Boris, a Ukrainian businessman, has decorated his office in central Kyiv with photographs from when he was an officer in the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan (1979-1989). On one wall of the rectangular room are black and white photographs that show him in Afghanistan with Ukrainian and Russian officers, a Tajik military interpreter and Afghan security personnel. They represent a period of his life that he remembers fondly. “I remember Afghanistan as my best place of service. The very best,” he said in an interview. “I often dream about the military, but rarely about Afghanistan. When I do it’s always good dreams.”
His past as an officer in the Soviet-Afghan War remains an important part of his life. More than thirty years later, Boris still nurtures the memory (it is one reason why he invited me for an interview). He keeps in touch with former comrades-in-arms in other post-Soviet countries by phone and through Russian-language social networking site Odnoklassniki. He also attends international veterans’ gatherings, where he meets old friends and reminisces about his service.
But if he stays in touch with veterans in other countries, from Belarus to Kazakhstan, his relationships with some of his Russian veteran friends have taken a turn for the worse following the conflict between Ukraine and Russia. In Afghanistan, many of his closest comrades were Russian. But when he attended a veterans’ reunion near Moscow in 2016, he nearly got into a fistfight with one of his Russian friends over remarks that he made about the war in the Donbas. They have since made up (“We don’t talk about this topic anymore”) but Boris has not attended veterans’ meetings in Russia since.
