to my wife daily. It was very important. Thinking that no matter what, no matter how long we hold our position, I had to talk to my wife, at least for a moment, helped me get through. The other thing was movies. I love watching movies and TV-shows. They kept me going during moments of exhaustion, fear, and disappointment. I watched *a lot* of movies and TV shows.

There are so many movies that I don’t rewatch any, but what definitely stuck with me is Money Heist, a show about the robbery of the Royal Mint of Spain. Before the counteroffensive, I set myself the goal of watching all the Marvel movies; I’d never seen them before. So, during the month of prep for the counteroffensive, I trained during the day, went to the range, did running drills, and in the evenings I’d come back and watch at least one, sometimes two Marvel movies. I ended up watching all 26, the entire Infinity Saga, in a month. It was intense, but I did it, and I was like, “Alright, now I can die.”

Traditions are born through people who maintain them. I wasn’t one of them. The one thing that has always been a constant is young teams. I’m quite young myself, and the units I’ve served in before, whether as a commander or in my current role, were also made up of fairly young people who, despite their age, have joined the military and are fully dedicated to it.

Right now, we're trying to have shashlyk every week. We receive more meat weekly than we can store in our fridge, so there’s usually shashlyk every Saturday.

Coffee is definitely what keeps me going, it’s my morning ritual. It’s hard for me to even start the day without it now. I’ve found the kind of coffee I really like, so every day begins with brewing a proper filter brew. It’s something I do for myself, and only after that can I really get to work. If I can’t make my coffee, it’s actually harder to get started. I’m like, “Okay, new place, I need to work, but is there coffee here?”

My wife and I have two dates when we make sure to spend time together. No matter what, we try to meet on our wedding day, July 24. Whatever is going on, we always find a way to see each other. When it was safer, we’d meet in Odesa — that’s where we got married. If we couldn’t go there, we’d find alternatives: Kyiv, maybe a day by the pool to recreate that seaside feeling. Sometimes Ania would even come to see me near the front, in the villages where I was stationed. And I’d take a few days off for it.

And I absolutely love New Year’s. It’s very important for me to spend it at home, so I always plan my leave around those dates, no matter what. Over four years of service, I’ve managed to be home for New Year’s, every time for different reasons: recovery leave after an injury, regular leave, or simply having the chance to be off duty. But I’ve always spent New Year’s at home.

Definitely trips. Not so much to the places I know, I just really love seeing something new. Then, I’m happy like a child! That’s what you saw in Amsterdam. Trips to new places help me do my job even more inspired. Even during service. If I need some rest or just time to think, I schedule a trip, and even if we just go to Kramatorsk, I’ll be like: “Wow, a trip!”. Listening to music, looking at fields. I love the road. These are my moments of happiness: the road, the feeling of what Ukraine can be, or life outside of it, if it’s abroad. So yeah, trips definitely make me happy.

Yes, absolutely. Because in hard times, feeling happiness brings you back to life, to actually enjoying it, instead of turning on the energy-saving mode, or shutting down emotionally, like many people do when they’re exhausted. It’s about finding joy in small things, which you do, when almost everything is taken from you. Many soldiers appreciate small joys because they’re trivial, but because there’s simply nothing else left to enjoy. So when you survive and drink an energy drink at a gas station, you actually feel happy. And that becomes a sign of strength, that you’re still holding on.

Most recently — joining the team for the Invictus Games. It’s is an international sports event for service members injured in war or while on duty. In 2024, I started the selection process, and this year we went to Canada as part of the Ukrainian national team. The most unexpected joy recently was actually making the team. I didn’t expect it at all. You convinced me to try, and I went through all the stages, explaining why it mattered to me to be part of it. For me, the selection wasn’t about results. I saw it as a chance to enjoy myself, run, try archery, and learn something new along the way.

My desire not for winning, but for something new, led me to the Invictus Games team. I never focused on results or medals. My goal was to relax as much as possible, and enjoy myself outside of service. I treated the whole selection as a kind of recovery through sport.

I even joined the team announcement just out of curiosity, thinking, who are these lucky ones? Then I suddenly heard: “Oleksii Vasyliuk.” I was like, wait, what? I had just been listening in the background. I checked my phone and saw another name with a similar surname and someone else’s photo, and thought: well, that was close. Then the next name appears, and it’s me. The livestream was slightly delayed.

And I just sat there in the command post and said: “Guys, I think I’m going to Canada.” That’s how my Invictus journey started, and it became one of my most unexpected and genuine sources of joy recently.

A few days ago, while I was already on leave, my commander suddenly told me I had to be in Zaporizhzhia the next day at 13:00, no discussion. After some arranging, I made it there. What followed turned out to be unexpectedly joyful. I stayed overnight at a fellow soldier’s place, and we had very simple, home-style meals — pancakes in the morning and cabbage rolls in the evening. The pancakes were exactly how I like them, and the cabbage rolls reminded me of my parents’ home and childhood, something I rarely get now.

It was all very ordinary, but after being pulled back from leave into service, those simple, familiar things felt surprisingly close to home and made me genuinely happy.

