Description
Amidst Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine has imposed a travel ban on most men aged 18–60, and mobilization practices have gradually intensified. Despite these measures, draft evasion has grown, and over one million fighting-age men have fled abroad. While troop shortages are often discussed from a military perspective, less attention has been given to how men who fled experience and negotiate their position within a wartime gender order marked by the revival of militarized masculinity. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews with 59 Ukrainian men who fled the war, most of them illegally, this article maps complex experiences of agency and vulnerability, exploring how these men navigate societal expectations, civic responsibilities, and the everyday survival of themselves and their families during full-scale war and militarization. Conducting this research during a time of war and heightened gendered polarization also poses important ethnographic challenges, particularly regarding how to study men’s marginalization and agency under conditions where militarization, nationalism, and gender backlash reshape the boundaries of legitimate masculinity. In doing so, this article contributes to broader debates in Critical Military Studies by problematizing what kinds of male subjectivities are recognized as “deserving” of protection, empathy, and citizenship in times of war.
