The Other Front Line in Ukraine
MT799 Authenticated | Independent Contributors Column
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Publisher’s Note:
The Russo-Ukrainian War exacts a heavy toll on soldiers’ mental health and their families. To address this topic, I’ve invited world-renowned entrepreneur, journalist, and war correspondent Mitzi Perdue to share her thoughts, given her extensive reporting in Ukraine and her involvement in this parallel battle in the war – Mental Health.
About the Author:
Mitzi Perdue is an accomplished entrepreneur, war correspondent, nationally recognized syndicated columnist, and international activist. Most recently, she has dedicated her time and money to the mental health care needs of innocent Ukrainian wartime victims suffering from severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Mitzi holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Harvard University and a master's degree from George Washington University. She is also the founder of “Mental Health Global.”
The Other Front Line in Ukraine
I’ve been a war correspondent long enough to know what most people expect with reporting from Ukraine: maps, arrows, the names of towns that become famous for a week and then fade, and the grim arithmetic of killed and wounded. But in Ukraine, I have stumbled into a different kind of front line, one that almost never makes it into the dispatches.
It is a laptop screen. A shaky internet connection. A woman speaking softly because she has learned, the hard way, that walls can have ears. And a conversation not about where the battle lines moved today, but what the war has done to the mind and heart.
Through Mental Help Global, I have been invited into Zoom sessions that feel to me like history being recorded at the level that will matter for decades. These are real-time psychotherapy conversations, happening while the war is still grinding on. The participants are not public figures. They are average Ukrainians forced into extraordinary circumstances.
I have been there as a witness and, at times, as a fellow human being who can offer perspective. The sessions are convened and translated by Irina Tkach, a retired Ukrainian policewoman who works for Mental Help Global. Viktor Dlugunovych, a Ukrainian-American mental health professional living in New York. Occasionally I am asked to speak as well: as a journalist who has listened to roughly a hundred war crimes victims, and as an 85-year-old mother and grandmother who knows that courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision to keep going anyway.
One recent call centered on a woman named Olena. She had the kind of face you see everywhere in Ukraine now: composed, capable, and marked by a fatigue that has nothing to do with sleep. At the start, Tkach asked a simple question:
“Was it sudden for you? How did the occupation begin?”
Olena’s answer was not dramatic. She described the second day of the Invasion, the explosions, the bridge blown apart, and fear spreading through the town. She had been working at an industrial plant. By the end of February, the plant shut down, not for economic reasons but because the Russians were approaching. Everyone knew it. Then the conversation moved to Olena’s life today. Her husband was dead, and her son, Vadim, was a Russian prisoner of war. Tkach asked her,
“What worries you the most right now?”
Olena answered that her son had been in Russian captivity for nearly four years. If he returned, she knew he would not return as the same young man who left. What had happened was that her son was seized as a civilian at a checkpoint. She later learned he had been moved through a sequence of prisons, ending up in a penal colony in Mordovia. She has been told he is not convicted, not formally accused, simply held, one more human being treated as a bargaining chip. She said,
“I don’t know how to behave when he comes back…I don’t want to ask the wrong questions. I don’t want to hurt him.”
Dlugunovych understood the problem she was facing. Among its many horrors, he knows that war rearranges family relationships. Bonds that were once comfortable become fraught. Then he made a point that struck me because it is true in war and true in grief: it will not only be Vadim who has changed. Olena will have changed. Their country will have changed. Everything will be different. And then Dlugunovych offered what may be the hardest advice for anyone living inside a war: accept uncertainty. He compared Olena’s situation to learning to drive.
“You cannot learn to drive a parked car. You learn in traffic, with lights, unpredictable drivers, and the necessity of making decisions in real time. That is what you will have to do when you son comes home: learn, adjust, try, make mistakes, and try again. But you’ll be okay, A mother’s heart is the best advisor,”
Tkach translated, and you could see the advice had landed. Olena’s shoulders visibly relaxed. What people often miss about trauma is that it does not come only from what happened. It also comes from endless planning for what might happen next. Then Dlugunovych named something almost universal among the people I have interviewed in Ukraine, and yet still shocking each time I hear it: guilt. Olena felt guilty that her son was captured. She kept thinking how if she had acted differently that day, he wouldn’t have been at the place where the Russian soldiers took him prisoner. Dlugunovych addressed it directly,
“You cannot know what would have happened if you had talked him out of leaving the house that day. It might have been worse. You cannot carry responsibility for the decisions and violence of people who were armed, cruel, and intent on domination.”
Tkach widened the question, as a good facilitator does. Parents across Ukraine have faced this dilemma: Do you let that child make the decision, or do you try to pull him to safety? Dlugunovych answered as a father himself.
“You have to let adult children choose. You can’t prepare the path for the child,” he said. “You have to prepare the child for the path.”
It was heartbreaking, and also revealing. War does not create only victims of shelling and torture. It creates victims of responsibility, victims of impossible standards, victims of the belief that love should have been enough to keep someone safe.
As a journalist, I am trained to stand back. As a mother, I am trained to lean in. These sessions force me to do both. There is a kind of heroism that belongs to soldiers. And then there is another kind, quieter and just as consequential: the heroism of keeping the soul intact.
This is not the war of maps and missiles. This is the war inside the human being. And in that war, Ukraine is fighting back.
Vol 4, No 23 - BWR (MT799) 08.05.2026
Thank you for reading “Barbershop Whispers....Russia” written by Adam A Blanco! “Barbershop Whispers…Russia” is a product of e8Q Technologies, a consultancy with insights on all things Eurasia. Subscribe for free to receive new posts.
There are many things in this war that we only speak about with others who are in it. That's because we feel they are the only ones who truly know, understand, and don't judge. Our experiences here are going to take years to unpack and everyone who is helping in any way possible is greatly appreciated. I hope to read more from you.