Yes, definitely. I adore traveling, remember? This trip to Canada was... Three weeks of 100% pure happiness. And when I saw unhappy people on the team, I was genuinely surprised. I myself was happy about literally everything. About trying new food. About every excursion. About the training we had. Truly, these were the perfect three weeks.

We went snowboarding, and I kept falling. But I was actually happy that I had the chance to fall on Canadian snow and train with foreign instructors. The only thing that could really upset me was a painful fall, where I’d think I might have broken something and wouldn’t be able to continue speeding down the slope.

When I fell and hit my head somewhere, I’d think: is that the snow cracking, or my bones? But then I realized it was just the snow, and that I was still fine and able to continue. And that meant: I can keep going, I’m happy.

That ability to keep going after every fall only made me stronger.

Everything in the recent years of my life is associated with the service. Military experience and fatigue are very cumulative. I eventually transferred out of the Marine Corps because I was already at my limit and extremely exhausted. So I wouldn’t say there were long periods in service that felt like pure enjoyment.

My most recent combat deployments were definitely not pleasant. I wouldn’t say I felt happiness or enjoyment there, I’m not crazy, I don’t like war in any of its forms, especially when your life is constantly at risk.

What I do value most are the people around me. I try to surround myself with those I can rely on, people who make it possible to keep moving forward no matter how hard things get.

But the periods when you can simply be killed at any moment — I associate those mostly with my time in the Marine Corps. The last year or half-year before my transfer coincided with the Krynky operation, the amphibious crossing and holding of a bridgehead on the left bank of the Dnipro in Kherson region. And there was very little there that could be called joyful. So I can’t really compare it to anything else in that sense.

What also brought me back was this: in the house where we were staying, there was no shower. Marine infantry service, for me, is strongly associated with rather Spartan conditions, we often moved between directions and just found places to sleep for weeks or a month, not really living in comfort. We were rarely home, and proper amenities like a shower were often missing.

In that village the head of the community was a local woman who had lost part of her family during the occupation, which made her even more strongly pro-Ukrainian. We would come to her to shower and drink tea, and talk for hours. She shared her life stories, we shared ours.

That human connection is what grounded me during combat rotations. She treated us with such warmth and sincerity, always welcoming soldiers with open arms, hot tea, and coffee. I’ve rarely been met with that kind of genuine care anywhere else, especially in Donetsk region where there’s often mistrust toward locals. In Kherson region, it felt like pure support. And those moments became small islands of joy between deployments.

Well, in some ways it’s my wife. I wouldn’t say it’s 100%, because like in any marriage there are different situations. But the constant thread running through my entire service has been her.

In many moments during my service, she has pulled me out emotionally. And no matter how angry or frustrated I’ve been in the moment with specific things, if I look at our whole story, she has been my support and backbone. Often it was invisible, she carried the emotional weight, including my stress, exhaustion, and everything that comes with service. But she stayed there, supporting me and moving forward beside me.

Joy in war… it’s what helps you keep going. It allows you to do your job properly instead of just turning everything into routine. It’s like a kind of ticket to continuing life. There’s a lot of fatigue and risk. I’ve had moments when I thought: “Damn, today feels like a bad day to die,” even though there was still a 90% chance it could happen today. And that 10% is a very small chance.

When we come home, we might sit down, play some computer games, drink tea, or find a café in Kherson that’s still open despite the shelling and have a cinnamon coffee on a Thursday – which is supposed to bring money, or something. These are the kinds of small joys that always kept us going, no matter how bad things were.

So joy is something that definitely keeps you on this path. It’s a constant fuel you move on.

I came back for a wedding while on leave. It was yesterday. We had a great time and laughed a lot, mostly over old stories. Many of the guests are people I crossed paths with in my pre-war civilian life, so the conversations kept pulling me back into that earlier chapter of my life. It was funny and nostalgic.

One thing that really made me laugh: my friend, whose wedding I came to, had a task in one of the games to make his wife laugh, but he couldn’t, so he called in his groomsmen for help. One of them said: “I knew the groom, and only met the bride the day before. When invited, I thought that the groom had many girlfriends and wondered who would put up with him for life and agree to this adventure. Then I saw the bride and thought: ‘Good luck and stay strong!’ And that just cracked us all up.

I’ve never really thought about it, but since you asked, to me, joy smells like paska. Paska, as in Easter bread, makes me as happy as can be. So I’d say that’s the scent of joy for me.

When I'm full of energy and don't want to stop, when I just want to keep moving. That's when I feel alive. Alive and strong.

For me, it’s new impressions. Speaking of colors, it’s a lot of greens, browns, and bright natural colors. I love nature. But the kind of nature you have in a clean tidy town and freshness. Or the road. Not destruction and windbreak. Because brown, green, and all those bright colors are also present in windbreak, but it’s not the best experience… So, to me it’s joy, safety. The smell of fresh grass. Freshly cut grass in particular. The taste of fruit. Peaches, grapes, sweet apples. Colors as bright, contrasting, and varied as possible, just as I described earlier. And the feeling, besides a sense of security, is that of something new — a place I haven’t been to yet.