In the photo I have just seen Vadim Shishimarin is in the dock, hanging his head. He is 21, but looks about 15 as he stands there in the polycarbonate box, the first Russian soldier to be charged and tried in Ukraine for a war crime. He holds the rank of sergeant and was a tank commander. At 21? (I’m embarrassed to recall how immature I was at 21.) It is likely he has a mother: I wonder how she is feeling right now, but think I can make a good guess.
My middle son enlisted in the Greek Army when he was 19. I was, naturally enough, opposed to the idea, and well remember trying to talk him out of his decision. My final argument went like this:
‘What are you going to do when you find yourself having to obey orders that are against your conscience?’
“I’ll worry about that when the time comes.’
‘But it’ll be too late then.’
Predictably, I failed to dissuade him, and he went on to have a solid career as a marine commando in the Greek Special Forces, during which protracted time I switched my head off very regularly. And still do not want to know too much about his tours of duty in Bosnia and on the Greek borders, all of which are well behind him now.
Shishimarin has admitted his guilt, and has professed himself ready to take and endure the punishment meted out to him. It appears that he was in a car with other Russian soldiers. They were trying to retreat when they saw a cyclist, an unarmed civilian, get off his bike, and start to use his mobile phone. His name was Oleksandr Shelipov, and he was 62. The Russians feared he was about to betray their position, and Shishimarin maintains he was obeying orders when he shot the man. He has asked the man’s widow to forgive him: she says she understands his actions, but cannot forgive him. He is also on record as saying, ‘I didn’t want to be there, but it happened.’ And one wonders what would have happened to him had he disobeyed the order.
'I think of the soldier, the victim, the mother and the widow, and of one of Owen’s most famous lines: The pity of war, the pity of war distilled.'
Many things simply happen in war, and the reactions of those involved are most often unpredictable. My grandfather, during his first experience of a shell attack in France in 1916, flung himself into the dirt and screamed for his mother. My father, waiting during seemingly endless nights for an anticipated Japanese attack in the Borneo jungle, started praying for the attack to occur, ‘for then the suspense would be over.’
Do the politicians, and it’s always the politicians at the heart of these matters, have any idea of the effects of rank fear, and of the panic that must be experienced by many soldiers in the field, especially young ones? Politicians know about the desire to survive, but not at all in the same way. They think, it seems to me, in terms of the war machine, giving little thought to individuals who keep said machine oiled and running. There is life after political defeat, as many prominent figures in Australian public life are now having to learn, but life after a deathly episode on the battlefield is quite another matter.
The news has just come through as I write: Shishimarin has been sentenced to life imprisonment. What that means in practical terms in war-riven Ukraine I do not know: 25 years, or the rest of his natural life? It is thought that at least 10,000 war crimes have so far been committed in Ukraine; my thought is that this 21-year-old was bound to be a scapegoat, for he is the one who has been caught. Another thought is that as his victim’s life is over, so is his.
In war, nobody escapes: Shelipov’s widow could well have her own 25 years of a reduced, restricted life to endure. And what of Shishimarin’s parents?
Soldier-poet Wilfred Owen was killed a week before the Armistice was signed in November, 1918. He was a mere 25, and his mother received the news of his death as church bells were ringing to celebrate Armistice Day. Most of his poems were published posthumously, and with their depictions of the horrors of trench warfare, challenged what Owen thought of as the old lie, that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. It may be necessary and even fitting, but it can never be sweet.
In Strange Meeting, Owen’s haunting poem about reconciliation, two enemy soldiers meet in hell. One tells the other, I am the enemy you killed, my friend. Because all is quiet in hell, the narrator tells the dead man there is no cause to mourn. None , he replies, save the undone years, the hopelessness. And more than a hundred years later, I think of the soldier, the victim, the mother and the widow, and of one of Owen’s most famous lines: The pity of war, the pity of war distilled.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.
Main image: Sgt. Vadim Shishimarin of the Russian army appears at a sentencing hearing on May 23, 2022 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Christopher Furlong / Getty Images)